Dreamcatcher Read online

  What do you think you're going to do? he jeered at himself. Pick it off like it was a thread or a piece of lint?

  Which was exactly what he did do, because it was a thread: a red one from the shirt's printed logo. He dropped it and watched it float down to the snow. Then he retied the shirt around the tear in his jeans. For a man who had been considering all sorts of final options not four hours ago--the rope and the noose, the tub and the plastic bag, the bridge abutment and the ever-popular Hemingway Solution, known in some quarters as The Policeman's Farewell--he had been pretty goddamned scared there for a second or two.

  Because I don't want to go like that, he told himself. Not eaten alive by . . .

  "By toadstools from Planet X," he said.

  The eggman got moving again.

  8

  The world shrank, as it always does when we approach exhaustion with our work not done, or even close to done. Henry's life was reduced to four simple, repetitive motions: the pump of his arms on the poles and the push of the skis in the snow. His aches and pains faded, at least for the time being, as he entered some other zone. He only remembered anything remotely like this happening once before, in high school, when he'd been the starting center on the Derry Tigers basketball team. During a crucial pre-playoff game, three of their four best players had somehow fouled out before three minutes of the third quarter were gone. Coach had left Henry in for the rest of the game--he didn't get a single blow except for time-outs and trips to the foul line. He made it, but by the time the final buzzer honked and put an end to the affair (the Tigers had lost gaudily), he had been floating in a kind of happy dream. Halfway down the corridor to the boys' locker room, his legs had given out and down he had gone, with a silly smile still on his face, while his teammates, clad in their red traveling unis, laughed and cheered and clapped and whistled.

  No one to clap or whistle here; only the steady crackle-and-stutter of gunfire off to the east. Slowing a little bit now, maybe, but still heavy.

  More ominous were the occasional gunshots from up ahead. Maybe from Gosselin's? It was impossible to tell.

  He heard himself singing his least favorite Rolling Stones song, "Sympathy for the Devil" (Made damn sure that Pilate washed his hands and sealed His fate, thank you very much, you've been a wonderful audience, good night), and made himself stop when he realized the song had gotten all mixed up with memories of Jonesy in the hospital, Jonesy as he had looked last March, not just gaunt but somehow reduced, as if his essence had pulled itself in to form a protective shield around his surprised and outraged body. Jonesy had looked to Henry like someone who was probably going to die, and although he hadn't died, Henry realized now that it was around that time that his own thoughts of suicide had become really serious. To the rogue's gallery of images that haunted him in the middle of the night--blue-white milk running down his father's chin, Barry Newman's giant economy-sized buttocks jiggling as he flew from the office, Richie Grenadeau holding out a dog-turd to the weeping and nearly naked Duddits Cavell, telling him to eat it, he had to eat it--there was now the image of Jonesy's too-thin face and addled eyes, Jonesy who had been swopped into the street without a single rhyme or reason, Jonesy who looked all too ready to put on his boogie shoes and get out of town. They said he was in stable condition, but Henry had read critical in his old friend's eyes. Sympathy for the devil? Please. There was no god, no devil, no sympathy. And once you realized that, you were in trouble. Your days as a viable, paying customer in the great funhouse that was Kulture Amerika were numbered.

  He heard himself singing it again--But what's puzzling you is the nature of my game--and made himself stop it. What, then? Something really mindless. Mindless and pointless and tasty, something just oozing Kulture Amerika. How about that one by the Pointer Sisters? That was a good one.

  Looking down at his shuffling skis and the horizontal crimps left by the snowmobile treads, he began to sing it. Soon he was droning it over and over in a whispery, tuneless monotone while the sweat soaked through his shirts and clear mucus ran from his nose to freeze on his upper lip: "I know we can make it, I know we can, we can work it out, yes we can-can yes we can yes we can . . ."

  Better. Much better. All those yes we can-cans were as Amerikan Kulture as a Ford pickup in a bowling alley parking lot, a lingerie sale at JCPenney, or a dead rock star in a bathtub.

  9

  And so he eventually returned to the shelter where he had left Pete and the woman. Pete was gone. No sign of him at all.

  The rusty tin roof of the lean-to had fallen, and Henry lifted it, peeking under it like a metal bedsheet to make sure Pete wasn't there. He wasn't, but the woman was. She had crawled or been moved from where she'd been when Henry set out for Hole in the Wall, and somewhere along the line she'd come down with a bad case of dead. Her clothes and face were covered with the rust-colored mold that had choked the cabin, but Henry noticed an interesting thing: while the growth on her was doing pretty well (especially in her nostrils and her visible eye, which had sprouted a jungle), the stuff which had spread out from her, outlining her body in a ragged sunburst, was in trouble. The fungus behind her, on the side blocked from the fire, had turned gray and stopped spreading. The stuff in front of her was doing a little better--it had had warmth, and ground to grow on which had been melted clear of snow--but the tips of the tendrils were turning the powdery gray of volcanic ash.

  Henry was pretty sure it was dying.

  So was the daylight--no question of that now. Henry dropped the rusty piece of corrugated tin back on the body of Becky Shue and on the embery remains of the fire. Then he looked at the track of the Cat again, wishing as he had back at the cabin that he had Natty Bumppo with him to explain what he was seeing. Or maybe Jonesy's good friend Hercule Poirot, he of the little gray cells.

  The track swerved in toward the collapsed roof of the lean-to before continuing on northwest toward Gosselin's. There was a pressed-down area in the snow that almost made the shape of a human body. To either side, there were round divots in the snow.

  "What do you say, Hercule?" Henry asked. "What means this, mon ami?" But Hercule said nothing.

  Henry began to sing under his breath again and leaned closer to one of the round divots, unaware that he had left the Pointer Sisters behind and switched back to the Rolling Stones.

  There was enough light for him to see a pattern in the three dimples to the left of the body shape, and he recalled the patch on the right elbow of Pete's duffel coat. Pete had told him with an odd sort of pride that his girlfriend had sewed that on there, declaring he had no business going off hunting with a ripped jacket. Henry remembered thinking it was sad and funny at the same time, how Pete had built up a wistful fantasy of a happy future from that single act of kindness . . . an act which probably had more to do, in the end, with how the lady in question had been raised than with any feelings she might have for her beer-soaked boyfriend.

  Not that it mattered. What mattered was that Henry felt he could draw a bona fide deduction at last. Pete had crawled out from under the collapsed roof. Jonesy--or whatever was now running Jonesy, the cloud--had come along, swerved over to the remains of the lean-to, and picked Pete up.

  Why?

  Henry didn't know.

  Not all of the splotches in the flattened shape of his thrashing friend, who had crawled out from under the piece of tin by hooking himself along on his elbows, were that mold stuff. Some of it was dried blood. Pete had been hurt. Cut when the roof fell in? Was that all?

  Henry spotted a wavering trail leading away from the depression which had held Pete's body. At the end of it was what he first took to be a fire-charred stick. Closer examination changed his mind. It was another of the weasel things, this one burned and dead, now turning gray where it wasn't seared. Henry flipped it aside with the toe of his boot. Beneath it was a small frozen mass. More eggs. It must have been laying them even as it died.

  Henry kicked snow over both the eggs and the little monster's corpse, shudd
ering. He unwrapped the makeshift bandage for another look at the wound on his leg, and as he did it he realized what song was coming out of his mouth. He quit singing. New snow, just a scattering of light flakes, began to skirl down.

  "Why do I keep singing that?" he asked. "Why does that fucking song keep coming back?"

  He expected no answer; these were questions uttered aloud mostly for the comfort of hearing his own voice (this was a death place, perhaps even a haunted place), but one came anyway.

  "Because it's our song. It's the Squad Anthem, the one we play when we go in hot. We're Cruise's boys." Cruise? Was that right? As in Tom Cruise? Maybe not quite.

  The gunfire from the east was much lighter now. The slaughter of the animals was almost done. But there were men, a long skirmish line of hunters who were wearing green or black instead of orange, and they were listening to that song over and over again as they did their work, adding up the numbers of an incredible butcher's bill: I rode a tank, held a general's rank, when the blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank . . . Pleased to meet you, hope you guess my name.

  What exactly was going on here? Not in the wild, wonderful, wacky Outside World, but inside his own head? He'd had flashes of understanding his whole life--his life since Duddits, anyway--but nothing like this. What was this? Was it time to examine this new and powerful way of seeing the line?

  No. No, no, no.

  And, as if mocking him, the song in his head: general's rank, bodies stank.

  "Duddits!" he exclaimed in the graying, dying afternoon; lazy flakes falling like feathers from a split pillow. Some thought struggled to be born but it was too big, too big.

  "Duddits!" he cried again in his hortatory eggman's voice, and one thing he did understand: the luxury of suicide had been denied him. Which was the most horrible thing of all, because these weird thoughts--I shouted out who killed the Kennedys--were tearing him apart. He began to weep again, bewildered and afraid, alone in the woods. All his friends except Jonesy were dead, and Jonesy was in the hospital. A movie star in the hospital with Mr. Gray.

  "What does that mean?" Henry groaned. He clapped his hands to his temples (he felt as though his head were bulging, bulging) and his rusty old skipoles flapped aimlessly at the ends of their wrist-loops like broken propeller blades. "Oh Christ, what does that MEAN?"

  Only the song came in answer: Pleased to meet you! Hope you guess my name!

  Only the snow: red with the blood of slaughtered animals and they lay everywhere, a Dachau of deer and raccoon and rabbit and weasel and bear and groundhog and--

  Henry screamed, held his head and screamed so loud and so hard that he felt sure for a moment that he was going to pass out. Then his lightheadedness passed and his mind seemed to clear, at least for the time being. He was left with a brilliant image of Duddits as he had been when they first met him, Duddits not under the light of a blitzkrieg winter as in that Stones song but under the sane light of a cloudy October afternoon, Duddits looking up at them with his tilted, somehow wise Chinese eyes. Duddits was our finest hour, he had told Pete.

  "Fit wha?" Henry said now. "Fit neek?"

  Yeah, fit neek. Turn it around, put it on the right way, fit neek.

  Smiling a little now (although his cheeks were still wet with tears that were beginning to freeze), Henry began to ski along the crimped track of the snowmobile again.

  10

  Ten minutes later he came to the overturned wreck of the Scout. He suddenly realized two things: that he was ragingly hungry after all and that there was food in there. He had seen the tracks both going and coming and hadn't needed Natty Bumppo to know that Pete had left the woman and returned to the Scout. Nor did he need Hercule Poirot to tell him that the food they'd bought at the store--most of it, at least--would still be in there. He knew what Pete had come back for.

  He skied around to the passenger side, following Pete's tracks, then froze in the act of loosening the ski bindings. This side was away from the wind, and what Pete had written in the snow as he sat drinking his two beers was mostly still here: DUDDITS, printed over and over again. As he looked at the name in the snow, Henry began to shiver. It was like coming to the grave of a loved one and hearing a voice speak out of the ground.

  11

  There was broken glass inside the Scout. Blood, as well. Because most of the blood was on the back seat, Henry felt sure it hadn't been spilled in the original accident; Pete had cut himself on his return trip. To Henry, the interesting thing was that there was none of the red-gold fuzz. It grew rapidly, and so the logical conclusion was that Pete hadn't been infected when he'd come for the beer. Later, maybe, but not then.

  He grabbed the bread, the peanut butter, the milk, and the carton of orange juice. Then he backed out of the Scout and sat with his shoulders against the overturned rear end, watching the fresh snow sift down and gobbling bread and peanut butter as fast as he could, using his index finger as a knife and licking it clean between spreads. The peanut butter was good and the orange juice went down in two long drafts, but it wasn't enough.

  "What you're thinking of," he announced to the darkening afternoon, "is grotesque. Not to mention red. Red food."

  Red or not, he was thinking of it, and surely it wasn't all that grotesque; he was, after all, a man who had spent long nights thinking about guns and ropes and plastic bags. All of that seemed a little childish just now, but it was him, all right. And so--

  "And so let me close, ladies and gentlemen of the American Psychiatric Association, by quoting the late Joseph 'Beaver' Clarendon: 'Said fuck it and put a dime in the Salvation Army bucket. And if you don't like it, grab my cock and suck it.' Thank you very much."

  Having thus discoursed to the American Psychiatric Association, Henry crawled back into the Scout, once more successfully avoiding the broken glass, and got the package wrapped in butcher's paper ($2.79 printed on it in Old Man Gosselin's shaky hand). He backed out again with the package in his pocket, then took it out and snapped the twine. Inside were nine plump hot dogs. The red kind.

  For a moment his mind tried to show him the legless reptilian thing squirming on Jonesy's bed and looking at him with its empty black eyes, but he banished it with the speed and ease of one whose survival instincts have never wavered.

  The hot dogs were fully cooked, but he warmed them up just the same, running the flame of his butane lighter back and forth beneath each one until it was at least warm, then wrapping it in Wonder Bread and gobbling it down. He smiled as he did it, knowing how ridiculous he would look to an observer. Well, didn't they say that psychiatrists eventually ended up as loony as their patients, if not more so?

  The important thing was that he was finally full. Even more important, all the disconnected thoughts and fragmented images had drained out of his mind. Also the song. He hoped none of that crap would come back. Ever, please God.

  He swallowed more milk, belched, then leaned his head against the side of the Scout and closed his eyes. No going to sleep, though; these woods were lovely, dark and deep, and he had twelve-point-seven miles to go before he could sleep.

  He remembered Pete talking about the gossip in Gosselin's--missing hunters, lights in the sky--and how blithely The Great American Psychiatrist had dismissed it, gassing about the Satanism hysteria in Washington State, the abuse hysteria in Delaware. Playing Mr. Smartass Shrink-Boy with his mouth and the front of his mind while the back of his mind went on playing with suicide like a baby who's just discovered his toes in the bathtub. He had sounded entirely plausible, ready for any TV panel show that wanted to spend sixty minutes on the interface between the unconscious and the unknown, but things had changed. Now he had become one of the missing hunters. Also, he had seen things you couldn't find on the Internet no matter how big your search engine was.

  He sat there, head back, eyes closed, belly full. Jonesy's Garand was propped against one of the Scout's tires. The snow lit on his cheeks and forehead like the light touch of a kitten's paws. "This is it, what all the geek
s have been waiting for," he said. "Close encounters of the third kind. Hell, maybe the fourth or fifth kind. Sorry I made fun of you, Pete. You were right and I was wrong. Hell, it's worse than that. Old Man Gosselin was right and I was wrong. So much for a Harvard education."

  And once he'd said that much out loud, things began to make sense. Something had either landed or crashed. There had been an armed response from the United States government. Were they telling the outside world what had happened? Probably not, that wasn't their style, but Henry had an idea they would have to before much longer. You couldn't put the entire Jefferson Tract in Hangar 57.

  Did he know anything else? Maybe, and maybe it was a little more than the men in charge of the helicopters and the firing parties knew. They clearly believed they were dealing with a contagion, but Henry didn't think it was as dangerous as they seemed to. The stuff caught, bloomed . . . but then it died. Even the parasite that had been inside the woman had died. This was a bad time of year and a bad place to culture interstellar athlete's foot, if that was what it was. All that argued strongly for the possibility of a crash landing . . . but what about the lights in the sky? What about the implants? For years people who claimed they'd been abducted by ETs had also claimed they had been stripped . . . examined . . . forced to undergo implants . . . all ideas so Freudian they were almost laughable . . .

  Henry realized he was drifting and snapped awake so strongly that the unwrapped package of hot dogs tumbled off his lap and into the snow. No, not just drifting; dozing. A good deal more light had seeped out of the day, and the world had gone a dull slate color. His pants were speckled with the fresh snow. If he'd gone any deeper, he'd've been snoring.

  He brushed himself off and stood up, wincing as his muscles screamed in protest. He regarded the hot dogs lying there in the snow with something like revulsion, then bent down, rewrapped them, and tucked them into one of his coat pockets. They might start looking good to him again later on. He sincerely hoped not, but you never knew.