Lisey’sStory Read online

  Hush and close your eyes.

  That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn’t tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It’s a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don’t they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it’s so sad—

  She didn’t want to think about that sadness, nor did she want to think about her hurt breast, where the pain had begun to creep back. She turned her thoughts to Boo’ya Moon again, instead. She recalled how utterly amazing and wonderful it had been to go from the bitter subzero Maine night to that tropical place in the wink of a maiden’s eye. The somehow sad texture of the air, and the silky aromas of frangipani and bougainvillea. She remembered the tremendous light of the setting sun and the rising moon and how, far off, that bell was ringing. That same bell.

  Lisey realized that the sound of the riding mower in the Galloways’ yard now seemed oddly distant. So was the blat of a passing motorcycle. Something was happening, she was almost sure of it. A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning. Maybe the world was not too much with her, after all.

  But what if you get over there and it’s night? Assuming that what you feel isn’t just a combination of narcotics and wishful thinking, what if you get over there and it’s night, when the bad things come out? Things like Scott’s long boy?

  Then I’ll come back here.

  If you have time, you mean.

  Yes, that’s what I mean, if there’s t—

  Suddenly, shockingly, the light shining through the lids of her closed eyes changed from red to a dim purple that was almost black. It was as if a shade had been pulled. But a shade wouldn’t account for the glorious mixture of smells that suddenly filled her nose: the mixed perfume of all those flowers. Nor could it account for the grass she now felt pricking her calves and naked back.

  She’d made it. Gotten over. Come through.

  “No,” Lisey said with her eyes still shut—but it was feeble, little more than a token protest.

  You know better, Lisey, Scott’s voice whispered. And time is short. SOWISA, babyluv.

  And because she knew that voice was absolutely right—time was indeed short—Lisey opened her eyes and sat up in her talented husband’s childhood refuge.

  Lisey sat up in Boo’ya Moon.

  6

  It was neither night nor day, and now that she was here, she wasn’t surprised. She had come just before twilight on her previous two trips; was it any wonder it was just before twilight again?

  The sun, brilliant orange, stood above the horizon at the end of the seemingly endless field of lupin. Looking the other way, Lisey could see the first rising arc of the moon—one far bigger than the biggest harvest moon she had ever seen in her life.

  That’s not our moon, is it? How can it be?

  A breeze ruffled the sweaty ends of her hair, and somewhere not too far distant, that bell tinkled. A sound she remembered, a bell she remembered.

  You better hurry up, don’t you think?

  Yes indeed. It was safe at the pool, or so Scott had said, but the way there led through the Fairy Forest, and that was not. The distance was short, but she’d do well to hurry.

  She half-ran up the slope to the trees, looking for Paul’s marker. At first she didn’t see it, then spotted it leaning far over to one side. She didn’t have time to straighten the cross…but took the time, anyway, because Scott would have taken the time. She set the silver spade aside for a moment (it had indeed come with her, as had the yellow knitted square) so she could use both hands. There must be weather here, because the single painstakingly printed word—PAUL—had faded to little more than a ghost.

  I think I straightened it last time, too, she thought. In ’96. And thought I’d like to look for the hypodermic needle, only there was no time.

  Nor was there now. This was her third real trip to Boo’ya Moon. The first hadn’t been so bad because she’d been with Scott and they’d gone no farther than the broken signpost reading TO THE POOL before returning to the bedroom at The Antlers. The second time, however, in 1996, she’d had to take the path into the Fairy Forest on her own. She couldn’t recall what bravery she must have summoned, not knowing how far it was to the pool or what she’d find when she got there. Not that this trip didn’t have its own unique set of difficulties. She was topless, her badly gored left breast was starting to throb again, and God only knew what sort of things the smell of her blood might attract. Well, it was too late to worry about that now.

  And if something does come at me, she thought, picking up the spade by its short wooden handle, one of those laughers, for instance, I’ll just bop it one with Little Lisey’s Trusty Maniac Swatter, Copyright 1988, Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved.

  Somewhere up ahead, that bell tinkled again. Barefoot, bare-breasted, blood-smeared, wearing nothing but a pair of old denim shorts and carrying a spade with a silver scoop in her right hand, Lisey set off toward the sound along the rapidly darkening path. The pool was up ahead, surely no more than half a mile distant. There it was safe even after dark, and she would take off the few clothes she still wore, and wash herself clean.

  7

  It grew dim very quickly once she was under the canopy of trees. Lisey felt the urge to hurry more strongly than ever, but when the wind stirred the bell again—it was very close, now, and she knew it was hung from a branch by a bit of stout cord—she stopped, struck by a complex overlay of recall. She knew the bell was hung on a piece of cord because she had seen it on her last trip here, ten years ago. But Scott had swiped it long before that, even before they were married. She knew because she had heard it in 1979. Even then it had sounded familiar, in an unpleasant way. Unpleasant because she had hated the sound of that bell long before it had come over here to Boo’ya Moon.

  “And I told him,” she murmured, switching the spade to her other hand and brushing back her hair. The yellow square of delight lay over her left shoulder. Around her the sweetheart trees rustled like whispering voices. “He didn’t say much, but I guess he took it to heart.”

  She set off again. The path dipped, then rose to the top of a hill where the trees were a little thinner and strong red light shone through them. Not quite sunset yet, then. Good. And here the bell hung, nodding from side to side just enough to produce the faintest chime. It had, once upon a time, sat beside the cash register of Pat’s Pizza & Café in Cleaves Mills. Not the kind of bell you hit with your palm, the discreet hotel-desk species that went ding! once and then shut up, but a kind of miniature silver school bell with a handle that went ding-a-ling for as long as you wanted to keep on shaking it. And Chuckie G., the cook who was on duty most nights during the year or so Lisey had waitressed at Pat’s, had loved that bell. Sometimes, she remembered telling Scott, she heard its annoying silver ding-a-ling in her dreams, along with Chuckie G. bawling, leather-lunged: Order’s up, Lisey! Come on, let’s hustle! Hungry people! Yes, in bed she had told Scott how much she had hated Chuckie G.’s annoying little bell, in the spring of 1979 it must have been, because not long after that the annoying little bell had disappeared. She’d never associated Scott with its disappearance, not even when she’d heard it the first time she’d been here—too many other things going on then, too much weird input—and he had never said a word about it. Then, in 1996, while searching for him, she had heard Chuckie G.’s long-lost bell again, and that time she had

  (let’s hustle hungry people order’s up)

  known it for what it was. And the whole thing had made perfect crackpot sense. Scott Landon had been the man, after all, who thought the Aubur
n Novelty Shop was the hardy-har capital of the universe. Why wouldn’t he have thought it a fine joke to swipe the bell that so annoyed his girlfriend and bring it to Boo’ya Moon? To hang it rah-cheer beside the path for the wind to ring?

  There was blood on it last time, the deep voice of memory whispered. Blood in 1996.

  Yes, and it had frightened her, but she had pushed on, anyway…and the blood was gone now. The weather that had faded Paul’s name from the marker’s crosspiece had also washed the bell clean. And the stout length of cord upon which Scott had hung it twenty-seven years before (always assuming time was the same over here) had almost worn away—soon the bell would tumble to the path. Then the joke would be over.

  And now intuition spoke to her as powerfully as it ever had in her life, not in words but in a picture. She saw herself laying the silver spade at the foot of the Bell Tree, and she did so without pause or question. Nor did she ask herself why; it looked too perfect lying there at the foot of the old, gnarled tree. Silver bell above, silver spade below. As to why it should be perfect…she might as well ask herself why Boo’ya Moon existed in the first place. She’d thought the spade had been made for her protection this time. Apparently not. She gave it one more look (it was all the time she could afford) and then moved on.

  8

  The path led her down into another fold of forest. Here the strong red light of evening had faded to dimming orange and the first of the laughers woke somewhere ahead of her in the darker reaches of the woods, its horribly human voice climbing that glass mad-ladder and making her arms break out in gooseflesh.

  Hurry, babyluv.

  “Yes, all right.”

  Now a second laugher joined the first, and although she felt more gooseflesh ripple up her bare back, she thought she was all right. Just up ahead the path curved around a vast gray rock she remembered very well. Beyond it lay a deep rock-hollow—oh yes, deep and puffickly huh-yooge—and the pool. At the pool she would be safe. It was scary at the pool, but it was also safe. It—

  Lisey became suddenly, queerly positive that something was stalking her, just waiting for the last of the light to drain away before making its move.

  Its lunge.

  Heart pounding so hard it hurt her mutilated breast, she dodged around the great gray bulk of that protruding stone. And the pool was there, lying below like a dream made real. As she looked down at that ghostly shining mirror, the last memories clicked into place, and remembering was like coming home.

  9

  She comes around the gray rock and forgets all about the dried smear of blood on the bell, which has so troubled her. She forgets the screaming, windy cold and brilliant northern lights she has left behind. For a moment she even forgets Scott, whom she’s come here to find and bring back…always assuming he wants to come. She looks down at the ghostly shining mirror of the pool and forgets everything else. Because it’s beautiful. And even though she’s never been here before in her life, it’s like coming home. Even when one of those things starts to laugh she isn’t afraid, because this is safe ground. She doesn’t need anyone to tell her that; she knows it in her bones, just as she knows Scott has been talking about this place in his lectures and writing about it in his books for years.

  She also knows that this is a sad place.

  It’s the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it’s also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it’s always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it’s always sad. Because imagination isn’t the only thing this place is about. It’s also about

  (giving in)

  waiting. Just sitting…and looking out over those dreamy waters…and waiting. It’s coming, you think. It’s coming soon, I know it is. But you don’t know exactly what and so the years pass.

  How can you know that, Lisey?

  The moon told her, she supposes; and the northern lights that burn your eyes with their cold brilliance; the sweet-dust smell of roses and frangipani on Sweetheart Hill; most of all Scott’s eyes told her as he struggled just to hold on, hold on, hold on. To keep from taking the path that led to this place.

  More cackling voices rise in the deeper reaches of the woods and then something roars, momentarily silencing them. Behind her, the bell tinkles, then falls still again.

  I ought to hurry.

  Yes, even though she senses hurry is antithetical to this place. They need to be getting back to their house on Sugar Top as soon as possible, and not because there’s danger of wild beasts, of ogres and trolls and

  (vurts and seemies)

  other strange creatures deep in the Fairy Forest where it’s always dark as a dungeon and the sun never shines, but because the longer Scott stays here, the less likely she’ll ever be able to bring him back. Also…

  Lisey thinks of how it would be to see the moon burning like a cold stone in the still surface of the pool below—and she thinks: I might get fascinated.

  Yes.

  Old wooden steps lead down this side of the slope. Beside each one is a stone post with a word carved into it. She can read these in Boo’ya Moon, but knows they would mean nothing to her back home; nor will she be able to remember anything but the simplest: X means bread.

  The stairs end in a downsloping ramp running to her left that finally empties at ground level. Here a beach of fine white sand glimmers in the rapidly failing light. Above the beach, carved on step-backs into a rock wall, are perhaps two hundred long, curved stone benches that look down on the pool. There might be space for a thousand or even two thousand people here if they were seated side by side, but they’re not. She thinks there can be no more than fifty or sixty in all and most of them are hidden in gauzy wrappings that look like shrouds. But if they’re dead, how can they be sitting? Does she even want to know?

  On the beach, standing scattered, are maybe two dozen more. And a few people—six or eight—are actually in the water. They wade silently. As Lisey reaches the bottom of the steps and begins making her way toward the beach, her feet treading easily along the sunken rut of a path many other feet have walked before her, she sees a woman bend over and begin to lave her face. She does this with the slow gestures of someone in a dream, and Lisey recalls that day in Nashville, how everything fell into slow motion when she realized Blondie meant to shoot her husband. That was also like a dream, but wasn’t.

  Then she sees Scott. He’s sitting on a stone bench nine or ten rows up from the pool. He’s still got Good Ma’s african, only here it’s not bundled around him because it’s too warm. It’s just drawn across his knees, with the balance puddled over his feet. She doesn’t know how the african can be both here and in the house on the View at the same time and thinks: Maybe because some things are special. The way Scott is special. And she? Is a version of Lisey Landon still back in the house on Sugar Top Hill? She thinks not. She thinks she is not that special, not her, not little Lisey. She thinks that, for better or worse, she is entirely here. Or entirely gone, depending on which world you’re talking about.

  She pulls in breath, meaning to call his name, then doesn’t. A powerful intuition stops her.

  Shhhh, she thinks. Shhhh, little Lisey, now

  10

  Now you must be still, she thought, as she had in January of 1996.

  All was as it had been then, only now she saw it a little better because she had come a little earlier; the shadows in the stone valley that cupped the pool were only beginning to gather. The water had the shape, almost, of a woman’s hips. At the beach end, where the hips would nip into the waist, was an arrowhead of fine white sand. Upon it, standing far apart from one another, were four people, two men and two women, staring raptly at the pool. In the water were half a dozen more. No one was swimming. Most were in no deeper than their calves; one man was in up to his
waist. Lisey wished she could have read the expression on this man’s face, but she was still too far away. Behind the waders and the people standing on the beach—those who hadn’t yet found enough courage to get wet, Lisey was convinced—was the sloping headland that had been carved into dozens or maybe hundreds of stone benches. Upon them, widely scattered, sat as many as two hundred people. She seemed to remember only fifty or sixty, but this evening there were definitely more. Yet for every person she could see, there had to be at least four in those horrible

  (cerements)

  wrappings.

  There’s a graveyard, too. Do you remember?

  “Yes,” Lisey whispered. Her breast was hurting badly again, but she looked at the pool and remembered Scott’s sliced-up hand. She also remembered how quickly he had recovered from being shot in the lung by the madman—oh, the doctors had been amazed. There was better medicine than Vicodin for her, and not far away.

  “Yes,” she said again, and began making her way along the downsloping path, this time with only one unhappy difference: there was no Scott Landon sitting on a bench down there.

  Just before the path ended at the beach, she saw another path splitting off to her left and away from the pool. Lisey was once more all but overwhelmed by memory as she saw the moon

  11

  She sees the moon rising through a kind of slot in the massive granite outcropping that cups the pool. That moon is bloated and gigantic, just as it was when her husband-to-be brought her to Boo’ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers, but in the widening clearing to which that slot leads, its infected red-orange face is broken into jagged segments by the silhouettes of trees and crosses. So many crosses. Lisey is looking into what might almost be a rustic country graveyard. Like the cross Scott made for his brother Paul, these appear to be made of wood, and although some are quite large and a few are ornate, they all look handmade and many are the worse for wear. There are rounded markers as well, and some of these might be made of stone, but in the gathering gloom, Lisey cannot tell for sure. The light of the rising moon hinders rather than helps, because everything in the graveyard is backlit.