Lisey’sStory Read online

  Lisey nods. Her own fear is so great it’s incapacitating, and any sense of exhilaration at having him back is gone. Has he lived with this all his life? If so, how has he lived with it? But even now, in the extremity of her terror, she supposes she knows. Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

  “Concentrate, Lisey. Do it now. Bust your brains.”

  She closes her eyes and sees the guest room of their house on Sugar Top Hill. Sees Scott sitting in the rocker. Sees herself sitting on the chilly floor beside him, holding his hand. He is gripping her hand as hard as she is gripping his. Behind them, the frost-filled panes of the window are filled with fantastic shifting light. The TV is on and The Last Picture Show is once more playing. The boys are in Sam the Lion’s black-and-white poolroom and Hank Williams is on the juke singing “Jambalaya.”

  For a moment she feels Boo’ya Moon shimmer, but then the music in her mind—music that was for a moment so clear and happy—fades. Lisey opens her eyes. She’s desperate to see home, but the big gray rock and the path leading away through the sweetheart trees are both still there. Those strange stars still blaze down, only now the laughers are silent and the harsh whispering of the bushes has stilled and even Chuckie G.’s bell has quit its fitful tinkling because the long boy has stopped to listen and the whole world seems to hold its breath and listen with it. It’s over there, not fifty feet away on their left; Lisey can now actually smell it. It smells like old farts in turnpike rest area bathrooms, or the poison whiff of bourbon and cigarette smoke you sometimes get when you turn the key and walk into a cheap motel room, or Good Ma’s pissy diapers when she was old and raving senile; it’s stopped behind the nearest rank of sweetheart trees, has paused in its tunnelish run through the woods, and dear God they aren’t going, they aren’t going back, they are for some reason stuck here.

  Scott’s whisper is now so low he hardly seems to be speaking at all. If not for the faint sensation of his lips moving against the sensitive skin of her ear, she could almost believe this was telepathy. “It’s the african, Lisey—sometimes things will go one way but not the other. Usually things that can double. I don’t know why, but that’s it. I feel it like an anchor. Drop the african.”

  Lisey opens her arms and lets it fall. The sound it makes is only the softest sigh (like the arguments against insanity falling into some ultimate basement), but the long boy hears it. She feels a shift in the rowing direction of its unknowable thoughts; feels the hideous pressure of its insane regard. One of the trees snaps with an explosive rending noise as the thing over there begins to turn, and she closes her eyes again and sees the guest room as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, sees it with desperate intensity, and through a perfect magnifying lens of terror.

  “Now,” Scott murmurs, and the most amazing thing happens. She feels the air turn inside out. Suddenly Hank Williams is singing “Jambalaya.” He’s singing

  14

  He was singing because the TV was on. She could now remember this as clearly as anything in her life, and she wondered how she ever could have forgotten it.

  Time to get off Memory Lane, Lisey—time to go home.

  Everybody out of the pool, as the saying was. Lisey had gotten what she’d come here for, had gotten it while caught up in that last terrible memory of the long boy. Her breast still hurt, but the fierce throbbing was down to a dull ache. She had felt worse as a teenager, after spending a long hot day in a bra that was too small for her. From where she knelt chin-deep in the water she could see that the moon, now smaller and almost pure silver, had risen above all but the highest of the trees in the graveyard. And now a new fear rose to trouble her: what if the long boy came back? What if it heard her thinking about it and came back? This was supposed to be a safe place and Lisey thought it probably was—from the laughers and the other nasty things that might live in the Fairy Forest, at least—but she had an idea that the long boy might not be bound by any rules that held the other things away from here. She had an idea the long boy was…different. The title of some old horror story first occurred to her, then clanged in her mind like an iron bell: “Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You, My Lad.” This was followed by the title of the only Scott Landon book she had ever hated: Empty Devils.

  But before she could start back to the sand, before she could even get to her feet again, Lisey was struck by yet another memory, this one far more recent. It was of waking in bed with her sister Amanda just before dawn and finding that past and present had gotten all tangled together. Worse still, Lisey had come to believe that she wasn’t in bed with her sister at all, but with her dead husband. And in a way, that had been true. Because although the thing in bed with her had been wearing Manda’s nightgown and had spoken in Manda’s voice, it had used the interior language of their marriage and phrases only Scott could have known.

  You have a blood-bool coming, the thing in bed with her had said, and along had come the Black Prince of the Incunks with her own Oxo can opener in his nasty bag of tricks.

  It goes behind the purple. You’ve already found the first three stations. A few more and you’ll get your prize.

  And what prize had the thing in bed with her promised? A drink. She had guessed a Coke or an RC Cola because those had been Paul’s prizes, but now she knew better.

  Lisey lowered her head, buried her battered face in the pool, and then, without allowing herself to think about what she was doing, took two quick swallows. The water in which she stood was almost hot, but what she took in her mouth was cool and sweet and refreshing. She could have drunk a good deal more, but some intuition told her to stop at two sips. Two was just the right number. She touched her lips and found that the swelling there was almost gone. She wasn’t surprised.

  Not trying to be quiet (and not bothering to be grateful, at least not yet), Lisey floundered back to the beach. It seemed to take forever. No one was wading near shore now, and the beach was empty. Lisey thought she saw the woman she’d spoken to sitting on one of the stone benches with her companion, but couldn’t be sure because the moon hadn’t risen quite enough. She looked a bit higher, and her gaze fixed on one of the wrapped figures a dozen or so benches up from the water. Moonlight had coated one side of this creature’s gauzy head with thin silver gilt, and a queer certainty came to her: that was Scott, and he was watching her. Didn’t the idea make a kind of crazy sense? Didn’t it, if he had held onto enough consciousness and will to come to her in the moments before dawn, as she lay in bed with her catatonic sister? Didn’t it, if he was determined to have his say just one more time?

  She felt the urge to call his name, even though to do so would surely be dangerous madness. She opened her mouth and water from her wet hair ran into her eyes, stinging them. Faintly, she heard the wind tinkling Chuckie G.’s bell.

  It was then that Scott spoke to her, and for the last time.

  —Lisey.

  Infinitely tender, that voice. Calling her name, calling her home.

  —Little

  15

  “Lisey,” he says. “Babyluv.”

  He’s in the rocking chair and she’s sitting on the cold floor, but he’s the one doing the shivering. Lisey has a sudden brilliant memory of Granny D saying Afeard and shidderin in the dark and it hits her that he’s cold because now all of the african is in Boo’ya Moon. But that’s not all—the whole frigging room is cold. It was chilly before but now it’s cold, and the lights are out, as well.

  The constant whooshy whisper of the furnace has ceased, and when she looks out the frosty window she can see only the extravagant colors of the northern lights. The Galloways’ pole-light next door has gone dark. Power outage, she thinks, but no—the television is still on and that damned movie is still playing. The boys from Anarene, Texas, are hanging out in the pool-hall, soon they’ll go to Mexico and when they come back Sam the Lion will be dead, he’ll be wra
pped in gauze and sitting on one of those stone benches overlooking the p—

  “That’s not right,” Scott says. His teeth are chattering slightly, but she can still hear the perplexity in his voice. “I never turned the goddam movie on because I thought it would wake you up, Lisey. Also—”

  She knows that’s true, when she came in here this time and found him the TV was off, but right now she’s got something far more important on her mind. “Scott, will it follow us?”

  “No, baby,” he says. “It can’t do that unless it gets a real good whiff of your scent or a fix on your…” He trails off. It’s the movie he’s still most concerned with, it seems. “Also, it’s never ‘Jambalaya’ in this scene. I’ve watched The Last Picture Show fifty times, except for Citizen Kane it may be the greatest movie ever made, and it’s never ‘Jambalaya’ in the pool-hall scene. It’s Hank Williams, sure, but it’s ‘Kaw-Liga,’ the song about the Indian chief. And if the TV and the VCR are working, where’s the damn lights?”

  He gets up and flicks the wall-switch. There’s nothing. That big cold wind from Yellowknife has finally killed their power, and power all over Castle Rock, Castle View, Harlow, Motton, Tashmore Pond, and most of western Maine. At the same instant Scott flicks the useless light-switch on, the TV goes off. The picture dwindles to a bright white point that glows for a moment, then disappears. The next time he tries his tape of The Last Picture Show, he’ll discover a ten-minute stretch in the middle of it is blank, as if wiped clean by a powerful magnetic field. Neither of them will ever speak of it, but Scott and Lisey will understand that although both of them were visualizing the guest room, it was probably Lisey who hollered them home with the greatest force…and it was certainly Lisey who visualized ole Hank singing “Jambalaya” instead of “Kaw-Liga.” As it was Lisey who so fiercely visualized both the VCR and the TV running when they returned that those appliances did run for almost a minute and a half, even though the electricity was out from one end of Castle County to the other.

  He stokes up the woodstove in the kitchen with oak chunks from the woodbox and she makes them a jackleg bed—blankets and an air-mattress—on the linoleum. When they lie down, he takes her in his arms.

  “I’m afraid to go to sleep,” she confesses. “I’m afraid that when I wake up in the morning, the stove will be out and you’ll be gone again.”

  He shakes his head. “I’m all right—it’s past for awhile.”

  She looks at him with hope and doubt. “Is that something you know, or just something you’re saying to soothe the little wife?”

  “Which do you think?”

  She thinks this isn’t the ghost-Scott she’s been living with since November, but it’s still hard for her to believe in such miraculous changes. “You seem better, but I’m leery of my own wishful thinking.”

  In the stove, a knot of wood explodes and she jumps. He holds her closer. She snuggles against him almost fiercely. It’s warm under the covers; warm in his arms. He is all she has ever wanted in the dark.

  He says, “This…this thing that has troubled my family…it comes and goes. When it passes, it’s like a cramp letting go.”

  “But it will come back?”

  “Lisey, it might not.” The strength and surety in his voice so surprises her that she looks up to check his face. She sees no duplicity there, even of the kindly sort meant to ease a troubled wife’s heart. “And if it does, it might never come back as strongly as it did this time.”

  “Did your father tell you that?”

  “My father didn’t know much about the gone part. I’ve felt this tug toward…the place where you found me…twice before. Once the year before I met you. That time booze and rock music got me through. The second time—”

  “Germany,” she says flatly.

  “Yes,” he says. “Germany. That time you pulled me through, Lisey.”

  “How close, Scott? How close was it in Bremen?”

  “Close,” he says simply, and it makes her cold. If she had lost him in Germany, she would have lost him for good. Mein gott. “But that was a breeze compared to this. This was a hurricane.”

  There are other things she wants to ask him, but mostly she only wants to hold him and believe him when he says that maybe things will be okay. The way you want to believe the doctor, she supposes, when he says the cancer is in remission and may never come back.

  “And you’re okay.” She needs to hear him say it one more time. Needs to.

  “Yes. Good to go, as the saying is.”

  “And…it?” She doesn’t need to be more specific. Scott knows what she’s talking about.

  “It’s had my scent for a long time, and it knows the shape of my thoughts. After all these years, we’re practically old friends. It could probably take me if it wanted to, but it would be an effort, and that fella’s pretty lazy. Also…something watches out for me. Something on the bright side of the equation. There is a bright side, you know. You must know, because you’re a part of it.”

  “Once you told me you could call it, if you wanted to.” She says this very low.

  “Yes.”

  “And sometimes you want to. Don’t you?”

  He doesn’t deny it, and outside the wind howls a long cold note along the eaves. Yet here under the blankets in front of the kitchen stove, it’s warm. It’s warm with him.

  “Stay with me, Scott,” she says.

  “I will,” he tells her. “I will as long as

  16

  “I will as long as I can,” Lisey said.

  She realized several things at the same time. One was that she had returned to her bedroom and her bed. Another was that the bed would have to be changed, because she had come back soaking wet, and her damp feet were coated with beach sand from another world. A third was that she was shivering even though the room wasn’t particularly cold. A fourth was that she no longer had the silver spade; she had left it behind. The last was that if the seated shape had indeed been her husband, she had almost certainly seen him for the last time; her husband was now one of the shrouded things, an unburied corpse.

  Lying on her wet bed in her soaking shorts, Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind—she thought that might also have been part of her prize at the end of Scott’s last bool hunt—but first she needed to finish grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time, and although there was also still some pain in her damaged breast, Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, or so ready to kick ass and take down names.

  As the saying was.

  XII. Lisey at Greenlawn

  (The Hollyhocks)

  1

  She glanced at the clock on the nightstand as she peeled off her soaked shorts and smiled, not because there was anything intrinsically funny about ten minutes to twelve on a morning in June, but because one of Scrooge’s lines from A Christmas Carol had occurred to her: “The spirits have done it all in one night.” It seemed to Lisey that something had accomplished a great deal in her own life in a very short period of time, most of it in the last few hours.

  But you have to remember that I’ve been living in the past, and that takes up a surprising amount of a person’s time, she thought…and after a moment’s consideration let out a great, larruping laugh that probably would have sounded insane to anyone listening down the hall.

  That’s okay, keep laughin, babyluv, ain’t nobody here but us chickadees, she thought, going into the bathroom. That big, loose laugh started to come out of her again, then stopped suddenly when it occurred to her that Dooley might be here. He could be holed up in the root cellar or one of this big house’s many closets; he might be sweating it out this late morning in the attic, right over her head. She didn’t know much about him and would be the
first to admit it, but the idea that he had gone to ground here in the house fit what she did know. He’d already proved he was a bold sonofabitch.

  Don’t worry about him now. Worry about Darla and Canty.

  Good idea. Lisey could get to Greenlawn ahead of her older sisters, that wouldn’t be much of a horse-race, but she couldn’t afford to dawdle, either. Keep your string a-drawing, she thought.

  But she couldn’t deny herself a moment in front of the full-length mirror on the back of the bedroom door, standing with her hands at her sides, looking levelly and without prejudice at her slender, unremarkable, middle-aged body—and at her face, which Scott had once described as that of a fox in summer. It was a little puffy, nothing more. She looked like she’d slept exceptionally hard (maybe after a drink or three too many), and her lips still turned out a little, giving them a strangely sensual quality that made her feel both uneasy and a tiny bit gleeful. She hesitated, not sure what to do about that, and then found a tube of Revlon Hothouse Pink at the back of her lipstick drawer. She touched some on and nodded, a little doubtfully. If people were going to look at her lips—and she thought they might—she’d do better giving them something to look at than trying to cover up what couldn’t be hidden.

  The breast Dooley had operated on with such lunatic absorption was marked with an ugly scarlet ditch that circled up from beneath her armpit before petering out above her ribcage. It looked like a fairly bad cut that might have happened two or three weeks ago and was now healing well. The two shallower wounds looked like no more than the sort of red marks that resulted from wearing too-tight elastic garments. Or perhaps—if you had a lively imagination—rope burns. The difference between this and the horror she had observed upon regaining consciousness was amazing.

  “All the Landons are fast healers, you sonofabitch,” Lisey said, and stepped into the shower.