Brilliant knowledge in every nerve-ending. Exploding in every nerve-ending. Dooley might have learned about Cole while reading up on his literary hero, but Lisey knew this wasn"t so. And it all made such perfect, divine sense.
"You were never in Brushy Mountain. That was just a tale you told Woodbody. Barstool talk. But you were locked up, all right. That much was true. You were in the looneybin. You were in the looneybin with Cole."
"Shut up, Missus! You listen-a me and shut up right now!"
"Lisey, stop!" Amanda cried.
She paid no attention to either of them. "Did you two discuss your favorite Scott Landon books...when Cole was medicated enough to talk rationally, that is? Bet you did. He liked Empty Devils best, right? Sure. And you liked The Coaster"s Daughter. Just a couple of Deep s.p.a.ce Cowboys talking books while they got a few repairs in their smucking guidance systems-"
"That"s enough, I said!" Swimming out of the gloom. Swimming out of it like a diver coming up from black water into the green shallows, goggles and all. Of course divers didn"t hold paper bags in front of their chests as if to shield their hearts from the blows of cruel widows who knew too much. "I ain"t goan warn you again-"
Lisey took no notice. She didn"t know if Amanda was still holding the gun and no longer cared. She was delirious. "Did you and Cole talk about Scott"s books in group therapy? Sure you did. About the father stuff. And then, after they let you out, there was Woodsmucky, just like a Daddy in a Scott Landon book. One of the good Daddies. After they let you out of the nutbarn. After they let you out of the scream factory. After they let you out of the laughing academy, as the saying i-"
With a shriek, Dooley dropped his paper sack (it clanked) and launched himself at Lisey. She had time to think, Yes. This is why I needed my hands free.
Amanda also shrieked, hers overlapping his. Of the three of them only Lisey was calm, because only Lisey knew precisely what she was doing...if not precisely why. She made no effort to run. She opened her arms to Jim Dooley and caught him like a fever.
3.
He would have knocked her to the floor and landed on top of her-Lisey had no doubt this was his intention-if not for the desk. She let his weight carry her back, smelling the sweat in his hair and on his skin. She also felt the curve of the goggles digging into her temple and heard a low, rapid clicking sound just below her left ear.
That"s his teeth, she thought. That"s his teeth, trying for my neck.
Her b.u.t.t smacked against the long side of Dumbo"s Big Jumbo. Amanda screamed again. There was a loud report and a brief brilliant flash of light.
"Leave her alone, motherf.u.c.ker!"
Big talk but she fired into the ceiling, Lisey thought, and tightened her locked hands behind Dooley"s neck as he bent her backward like a dance-partner at the end of a particularly amorous tango. She could smell gun-smoke, her ears were ringing, and she could feel his c.o.c.k, heavy and almost fully erect.
"Jim," she whispered, holding him. "I"ll give you what you want. Let me give you what you want."
His grip loosened a little. She sensed his confusion. Then, with a feline yowl, Amanda landed on his back and Lisey was forced down again, now almost sprawling on the desk. Her spine gave a warning creak, but she could see the oval smudge of his face-enough to make out how afraid he looked. Was he afraid of me all along? she wondered.
Now or never, little Lisey.
She sought his eyes behind the weird circles of gla.s.s, found them, locked in on them. Amanda was still yowling like a cat on a hot griddle, and Lisey could see her fists hammering Dooley"s shoulders. Both fists. So she had fired that one shot into the ceiling, then dropped the gun. Ah well, maybe it was for the best.
"Jim." G.o.d, his weight was killing her. "Jim."
His head dipped, as if drawn by the lock of her eyes and the force of her will. For a moment Lisey didn"t think she would be able to reach him, even so. Then, with a final desperate lunge-Pafko at the wall, Scott would have said, quoting G.o.d knew who-she did. She breathed the meat and onions he"d eaten for his supper as she settled her mouth on his. She used her tongue to force his lips open, kissed harder, and so pa.s.sed on her second sip of the pool. She felt the sweetness go. The world she knew wavered and then began to go with it. It happened fast. The walls turned transparent and that other world"s mingled scents filled her nose: frangipani, bougainvillea, roses, night-blooming cereus.
"Geromino," she said into his mouth, and as if it had only been waiting for that word, the solid weight of the desk beneath her turned to rain. A moment later it was gone completely. She fell; Jim Dooley fell on top of her; Amanda, still screaming, fell on top of both.
Bool, Lisey thought. Bool, the end.
4.
She landed on a thick mat of gra.s.s that she knew so well she might have been rolling around in it her whole life. She had time to register the sweetheart trees and then the breath was driven out of her in a large and noisy woof. Black spots danced before her in the sunset-colored air.
She might have pa.s.sed out if Dooley hadn"t rolled away. Amanda he shrugged off his back as if she had been no more than a troublesome kitten. Dooley surged to his feet, staring first down the hill carpeted with purple lupin and then turning the other way, toward the sweetheart trees that formed the outrider of what Paul and Scott Landon had called the Fairy Forest. Lisey was shocked by Dooley"s aspect. He looked like some weird flesh-and-hair-covered skull. After a moment she realized it was his narrowness of face combined with evening shadows, and what had happened to his goggles. The lenses hadn"t made the trip to Boo"ya Moon. His eyes stared out through the holes where they had been. His mouth hung open. Spit ran between the upper and lower lips in silver strings.
"You always...liked...Scott"s books," Lisey said. She sounded like a winded runner, but her breath was returning and the black flecks in front of her eyes were disappearing. "How do you like his world, Mr. Dooley?"
"Where..." His mouth moved, but he couldn"t finish.
"Boo"ya Moon, on the edge of the Fairy Forest, near the grave of Scott"s brother, Paul."
She knew that Dooley would be as dangerous to her (and to Amanda) over here as in Scott"s study once such wits as he possessed came back to him, but she still allowed herself a moment to look over that long purple slope, and at the darkening sky. Once more the sun was going down in orange fire while the full moon rose opposite. She thought, as she had before, that the mixture of heat and cold silver might kill her with its feverish beauty.
Not that it was beauty she had to worry about. A sunburned hand fell on her shoulder.
"What are you doin-a me, Missus?" Dooley asked. His eyes bulged inside the empty goggles. "You tryin to hypno-lize me? Because it won"t work."
"Not at all, Mr. Dooley," Lisey said. "You wanted what was Scott"s, didn"t you? And surely this is better than any unpublished story, or even cutting a woman with her own can opener, wouldn"t you say? Look! A whole other world! A place made of imagination! Dreams spun into whole cloth! Of course it"s dangerous in the forest-dangerous everywhere at night, and it"s almost night now-but I"m confident that a brave and strapping lunatic such as yourself-"
She saw what he meant to do, saw her murder clearly in those weird socketed eyes, and cried out her sister"s name...in alarm, yes, but also starting to laugh. In spite of everything. Laughing at him. Partly because he looked pretty silly with the gla.s.s gone out of his goggles, mostly because at this mortal moment the punchline of some ancient wh.o.r.e-house joke had popped into her mind: Hey, youse guys, your sign fell down! The fact that she couldn"t remember the joke itself only made it funnier.
Then her breath was gone and Lisey could no longer laugh. She could only rattle.
5.
She clawed at Dooley"s face with her short but far from nonexistent nails and left three bleeding gouges in one cheek, but the grip on her throat didn"t loosen-if anything, it tightened down. The rattle coming from her was louder now, the sound of some primitive mechanical device with dirt in its gears. Mr. Silver"s potato-grader, maybe.
Amanda, where the smuck are you? she thought, and then Amanda was there. Pounding her fists on Dooley"s back and shoulders had done no good. This time she fell on her knees, grasped his crotch through his jeans with her wounded hands...and twisted.
Dooley howled and thrust Lisey away. She flew into the high gra.s.s, fell on her back, and then scrambled to her feet again, gasping breath down her fiery throat. Dooley was bent over with his head down and his hands between his legs, a painful pose that brought Lisey a clear memory of a seesaw accident in the schoolyard and Darla saying matter-of-factly: "That"s just one of the reasons I"m glad I"m not a boy."
Amanda charged him.
"Manda, no!" Lisey shouted, but too late. Even hurt, Dooley was miserably quick. He evaded Amanda easily, then clubbed her aside with one bony fist. He tore off the useless goggles with the other hand and threw them into the gra.s.s: he slang them forth. All pretense at sanity had left those blue eyes. He could have been the dead thing in Empty Devils, climbing implacably out of the well to exact its revenge.
"I dunno just where we are, but I tell you one thing, Missus: you ain"t never goan home."
"Unless you catch me, you"re the one who"s never going home," Lisey said. Then she laughed again. She was frightened- terrified-but it felt good to laugh, perhaps because she understood that her laughter was her knife. Every peal from her burning throat drove the point deeper into his flesh.
"Don"t you run "at hee-haw sound at me, you b.i.t.c.h, don"t you G.o.ddam dare!" Dooley roared, and ran at her.
Lisey turned to flee. She had taken no more than two running steps toward the path into the woods when she heard Dooley scream in pain. She looked over her shoulder and saw him on his knees. There was something jutting out of his upper arm, and his shirt was darkening rapidly around it. Dooley staggered to his feet and plucked at it with a curse. The jutting thing wiggled but didn"t come out. Lisey saw a flash of yellow, running away from it in a line. Dooley cried out again, then seized the thing stuck in his flesh with his free hand.
Lisey understood. It came in a flash, too perfect not to be true. He had started to run after her, but Amanda had tripped him before he could do more than get started. And he had come down on Paul Landon"s wooden grave-marker. The crosspiece was sticking out of his bicep like an oversized pin. Now he yanked it free and threw it aside. More blood flowed from the open wound, scarlet creeping down his shirtsleeve to the elbow. Lisey knew she had to make sure Dooley didn"t turn his rage on Amanda, who was lying helplessly in the gra.s.s almost at his feet.
"Can"t catch a flea, can"t catch me!" Lisey chanted, drawing on playground lore she didn"t even know she remembered. Then she stuck her tongue out at Dooley, twiddling her fingers in her ears for good measure.
"You b.i.t.c.h! You c.u.n.t!" Dooley screamed, and charged.
Lisey ran. She wasn"t laughing now, she was finally too afraid to laugh, but she was still wearing a terrified smile as her feet found the path and she ran into the Fairy Forest, where it was already night.
6.
The marker that said TO THE POOL was gone, but as Lisey ran down the first stretch-the path a dim white line that seemed to float amid the darker ma.s.ses of the surrounding trees- broken cackles arose from ahead of her. Laughers, she thought, and chanced a look back over her shoulder, thinking that if her friend Dooley heard those babies, he might change his mind about- But no. Dooley was still there, visible in the stutters of fading light because he had gained on her, he was really flying along in spite of the black blood now coating his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist. Lisey tripped over a root in the path, almost lost her balance, and somehow managed to keep it, in part by reminding herself that Dooley would be on top of her five seconds after she fell. The last thing she"d feel would be his breath, the last thing she"d smell would be the curdling aroma of the surrounding trees as they changed to their more dangerous night-selves, and the last thing she"d hear would be the insane laughter of the hyena-things that lived deeper in the forest.
I can hear him panting. I can hear that because he"s gaining. Even running at top speed-and I won"t be able to keep this up for long-he can run a little bit faster than I can. Why doesn"t that squeeze in the b.a.l.l.s she fetched him slow him down? Why doesn"t the blood-loss?
The answer to those questions was simple, the logic stark: they were slowing him down. Without them, she"d be caught already. Lisey was in third gear. She tried to find fourth and couldn"t. Apparently she didn"t have a fourth gear. Behind her, the harsh and rapid sound of Jim Dooley"s breathing grew closer still, and she knew that in only a minute, maybe less, she would feel the first brush of his fingers on the back of her shirt.
Or in her hair.
7.
The path tilted and grew steeper for a few moments; the shadows grew deeper. She thought she might finally be gaining a little bit on Dooley. She didn"t dare cast a glance back to see, and she prayed that Amanda wouldn"t try following them. It might be safe on Sweetheart Hill, and it might be safe at the pool, but it wasn"t a bit safe in these woods. Jim Dooley was far from the worst of it, either. Now she heard the faint and dreamy ring of Chuckie G."s bell, swiped by Scott in another lifetime and hung from a tree at the top of the next rise.
Lisey saw brighter light ahead, not reddish-orange now but just a dying pink afterglow. It stole through a thinning of the trees. The path was a bit brighter, too. She could see its gentle upslope. Beyond that next rise, she remembered, it sank again, winding through even thicker forest until it reached the big rock and the pool beyond.
Can"t make it, she thought. The breath tearing in and out of her throat was hot and there was the beginning of a st.i.tch in her side. He"ll catch me before I"m halfway up that hill.
It was Scott"s voice that responded, laughing on top, surprisingly angry beneath. You didn"t come all this way for that. Go on, babyluv-SOWISA.
SOWISA, yes. Strapping it on had never seemed more appropriate than right now. Lisey tore up the hill, hair plastered to her skull in sweaty strings, arms pumping. She breathed in huge s.n.a.t.c.hes, exhaled in harsh bursts. She wished for the sweet taste in her mouth, but she"d given her last sip of the pool to the crazy smuck behind her and now what her mouth tasted of was copper and exhaustion. She could hear him closing in again, not yelling now, saving all his breath for the chase. The cramp in her side deepened. A high, sweet singing started up first in her right ear, then in both of them. The laughers cackled closer now, as if they wanted to be in at the kill. She could smell the change in the trees, how the aroma that had been sweet had grown sharp, like the smell of the ancient henna she and Darla had found in Granny D"s bathroom after she died, a poison smell, and- That"s not the trees.
All the laughers had fallen silent. Now there was only the sound of Dooley ripping breath from the air as he pounded along behind her, trying to close those last few feet of distance. And what she thought of was Scott"s arms sweeping around her, Scott pulling her against his body, Scott whispering Shhhh, Lisey. For your life and mine, now you must be still.
She thought: It"s not lying across the path, like it was when he tried to get to the pool in "04. This time it"s in its run beside the path. Like it was when I came to him during the winter of the big wind from Yellowknife.
But just as she glimpsed the bell, still hanging from that rotting length of cord, the last light of the day shining on its curve, Jim Dooley put on a final burst of speed and Lisey actually did feel his fingers slipping across the back of her shirt, hunting for purchase there, anything, a bra-strap would do. She managed to hold back the scream that rose in her throat, but it was a near thing. She bolted onward, finding a little more speed of her own, speed that probably would have done her no good if Dooley hadn"t tripped again, going down with a cry-"You b.i.t.c.h!"-that Lisey thought he would live to regret.
But perhaps not for long.
8.
That shy tinkle came again, from what had once been (Order"s up, Lisey! Come on, let"s hustle!) the Bell Tree and was now the Bell-and-Spade Tree. And there it was, Scott"s silver spade. When she had placed it here- following a powerful intuition she now understood-the laughers had been gibbering hysterically. Now the Fairy Forest was silent except for the sounds of her own tortured respiration and Dooley"s gasping spew of curses. The long boy had been sleeping-dozing, at least-and Dooley"s yelling had awakened it.
Maybe this was how it was supposed to go, but that did not make it easy. It was horrible to feel the awakening whisper of not-quite-alien thoughts from her undermind. They were like restless hands feeling for loose boards or testing the closed cover of a well. She found herself considering too many terrible things that had at one time or another undermined her heart: a pair of b.l.o.o.d.y teeth she"d once found on the floor of a movie-theater bathroom, two little kids crying in each other"s arms outside a convenience store, the smell of her husband as he lay on his deathbed, looking at her with his burning eyes, Granny D lying dying in the chickenyard with her foot going jerk-jerk-jerk.
Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine"s gone and the hour is none.
All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.
And now- In the always perfect, never-ending moment of now 9.
Gasping, whining, her heart nothing but bloodthunder in her ears, Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair. Dooley"s coming. She hears him. He"s quit cursing but she hears the approach of his respiration. It"s going to be close, closer than with Blondie, even though this madman doesn"t have a gun, because if Dooley manages to grab hold of her before she"s able to turn- But he doesn"t. Not quite. Lisey pivots like a hitter going after a fat pitch, swinging the silver spade just as hard as she can. The bowl catches a last bloom of pink light, a fading corsage, and its speeding upper edge ticks the hanging bell on its way by. The bell says a final word-TING!-and goes flying into the gloom, trailing its bit of rotting cord after it. Lisey sees the spade carry on forward and upward, and once more she thinks Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! Then the flat of the blade connects with Jim Dooley"s onrushing face, making not a crunch-the sound she remembers from Nashville-but a kind of m.u.f.fled gonging. Dooley shrieks in surprise and agony. He is driven sideways, off the path and into the trees, flailing with his arms, trying to keep his balance. She has a moment to see that his nose is laid radically over to one side, just as Cole"s was; time to see that his mouth is gushing blood from the bottom and both corners. Then there"s movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is vast movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There"s the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it"s there. Scott"s long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of now drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends.
10.
Almost before Lisey was aware of what was happening and surely before she was ready-although the idea of ever being ready for such a thing was a joke-suddenly it was there. The piebald thing. The living embodiment of what Scott had been talking about when he talked about the bad-gunky.
What she saw was an enormous plated side like cracked snakeskin. It came bulging through the trees, bending some and snapping others, seeming to pa.s.s right through a couple of the biggest. That was impossible, of course, but the impression never faded. There was no smell but there was an unpleasant sound, a chuffing, somehow gutty sound, and then its patchwork head appeared, taller than the trees and blotting out the sky. Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and screamed...lived and screamed...lived and screamed.
She herself could not scream. She was incapable of any noise at all. She took two steps backward, steps that felt weirdly calm to her. The spade, its silver bowl once more dripping with the blood of an insane man, fell from her fingers and landed on the path. She thought, It sees me...and my life will never truly be mine again. It won"t let it be mine.
For a moment it reared, a shapeless, endless thing with patches of hair growing in random clumps from its damp and heaving slicks of flesh, its great and dully avid eye upon her. The dying pink of the day and the waxing silver glow of moonlight lit the rest of what still lay snakelike in the shrubbery.
Then its eye turned from Lisey to the screaming, thrashing creature that was trying to back out of the little copse of trees that had entangled him, Jim Dooley with blood gushing from his broken mouth, broken nose, and one swollen eye; Jim Dooley with blood even in his hair. Dooley saw what was looking at him and screamed no more. Lisey saw him trying to cover his good eye, saw his hands fall to his sides, knew he had lost his strength, and felt a moment of pity for him in spite of everything, an instant of empathy that was gruesome in its strength and nearly unendurable in its human harmony. In that moment she might have taken it all back if it had meant only her own dying, but she thought of Amanda and tried to harden her horrified mind and heart.
The huge thing tangled in the trees poked forward almost delicately and gathered Dooley in. The flesh around the hole in its blunt snout seemed to wrinkle briefly, almost to pucker, and Lisey remembered Scott lying on the hot pavement that day in Nashville. As the low snorts and the crunching sounds began and Dooley started to voice his final, seemingly endless cries, she remembered Scott whispering, I hear it taking its meal. She remembered how he had pursed his lips in a tight O, and she recalled with perfect clarity how blood had burst from them when he made that indescribably nasty chuffing sound: fine ruby droplets which seemed to hang in the sweltering air.
She ran then, though she would have sworn she no longer knew how. She bolted back along the path toward the hill of lupin, away from the place near the Bell-and-Spade Tree where the long boy was eating Jim Dooley alive. She knew it was doing her and Amanda a favor, but she knew it was a lefthanded favor at best, because if she survived this night, she would now be free of the long boy no more than Scott had been, no, not a single day since his childhood. Now it had marked her as well, made her a part of its never-ending moment, its terrible world-spanning regard. From now on she would have to be careful, especially if she happened to wake up in the middle of the night...and Lisey had an idea that her nights of sound sleep were over. In the small hours she would have to steer her gaze away from mirrors, and window-gla.s.s, and especially from the curved surfaces of watergla.s.ses, G.o.d knew why. She would have to protect herself as well as she could.
If she survived this night.
It"s very close, honey, Scott had whispered as he lay shivering on the hot pavement. Very close.
Behind her, Dooley screamed as if he would never stop. Lisey thought it would drive her mad. Or that it already had.
11.
Just before she emerged from the trees, Dooley"s shrieking finally did cease. She didn"t see Amanda. This filled Lisey with new terror. Suppose her sister had run away to who knew which point of the compa.s.s? Or suppose she was still somewhere close at hand, but curled up in a fetal position, catatonic again and concealed by the shadows?
"Amanda? Amanda?"
There was an endless moment during which she heard nothing. It was followed-G.o.d, at last!-by a rustling in the high gra.s.s to Lisey"s left, and Amanda stood up. Her face, pale to begin with and painted paler by the light of the rising moon, now looked like that of a wraith. Or a harpy. She came stumbling forward, arms out, and Lisey gathered her in. Amanda was shivering. The hands at the nape of Lisey"s neck were locked in a chilly knot.
"Oh Lisey, I thought he"d never stop!"
"Me either."
"And so high...I couldn"t tell...they were so high...I hoped it was him, but I thought, "What if it"s Little? What if it"s Lisey?"" Amanda began to sob against the side of Lisey"s neck.
"I"m all right, Amanda. I"m here and I"m all right."
Amanda pulled her face away from Lisey"s neck so she could look down into her younger sister"s face. "Is he dead?"
"Yes." She would not share her intuition that Dooley might have achieved a kind of h.e.l.lish immortality within the thing that had eaten him. "Dead."
"Then I want to go back! Can we go back?"
"Yes."
"I don"t know if I can make a picture of Scott"s study in my mind...I"m so upset..." Amanda looked around fearfully. "This isn"t like Southwind at all."
"No," Lisey agreed, gathering Amanda back into her arms. "And I know you"re afraid. You just do the best you can."
Lisey was actually not worried about getting back to Scott"s study, back to Castle View, back to the world. She thought the problem now might be staying there. She remembered a doctor telling her once she"d have to be especially careful of her ankle after giving it a savage sprain while ice-skating. Because once you stretch those tendons, he"d said, it"s ever so much easier to do it next time.
That much easier next time, right. And it had seen her. That eye, as big as a spring sinkhole, both dead and alive, had been on her.
"Lisey, you"re so brave," Amanda said in a small voice. She took one final look at the sloping hill of lupin, gilded and strange in the growing light of the moon, then pressed her face against the side of Lisey"s neck again.
"Keep talking like that and I"ll have you back in Greenlawn tomorrow. Close your eyes."