Dreamcatcher

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 windup 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! Late-breaking! 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 Aroostook 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.

That clip had been videotaped at 9:45 A.M… according to the news anchor. The next
clip-shaky footage from a hand-held video camera-had been taken from a Cessna chartered by Channel 9 News to overfly the Jefferson Tract. The air had obviously been
bumpy and there was a lot of snow, but not enough to obscure the two helicopters which
had appeared and flanked the Cessna on either side like big brown dragonflies. There was

a radio transmission, so blurry that Roberta needed to read the transcript printed in yellow
at the bottom of the TV screen: “
This area is interdicted. You are ordered to turn back to
your point of flight origination. Repeat, this area is interdicted. Turn back.”
Did interdicted mean the same as quarantined? Roberta Cavell thought it probably

did, although she also thought fellows like that man Kurtz might quibble. The letters on the flanking helicopters were clearly visible: ANG. One of them might have been the very
one that took
Abraham Kurtz north.
Cessna pilot: “
Under whose orders is this operation being carried out?”
Radio: “
Turn back, Cessna, or you will be forced to turn back.”

The Cessna had turned back. It had been low on fuel anyway, the news anchor reported, as if that explained everything. Since then they had just been rehashing the same stuff and calling it
updates. The major networks supposedly had correspondents en route.
She was getting up to turn the TV off-watching had begun to make her nervous-when
Duddits screamed. Roberta’s heart stopped in her chest, then jackrabbited into doubletime.

She whirled around, bumping the table by the La-Z-Boy which had been Alfie’s and was
now hers, overturning her coffee cup. It soaked the
TV Guide
, drowning the cast of
The
Sopranos
in a puddle of brown.
The scream was followed by high, hysterical sobbing, the sobs of a child. But that was the thing about Duddits-he was in his thirties now, but he would die a child, and long
before he turned forty.

For a moment all she could do was stand still. At last she got moving, wishing that
Alfie were here… or even better, one of the boys. Not that any of them were boys now, of
course; only Duddits was still a boy; Down’s syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and
soon he would die in Never-Never Land.
“I’m coming, Duddie!” she called, and so she was, but she felt old to herself as she

went hurrying down the hall to the back bedroom, her heart banging leakily against her ribs, arthritis pinging her hips. No Never Land for her.
“Coming, Mummy’s coming!”
Sobbing and sobbing, as if his heart had broken. He had cried out the first time he realized his gums were bleeding after he brushed his teeth, but he had never screamed and
it had been years since he’d cried like this, the kind of wild sobbing that got into your head

and tore at your brains. Thump and hum, thump and hum, thump and hum.
“Duddie, what is it?”
She burst into his room and looked at him, wide-eyed, so convinced he must be
hemorrhaging that at first she actually saw blood. But there was only Duddits, rocking back and forth in his crank-up hospital bed, cheeks wet with tears. His eyes were that

same old brilliant green, but the rest of his color was gone. His hair was gone, too, his lovely blond hair that had reminded her of the young Art Garfunkel. The faint winterlight
coming in through the window gleamed on his skull, gleamed on the bottles ranked on the
bedside table (pills for infection, pills for pain, but no pills that would stop what was happening to him, or even slow it down), gleamed on the IV pole standing in front of the
table.

But there was nothing wrong that she could see. Nothing that would account for the
almost grotesque expression of pain on his face.
She sat down beside him, captured the restlessly whipping head and held it to her bosom. Even now, in his agitation, his skin was cool; his exhausted, dying blood could bring no heat to his face. She remembered reading
Dracula

long ago, back in high school, the pleasurable terror that had been quite a bit less pleasurable once she was in bed, the lights out, her room filled with shadows. She remembered being very glad there were no
real vampires, except now she knew different. There was at least one, and it was far more
terrifying than any Transylvanian count; its name wasn’t Dracula but leukemia, and there
was no stake you could put through its heart.
“Duddits, Duddie, honey, what is it?”

And he screamed it out as he lay against her breast, making her forget all about what
might or might not be happening up in the Jefferson Tract, freezing her scalp to her skull
and making her skin crawl and horripilate. “
Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!”
There was no need to ask him to say it again or to say it more clearly; she had been listening to him her whole life, and she knew well enough:
Beaver’s dead! Beaver’s dead! Oh, Mamma, Beaver’s dead!
Chapter Nine

PETE AND BECKY
1
Pete lay screaming in the snow-covered rut where he had landed until he could

scream no more and then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it. He couldn’t. This was no-compromise pain, blitzkrieg agony. He’d had no idea the world had such pain-had he known, surely he would have stayed with the woman. With Marcy, although Marcy wasn’t her name. He almost
knew

her name, but what did it matter? He was the one who was in trouble here, the pain coming up from his knee in baked spasms, hot and terrible.
He lay shivering in the road with the plastic bag beside him.
THANKS FOR SHOPPING AT OUR PLACE! on the side. Pete reached for it,
wanting to see if there was a bottle or two in there that wasn’t broken, and when his leg
shifted, a bolt of agony flew up from the knee. It made the others feel like twinges. Pete

screamed again, and passed out.
2
He didn’t know how long he’d been out when he came to-the light suggested it
hadn’t been long, but his feet were numb and his hands were going as well, in spite of the
gloves.
Pete lay partially turned on his side, the beer-bag lying beside him in a puddle of freezing amber slush. The pain in his knee had receded a little-probably that was numbing

up, too-and he found he could think again. That was good, because this was a fuckin pisser
he’d gotten himself into here. He had to get back to the lean-to and the fire, and he had to
do it on his own. If he simply lay here waiting for Henry and the snowmobile, he was apt
to be a Petesicle when Henry arrived-a Petesicle with a bag of busted beer-bottles beside
him, thank you for shopping at our place, you fucking alcoholic, thanks a lot. And there

was the woman to think of She might die, too, and all because Pete Moore had to have his
brewskis.
He looked at the bag with distaste. Couldn’t throw it into the woods; couldn’t risk waking his knee up again. So he covered it with snow, like a dog covering its own scat,
and then he began to crawl.
The knee wasn’t that numb after all, it seemed. Pete crawled on his elbows and
pushed with his good foot, teeth clenched, hair hanging in his eyes. No animals now; the

stampede had stopped and there was only him-the gaspy sound of his breathing and the stifled moans of pain each time his knee bumped. He could feel sweat running down his
arms and back, but his feet remained numb and so did his hands.
He might have given up, but halfway along the straight stretch he caught sight of the
fire he and Henry had made. It had burned down considerably, but it was there. Pete began

to crawl toward it, and each time he bumped his leg and the bolts of agony came, he tried
to project them into the orange spark of the fire. He wanted to get there. It hurt like pluperfect hell to move, but oh how he wanted to get there. He didn’t want to die freezing
to death in the snow.
“I’ll make it, Becky,” he muttered. “I’ll make it, Becky.” He spoke her name half a
dozen times before he heard himself using it.

As he approached the fire he paused to glance at his watch and frowned. It said
eleven-forty or thereabouts, and that was nuts-he remembered checking it before starting
back to the Scout, and it had said twenty past twelve then. A slightly longer look revealed
the source of the confusion. His watch was running backward, the second hand moving counterclockwise in irregular, spasmodic jerks. He looked at this without much surprise.

His ability to appreciate anything so fine as mere peculiarity had passed. Even his leg was
no longer his chief concern. He was very cold, and big shudders began to course his body
as he elbowed his way and pushed with his rapidly tiring good leg, covering the last fifty
yards to the dying fire.
The woman was no longer on the tarp. She now lay on the far side of the fire, as if
she had crawled toward the remaining wood and then collapsed.

“Hi, honey, I’m home,” he panted. “Had a little trouble with my knee, but now I’m
back. Goddam knee’s your fault anyway, Becky, so don’t complain, all right? Becky, is that your name?”
Maybe, but she made no response. Just lay there staring. He could still see only one
of her eyes, although whether it was the same one or the other he didn’t know. Didn’t seem so creepy now, but maybe that was because he had other things to worry about. Like

the fire. It was guttering, but there was a good bed of coals and he thought he was in time.
Get some wood on that sweetheart, really build her up, then lie here with his gal Becky (but upwind, please God-those hangers were
bad
). Wait for Henry to show up. Wouldn’t
be the first time Henry had pulled his nuts out of the fire.
Pete crawled toward the woman and the little stockpile of wood beyond her, and as

he got close-close enough to start picking up that ethery chemical smell again-he
understood why her gaze no longer bothered him. That creepy jackalope look had gone out of it. Everything had. She’d crawled halfway around the fire and died. The crusting of
snow around her waist and hips had gone a dark red.
Pete stopped for a moment, up on his aching arms and peering at her, but his interest

in her, dead or alive, was not much more than the passing interest he’d felt in his back-turning watch. What he wanted to do was get some wood on the fire and get
warm
. He would consider the problem of the woman later. Next month, maybe, when he was sitting
in his own living room with a cast on his knee and a cup of hot coffee in his hand.
He finally made it to the wood. Only four pieces were left, but they were
big
pieces.

Henry might be back before they burned down, and Henry would pick up some more
before going on to get help. Good old Henry. Still wearing his dorky horn-rims, even in
this age of soft contacts and laser surgery, but you could count on him.
Pete’s mind tried to return to the Scout, crawling into the Scout and smelling the cologne Henry had not, in fact, been wearing, and he wouldn’t let it.
Let’s not go there

, as the kids said. As if memory was a destination. No more ghost-cologne, no more memories
of Duddits. No more no bounce, no more no play. He had enough on his plate already.
He threw the wood onto the fire one branch at a time, sidearming the pieces
awkwardly, wincing at the pain in his knee but enjoying the way the sparks rose in a cloud, whirling beneath the lean-to’s canted tin ceiling like crazy fireflies before winking
out.

Henry would be back soon. That was the thing to hold onto. Just watch the fire blaze
up and hold that thought.
No, he won’t. Because things have gone wrong back at Hole in the Wall. Something to
do with-
“Rick,” he said, watching the flames taste the new wood. Soon they would feed and
grow tall.
He stripped off his gloves, using his teeth, and held his hands up to the warmth of the
fire. The cut on the pad of his right hand, where the busted bottle had gotten him, was long

and deep. Was going to leave a scar, but so what? What was a scar or two between friends? And they
were
friends, weren’t they? Yeah. The old Kansas Street Gang, the Crimson Pirates with their plastic swords and battery-powered
Star Wars
ray-guns. Once they had done something heroic-twice, if you counted the Rinkenhauer girl. They had even gotten their pictures in the paper that time, and so what if he had a few scars? And so

what if they had once maybe-just maybe-killed a guy? Because if ever there was a guy who deserved killing-But he wasn’t going to go there, either. No way, baby. He saw the line, though. Like
it or not, he saw the line, more clearly than he’d seen it in years. Primarily he saw Beaver… and heard him, too. Right in the center of his head.
Jonesy? You there, man?
“Don’t get up, Beav,” Pete said, watching the flames crackle and climb. The fire was

hot now, beating warmth against his face, making him feel sleepy. “You stay right where
you are. Just… you know, just sit tight.”
What, exactly, was all this about?
What’s all this jobba-nobba?
as the Beav himself

had sometimes said when they were kids, a phrase that meant nothing but still cracked them up. Pete sensed he could know if he wanted to, the line was that bright. He got a glimpse of blue tiles, a filmy blue shower curtain, a bright orange cap-Rick’s cap, McCarthy’s cap, old Mr I-Stand-at-the-Door’s cap-and sensed he could have all the rest if
he wanted it. He didn’t know if this was the future, the past, or what was happening right

Все материалы, размещенные в боте и канале, получены из открытых источников сети Интернет, либо присланы пользователями  бота. 
Все права на тексты книг принадлежат их авторам и владельцам. Тексты книг предоставлены исключительно для ознакомления. Администрация бота не несет ответственности за материалы, расположенные здесь