Dreamcatcher

unnecessary, but Kurtz, who had no intention of contracting Ripley if he could avoid it, was the big cheese. Among other things, he was supposed to set an example. Besides, he
played the odds. As for Freddy Johnson… well, he had plans for Freddy.
“I’m here, boss,” Underhill said in his phones.
“That was good shooting, better flying, and superlative thinking. You saved some
lives. You and I are back where we were. Right back to Square One. Got that?”

“I do, boss. Got it and appreciate it.”
And if you believe it
, Kurtz thought,
you’re even stupider than you look.
10
Behind Owen, Cavanaugh was still making noises, but the volume was decreasing
now. Nothing from Joe Blakey, who was maybe coming to understand the implications of
that gauzy red-gold whirlwind, which they might or might not have managed to avoid.
“Everything okay, buck?” Kurtz asked.

“We have some injuries,” Owen replied, “but basically five-by. Work for the
sweepers, though; it’s a mess back there,” Kurtz’s crowlike laughter came back, loud in Owen’s headphones.
11
“Freddy-”
“Yes, boss.”
“We need to keep an eye on Owen Underhill.”
“Okay.”
“If we need to leave suddenly-Imperial Valley-Underhill stays here.”
Freddy Johnson said nothing, just nodded and flew the helicopter. Good lad. Knew

which side of the line he belonged on, unlike some.Kurtz again turned to him. “Freddy, get
us back to that godforsaken little store and don’t spare the horses. I want to be
there at least fifteen minutes before Owen and Joe Blakey. Twenty, if possible.”
“Yes, boss.”
“And I want a secure satellite uplink to Cheyenne Mountain.”
“You got it. Take about five.”
“Make it three, buck. Make it three.”
Kurtz settled back and watched the pine forest flow under them. So much forest, so

much wildlife, and not a few human beings-most of them at this time of year wearing orange. And a week from now maybe in seventy-two hours-it would all be as dead as the
mountains of the moon. A shame, but if there was one thing of which there was no shortage in Maine, it was woods.
Kurtz spun the cocked hat on the end of his finger. If possible, he intended to see Owen Underhill wearing it after he had ceased breathing.

“He just wanted to hear if any of it had changed,” Kurtz said softly.
Freddy Johnson, who knew which side his bread was buttered on, said nothing.
12
Halfway back to Gosselin’s and Kurtz’s speedy little Kiowa already a speck that
might or might not still be there, Owen’s eyes fixed on Tony Edward’s right hand, which
was gripping one branch of the Chinook’s Y-shaped steering yoke. At the base of the right

thumbnail, fine as a spill of sand, was a curving line of reddish-gold. Owen looked down
at his own hands, inspecting them as closely as Mrs. Jankowski had during Personal Hygiene, back in those long-ago days when the Rapeloews had been their neighbors. He
could see nothing yet, not on his, but Tony had his mark, and Owen guessed his own would come in time.
Baptists the Underhills had been, and Owen was familiar with the story of Cain and
Abel.

The voice of thy brother’s blood cried unto me from the ground
, God had said, and he had sent Cain out to live in the land of Nod, to the east of Eden. With the low men, according to his mother. But before Cain was set loose to wander, God had put a mark upon him, so even the low men of Nod would know him for what he was. And now,

seeing that red-gold thread on the nail of Eddie’s thumb and looking for it on his own hands and wrists, Owen guessed he knew what color Cain’s mark had been.
Chapter Eleven
THE EGGMAN’s JOURNEY
1
Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself The problem
was that it didn’t speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it
didn’t matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice,

his life had improved enormously. He even had nights when he slept again (not a lot of them, but enough), and he had never had a really bad day.
Until today. It had been Jonesy’s body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his
old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside-Henry rather thought he was-but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to

be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.
Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by
without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn’t want to think,
didn’t want to care.
At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in
the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-

word sign-CLARENDON-he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then
tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was
picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He
couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure it mattered.
Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked
dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded,

and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those
things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.
The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their

welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or
maybe fungus. And something else…
Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently-he had a memory,
both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice’s a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the
wine the

sommelier
had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking,
We
sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other’s assholes, and it all comes to about the same
. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father’s chin had come, He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be,
and if it were done, than “twere well it were done quickly.

What he smelled now wasn’t wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he
couldn’t place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong
innards was here, too.
Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last
time, feeling the weight of all the years-the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid

of pot, a food-fight in “96 (or maybe it had been “97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and
childhood’s brilliance.
As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than

organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildev,7ystuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No
doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.
Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away

from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning.
If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was
probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the
barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks,
was there?

He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the
packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.
2
The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day,
Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to
the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to… to the what?

To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no woodpeckers pecking, no
squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded
plop
as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone,
had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.
He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed’s interior.

Pete would have done better-Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the
smallest jar of screws-but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete’s special skill. He’d been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen
cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.

Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still
for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn’t want to be surprised by
anything if he could help it.
When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the
snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil

stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the comer.
The worktable was a mess-a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what
had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into

the table’s thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had
gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.
It was Jonesy.
Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he
knew
that, and
it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what
he

wanted was clearly visible in the far comer of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.
Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the
interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters” masks

hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he

saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at
his own shadow.
He left the shed in four big steps, the painters” masks swinging from his right hand.
He held onto his lungfill of decayed air until he’d made four more steps along the packed
track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted

on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.
From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for
that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry’s mind there came a vision as clear as the
memory of milk running down his father’s chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with
rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and

the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what
was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn’t dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits’s weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made

you feel as if your head were going to explode.
Henry straightened up, saw fresh blood on the palm of his left glove, and cried “Ah,
shit!
” at the sky in a voice that was both furious and amused. He had covered his mouth and nose, he had gotten the masks and was planning on wearing at least two when he went
inside Hole in the Wall, but he had completely forgotten the gash in his thigh, the one he’d
gotten when the Scout rolled over. If there had been a contaminant out there in the shed,

something given off by the fungus, the chances were excellent that it was in him now. Not
that the precautions he
had
taken were any such of a much. Henry imagined a sign, big red letters reading BIOHAZARD AREA! PLEASE HOLD BREATH AND COVER ANY
SCRATCHES YOU MAY HAVE WITH YOUR HAND!
He grunted laughter and started back toward the cabin. Well, good God, Maude, it
wasn’t as if he had planned to live forever, anyway-Off to the east, the gunfire crackled on
and on.
3

Once again standing outside Hole in the Wall’s open door, Henry felt in his back
pocket for a handkerchief without much hope of finding one… and didn’t. Two of the unadvertised attractions of spending time in the woods were urinating where you wanted
and just leaning over and giving a honk when your nose felt in need of a blow. There was
something primally satisfying about letting the piss and the snot fly… to men, at least.

When you thought about it, it was sort of a blue-eyed wonder that women could love the
best of them, let alone the rest of them.
He took off his coat, the shirt under it, and the thermal undershirt beneath that. The
final layer was a faded Boston Red Sox tee-shirt with GARCIAPARRA 5 on the back.
Henry took this off, spun it into a bandage, and wrapped it around the blood-caked tear in
the left leg of his jeans, thinking again that he was locking the barn door after the horse

had been stolen. Still, you filled in the blanks, didn’t you? Yes, you filled in the blanks and you printed neatly and legibly. These were the concepts upon which life ran. Even when
life was running out, it seemed.
He put the rest of his outerwear back on over his goosepimply top half, then donned
two of the teardrop-shaped painters” masks. He considered fixing two of the others over
his ears, imagined those narrow bands of elastic crisscrossing the back of his head like the

straps of a shoulder holster, and burst out laughing. What else? Use the last mask to cover
one eye?
“If it gets me, it gets me,” he said, at the same time reminding himself that it wouldn’t hurt to be careful; a little dose of careful never hurt a man, old Lamar used to say.
Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward
appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was

now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were
patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked
capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line
of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track

of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb
hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon’s dreamcatcher. Henry didn’t think he
would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.

You aren’t really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you’ve seen how fast it
grows? Jonesy
looked
all right when he went by, but he
wasn’t
all right, and you know it.
You felt it. So… you aren’t really going on, are you?
“I think so,” Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he
spoke. “If it gets hold of me… why, I’ll just have to kill myself” Laughing like Stubb in
Moby-Dick
, Henry moved farther into the cabin.
4

With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in
front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least
four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a

V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the
doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med
school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical exarniner’s shot he had never quite

forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the buttocks.
Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only…
Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty till twelve. It was
now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was
lurking there.
Nah. Nothing but Jonesy’s Garand, leaning against the wall.
Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the
goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it
over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red Jump growing outside the

bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom,
forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment
he would see the straggly remains of the Beav’s long black hair or his Doc Martens, which

Beaver called his “lesbian solidarity statement”. The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk
him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred
expression of surprise was fuck me Freddy.

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