Dreamcatcher

14
“Dreamcatcher,” Beav says, and they understand each other as they sometimes do, as
they think (mistakenly, Henry will later realize) all friends do. Although they have never
spoken directly of the dream they all shared on their first hunting trip to Hole in the Wall,
they know Beaver believed that it had somehow been caused by Lamar’s dreamcatcher.

None of the others have tried to tell him differently, partly because they don’t want to challenge Beaver’s superstition about that harmless little string spiderweb and mostly because they don’t want to talk about that day at all. But now they understand that Beaver
has latched onto at least half a truth. A dreamcatcher has indeed bound them, but not Lamar’s.
Duddits is their dreamcatcher.

“Come on,” Beaver says quietly. “Come on, you guys, don’t be afraid. Grab hold of
him.”
And so they do, although they
are
afraid a little anyway; Beaver… too.
Jonesy takes Duddits’s right hand, which has become so clever with machinery out
there at Voke. Duddits looks surprised, then smiles and closes his fingers over Jonesy’s.
Pete takes Duddits’s left hand. Beaver and Henry crowd in and slip their arms around Duddits’s waist.

And so the five of them stand beneath one of Strawford Park’s vast old oaks, with a
lace of Junelight and shadows dappling their faces. They are like boys in a huddle before
some big game. The softball girls in their bright yellow shirts ignore them; so do the squirrels; so does the industrious wino, who is putting together a bottle of dinner one empty soda-can at a time.
Henry feels the light steal into him and understands that the light is his friends and

himself, they make it together, that lovely lace of light and green shadow, and of them all,
Duddits shines brightest. He is their hall; without him there is no bounce, there is no play.
He is their dreamcatcher, he makes them one. Henry’s heart fills up as it never will again
(and the void of that lack will grow and darken as the years pile up around him), and he
thinks:
Is it to find one lost retarded girl who probably matters to no one but her parents?

Was it to kill one brainless bully-boy, joining together to somehow make him drive off the
road, doing it, oh for God’s sake doing it in our sleep? Can that be all? Something so
great, something so wondrous, for such tiny matters? Can that be all?
Because if it is-he thinks this even in the ecstasy of their joining-then what is the use?
What can anything possibly
mean
?
Then that and all thought is swept away by the force of the experience. The face of

Josie Rinkenhauer rises in front of them, a shifting image that is composed first of four perceptions and memories… then a fifth, as Duddits understands who it is they’re making
all this fuss about.
When Duddits weighs in, the image grows a hundred times brighter, a hundred times
sharper. Henry hears someone-Jonesy-gasp, and he would gasp himself, if he had the
breath to do so. Because Duddits may be retarded in some ways, but not in
this

way; in this way, they are the poor stumbling enfeebled idiots and Duddits is the genius.
“Oh my
God,”
Henry hears Beaver cry, and in his voice there are equal parts ecstasy
and dismay.
Because Josie is standing here with them. Their differing perceptions of her age have
turned her into a child of about twelve, older than she was when they first encountered her

waiting outside The Retard Academy, surely younger than she must be now. They have settled on a sailor dress with an unsteady color that cycles from blue to pink to red to pink
to blue again. She is holding the great big plastic purse with BarbieKen peeking out the
top and her knees are splendidly scabby. Ladybug earrings appear and disappear below her lobes and Henry thinks
Oh yeah, I remember those
and then they steady into the mix.

She opens her mouth and says,
Hi, Duddie.
Looks around and says, Hi,
you guys.
Then, just like that, she’s gone. Just like that they are five instead of six, five big boys
standing under the old oak with June’s ancient light printing their faces and the excited cries of the softball girls in their cars. Pete is crying. So is Jonesy. The wino is gone-he’s
apparently collected enough for his bottle-but another man has come, a solemn man

dressed in a winter parka in spite of the day’s warmth. His left check is covered with red
stuff that could be a birthmark, except Henry knows it isn’t. It’s byrus. Owen Underhill has joined them in Strawford Park, is watching them, but that’s all right; no one sees this
visitor from the far side of the dreamcatcher except for Henry himself.
Duddits is smiling, but he looks puzzled at the tears on two of his friends” cheeks.
“Eye-ooo ine?” he asks Jonesy-

why you cryin?
“It doesn’t matter,” Jonesy says. When he slips his hand out of Duddits’s, the last of the connection breaks. Jonesy wipes at his face
and so does Pete. Beav utters a sobbing little laugh. “I think I swallowed my toothpick,”
he says.
“Nah, there it is, ya fag,” Henry says, and points to the grass, where the chewed-up
pick is lying.
“Fine Osie?” Duddits asks.
“Can you, Duds?” Henry asks.

Duddits walks toward the softball field, and they follow him in a respectful little cluster. Duds walks right past Owen but of course doesn’t see him; to Duds, Owen
Underhill doesn’t exist, at least not yet. He walks past the bleachers, past third base, past
the little snackbar. Then he stops.
Beside him, Pete gasps.
Duddits turns and looks at him, bright-eyed and interested, almost laughing. Pete is

holding out one finger, ticking it back and forth, looking past the moving finger at the ground. Henry follows his gaze and for a moment
thinks
he sees something-a bright flash of yellow on the grass, like paint-and then it’s gone. There’s only Pete, doing what he does
when he’s using his special remembering gift.
“Ooo you eee-a yine, Eete?” Duddits inquires in a fatherly way that almost makes
Henry laugh-
Do you see the line, Pete?

“Yeah,” Pete says, bug-eyed. “Fuck, yeah.” He looks up at the others. “She was
here,
you guys! She was
right here!”
They walk across Strawford Park, following a line only Duddits and Pete can see
while a man only Henry can see follows along behind them. At the north end of the park is
a rickety board fence with a sign on it: D.B. amp;A. P,.R. PROPERTY
KEEP OUT!
Kids

have been ignoring this sign for years, and it’s been years since the Derry, Bangor, and Aroostook actually ran freights along the spur through The Barrens, anyway. But they see
the train-tracks when they push through a break in the fence; they are down at the bottom
of the slope, gleaming rustily in the sun.
The slope is steep, a-riot with poison sumac and poison ivy, and halfway down they

find Josie Rinkenhauer’s big plastic purse. It is old now and sadly battered-mended in several places with friction tape-but Henry would know that purse anywhere…
Duddits pounces on it happily, yanks it open, peers inside. “ArbyEn!” he announces,

and pulls them out. Pete, meanwhile, has foraged on, bent over at the waist, grim as Sherlock Holmes on the trail of Professor Moriarty. And it is Pete Moore who actually finds her, looking wildly around at the others from a filthy concrete drainpipe that pokes
out of the slope and tangled foliage: “
She’s in here!”
Pete screams deliriously. Except for two flaring patches of color on his checks, his face is as pale as paper. “
Guys, I think she’s
in here!”

There is an ancient and incredibly complex system of drains and sewers beneath
Derry, a town which exists in what was once swampland shunned even by the Micmac
Indians who lived all around it. Most of the sewer-system was built in the thirties, with New Deal money, and most of it will collapse in 1985, during the big storm that will flood

the town and destroy the Derry Standpipe. Now the pipes still exist. This one slopes downward as it bores into the hill. josie Rinkenhauer ventured in, fell, then slid on fifty years” worth of dead leaves. She went down like a kid on a slide and lies at the bottom.
She has exhausted herself in her efforts to climb back up the greasy, crumbling incline; she
has eaten the two or three cookies she had in the pocket of her pants and for the last series

of endless hours-twelve, perhaps fourteen-has only lain in the reeking darkness, listening
to the faint hum of the outside world she cannot reach and waiting to die.
Now at the sound of Pete’s voice, she raises her head and calls with all of her remaining strength: “
Help mee! I can’t get out! Pleeease, help meee!”
It never occurs to them that they should go for an adult perhaps for Officer Nell, who

patrols this neighborhood. They are crazy to get her out; she has become their
responsibility. They won’t let Duddits in, they maintain at least that much sanity, but the
rest of them create a chain into the dark without so much as thirty seconds” discussion: Pete first, then the Beav, then Henry, then Jonesy, the heaviest, as their anchor.
In this fashion they crawl into the sewage-smelling dark (there’s the stench of

something else, too, something old and nasty beyond belief), and before he’s gotten ten feet Henry finds one of Josie’s sneakers in the muck. He puts it in a back pocket of his jeans without even thinking about it.
A few seconds later, Pete calls back over his shoulder: “Whoa, stop.”
The girl’s weeping and pleas for help are very loud now, and Pete can actually see her
sitting at the bottom of the leaf-lined slope. She’s peering up at them, her face a smudged

white circle in the gloom.
They stretch their chain farther, being as careful as they can despite their excitement.
Jonesy has got his feet braced against a huge chunk of fallen concrete. Josie reaches up…
gropes… cannot quite touch Pete’s outstretched hand. At last, when it seems they must admit defeat, she scrambles a little way up. Pete grabs her scratched and filthy wrist.
“
Yeah!”
he screams triumphantly. “Gotcha!”

They pull her carefully back up the pipe toward where Duddits is waiting, holding up
her purse in one hand and the two dolls in the other, shouting in to Josie not to worry, not
to worry because he’s got BarbieKen. There’s sunlight, fresh air, and as they help her out of the pipe-
15
There was no telephone in the Humvee-two different radios but no telephone.
Nevertheless, a phone rang loudly, shattering the vivid memory Henry had spun between

them and scaring the hell out of both of them.
Owen jerked like a man coming out of a deep sleep and the Humvee lost its tenuous
hold on the road, first skidding and then going into a slow and ponderous spin, like a dinosaur dancing.
“
Holy fuck-”
He tried to turn into the skid. The wheel only spun, turning with sick ease, like the

wheel of a sloop that has lost its rudder. The Humvee went backward down the single treacherous lane that was left on the southbound side of 1-95, and at last fetched up askew
in the snowbank on the median side, headlights opening a cone of snowy light back in the
direction they had come.
Brring! Brring! Brring!
Out of thin air.
It’s in my head,
Owen thought
. I’m projecting it, but I think it’s actually in my head,
more goddam telep
-

There was a pistol on the seat between them, a Glock. Henry picked it up, and when
he did, the ringing stopped. He put the muzzle against his ear with his entire fist wrapped
around the gunbutt.
Of course,
Owen thought.
Makes perfect sense. He got a call on the Glock, that’s all.
Happens all the time.
“Hello,” Henry said. Owen couldn’t hear the reply, but his companion’s tired face lit
in a grin. “Jonesy! I
knew
it was you!”
Who else would it be?
Owen wondered.
Oprah

Winfrey?
“
Where-” Listening. “Did he want Duddits, Jonesy? Is that why…” Listening again.
Then: “The
Standpipe?
Why… Jonesy?
Jonesy?”
Henry held the pistol against the side of his head a moment longer, then looked at it without
seeming to realize what it was.
He laid it on the seat again. The smile had gone.
“He hung up. I think the other one was coming back. Mr Gray, he calls him.”
“He’s alive, your buddy, but you don’t look happy about it.” It was Henry’s
thoughts

that weren’t happy about it, but there was no longer any need to say this. Happy at first,
the way you were always happy when someone you liked gave you a little ringy-dingy on
the old Glock, but not happy now. Why?
“He-
they-
are south of Derry. They stopped to eat at a truck stop called Dysart’s…
only Jonesy called it Dry Farts, like when we were kids. I don’t think he even knew it. He
sounded scared.”
“For himself? For us?”

Henry gave Owen a bleak look. “He says he’s afraid Mr Gray means to kill a State
Trooper and take his cruiser. I think that was mostly it.
Fuck.”
Henry struck his leg with his fist.
“But he’s alive.”
“Yeah,” Henry said with a marked lack of enthusiasm. “He’s immune. Duddits… you
understand about Duddits now?”
No. I doubt if you do, either, Henry…but maybe I understand enough.
Henry lapsed into thoughtspeak-it was easier.
Duddits changed us-being with Duddits

changed s. When Jonesy got hit by that car in Cambridge, it changed him again. The
brainwaves of people who undergo near-death experiences often change, I saw a
Lancet
article on that just last year. For Jonesy it must mean this Mr Gray can use him without
infecting him or wearing him out. And it’s also enabled him to keep from being subsumed,
at least so far.
“Subsumed?”
Co-opted. Gobbled up.
Then aloud: “Can you get us out of this snowbank?”
I think so.

“That’s what I was afraid of,” Henry said glumly. Owen turned to him, face greenish
in the glow of the dashboard instruments. “What the fuck is
wrong
with you?”
Christ,
don’t you understand? How many ways do I have to tell you
this? “He’s still
in
there!
Jonesy!”
For the third or fourth time since his and Henry’s run had started, Owen was forced to
leap over the gap between what his head knew and what his heart knew. “Oh. I see.” He

paused. “He’s alive. Thinking and alive. Making
phone calls,
even.” He paused again.
“Christ.”
Owen tried the Hummer in low forward and got about six inches before all four
wheels began to spin. He geared reverse and drove them backward into the snowbank-
crunch.
But the Hummer’s rear end came up a little on the packed snow, and that was what Owen wanted. When he went back to low, they’d come out of the snowbank like a

cork out of a bottle. But he paused a moment with the brake pressed under the sole of his
boot. The Hummer had a rough, powerful idle that shook the whole frame. Outside, the wind snarled and howled, sending snow-devils skating down the deserted turnpike.
“You know we have to do it, don’t you?” Owen said. “Always assuming we’re able
to catch him in the first place. Because whatever the specifics might be, the general plan is
almost certainly general contamination. And the math-”

“I can do the math,” Henry said. “Six billion people on Spaceship Earth, versus one
Jonesy.” “Yep, those are the numbers.” “Numbers can lie,” Henry said, but he spoke bleakly. Once the numbers got big enough, they didn’t,
couldn’t
lie. Six billion was a very big number.
Owen let off the brake and laid on the accelerator. The Humvee rolled forward-a

couple of feet, this time-started to spin, then caught hold and came roaring out of the snowbank like a dinosaur. Owen turned it south.
Tell me what happened after you pulled the kid out of the drainpipe.
Before Henry could do so, one of the radios under the dash crackled. The voice that
followed came through loud and clear-its owner might have been sitting there in the Hummer with them.
“Owen? You there, buck?”
Kurtz.
16

It took them almost an hour to get the first sixteen miles south of Blue Base (the
former
Blue Base), but Kurtz wasn’t worried. God would take care of them, he was quite sure of that.
Freddy Johnson was driving them (the happy quartet was packed into another snow-
equipped Humvee). Perlmutter was in the passenger seat, handcuffed to the doorhandle.
Cambry was likewise cuffed in back. Kurtz sat behind Freddy, Cambry behind Pearly.

Kurtz wondered if his two press-ganged laddie-bucks were conspiring in telepathic
fashion. Much good it would do them, if they were. Kurtz and Freddy both had their windows rolled down, although it rendered the Humvee colder than old Dad’s outhouse in
January; the heater was on high but simply couldn’t keep up. The open windows were a
necessity, however. Without them, the atmosphere of the Hummer would quickly become

uninhabitable, as sulfurous as a poisoned coalmine. Only the smell on top wasn’t sulfur but ether. Most of it seemed to be coming from Perlmutter. The man kept shifting in his
seat, sometimes groaning softly under his breath. Cambry was hot with Ripley and
growing like a wheat field after a spring rain, and he had that smell-Kurtz was getting it
even with his mask on. But Pearly was the chief offender, shifting in his seat, trying to fart

noiselessly (the one-cheek sneak, they had called such a maneuver back in the dim days of
Kurtz’s childhood), trying to pretend that suffocating smell wasn’t coming from him. Gene
Cambry was growing Ripley; Kurtz had an idea that Pearly, God love him, was growing
something else.
To the best of his ability, Kurtz concealed these thoughts behind a mantra of his own:
Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts, Davis and Roberts.

“Would you please stop that?” Cambry asked from Kurtz’s right. “You’re driving me
crazy.” “Me too,” Perlmutter said. He shifted in his seat and a low
pffft
sound escaped
him. The sound of a deflating rubber toy, perhaps.
“Oh, man, Pearly!” Freddy cried. He unrolled his window further, letting in a swirl of
snow and cold air. The Humvee skated and Kurtz braced himself, but then it steadied again. “Would you
please
quit with the fuckin anal perfume?”

“I beg your pardon,” Perlmutter said stiffly. “if you’re insinuating that I broke wind,
then I have to tell you-”I’m not insinuatin
anything,”
Freddy said. “I’m telling you to quit stinkin the place up or-”
Since there was no satisfactory way in which Freddy could complete this threat-for
the time being they needed two telepaths, a primary and a backup-Kurtz broke in
smoothly. “The story of Edward Davis and Franklin Roberts is an instructive one, because

it shows there’s really nothing new under the sun. This was in Kansas, back when Kansas
really
was
Kansas…”
Kurtz, a pretty decent storyteller, took them back to Kansas during the Korean
conflict. Ed Davis and Franklin Roberts had owned similar smallhold farms not far from

Emporia, and not far from the farm owned by Kurtz’s family (which had not quite been named Kurtz). Davis, never bolted together tightly in the first place, grew increasingly certain that his neighbor, the offensive Roberts, was out to steal his farm. Roberts was spreading tales about him in town, Ed Davis claimed. Roberts was poisoning his crops, Roberts was putting pressure on the Bank of Emporia to foreclose the Davis farm.

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