Dreamcatcher

a dust of white on the aromatic orange-brown needles. There Henry fell on his knees, sobbing with terror and putting his gloved hands to his mouth to stifle the sound, because
what if it heard? It was Mr Gray, the cloud was Mr Gray, and what if it heard?
He crawled behind the moss-girdled trunk of a spruce tree, clutched it, then peered around it through the tumbled screen of his sweaty hair. He saw a spark of light in the dark

afternoon. It jittered, wavered, and rounded. It became a headlight.
Henry began to moan helplessly as the blackness neared. It seemed to hover over his
mind like an eclipse, obliterating thought, replacing it with terrible images: milk on his father’s chin, panic in Barry Newman’s eyes, scrawny bodies and staring eyes behind barbed wire, flayed women and hanged men. For a moment his understanding of the world

seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that
everything
was infected… or could be.
Everything
. His reasons for contemplating suicide were paltry in the face of this oncoming thing.
He pressed his mouth against the tree to keep from screaming, felt his lips tattoo a kiss into the springy moss all the way down to where it was moist and tasted of bark. In
that moment the Arctic Cat flashed past and Henry recognized the figure which straddled

it, the person who was generating the redblack cloud which now filled Henry’s head like a
dry fever.
He bit into the moss, screamed against the tree, inhaled fragments of moss without being aware of it, and screamed again. Then he simply knelt there, holding onto the tree
and shuddering, as the sound of the Arctic Cat began to diminish into the west. He was still there when it had died away to a troublesome whine again; still there when it faded
away entirely.

Pete’s back there somewhere
, he thought.
It’ll come to Pete, and to the woman.
Henry stumbled back to the road, unaware that his nose had begun bleeding again,
unaware that he was crying. He began moving toward Hole in the Wall once more,
although now the best pace he could manage was a shambling limp. But maybe that was
all right, because it was all over back at camp.

Whatever the horrible thing was that he had been sensing, it had happened. One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.
Chapter Seven
JONESY AND THE BEAV
1
Beaver said it again. No Beaver-isms now; just that bare Anglo-Saxon syllable you
came to when you were up against the wall and had no other way to express the horror you saw. “Ah,
fuck
, man-
fuck
.”

However much pain McCarthy had been in, he had taken time to snap on both of the
switches just inside the bathroom door, lighting the fluorescent bars on either side of the
medicine chest mirror and the overhead fluorescent ring. These threw a bright, even glare
that gave the bathroom the feel of a crime-scene photograph… and yet there was a kind of

stealthy surrealism, too, because the light wasn’t quite steady; there was just enough flicker for you to know the power was coming from a genny and not through a line maintained by Derry and Bangor Hydroelectric.
The tile on the floor was baby blue. There were only spots and splatters of blood on it
near the door, but as they approached the toilet next to the tub, the splotches ran together

and became a red snake. Scarlet capillaries had spread off from this. The tiles were tattooed with the footprints of their boots, which neither Jonesy nor Beaver had taken off.
On the blue vinyl shower curtain were four blurred fingerprints, and Jonesy thought:
He
must have reached out and grabbed at the curtain to keep from falling when he turned to
sit.
Yes, but that wasn’t the awful part. The awful part was what Jonesy saw in his mind’s

eye: McCarthy scuttling across the baby-blue tiles with one hand behind him, clutching himself, trying to hold something in.
“Ah,
fuck!
” Beaver said again. Almost sobbing. “I don’t want to see this, Jonesy-man, I
can’t
see this.”
“We’ve got to.” He heard himself speaking as if from a great distance. “We can do
this, Beav. If we could face up to Richie Grenadeau and his friends that time, we can face
up to this.”
“I dunno, man, I dunno…”

Jonesy didn’t know, either-not really-but he reached out and took Beaver’s hand.
Beav’s fingers closed over his with panicky tightness and together they went a step deeper
into the bathroom. Jonesy tried to avoid the blood, but it was hard; there was blood everywhere. And not all of it was blood.
“Jonesy,” Beaver said in a dry near-whisper. “Do you see that crud on the shower
curtain?”

“Yeah.” Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish-golden
mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the
narrow angles of the grout.
“What is it?” “I don’t know,” Jonesy said. “Same shit he had on his face, I guess.
Shut up a minute.” Then: “Mr McCarthy?… Rick?”
McCarthy, sitting there on the toilet, made no response. He had for some reason put

his orange cap back on-the bill stuck off at a crooked, slightly drunken angle. He was otherwise naked. His chin was down on his breastbone, in a parody of deep thought (or maybe it
wasn’t
a parody, who knew?). His eyes were mostly closed. His hands were clasped pritrdy together over his pubic thatch. Blood ran down the side of the toilet in a
big sloppy paintstroke, but there was no blood on McCarthy himself, at least not as far as

Jonesy could see.
One thing he
could
see: the skin of McCarthy’s stomach hung in two slack dewlaps.
The look of it reminded Jonesy of something, and after a moment or two it came to him. It
was how Carla’s stomach had looked after she had delivered each of their four children.
Above McCarthy’s hip, where there was a little lovehandle (and some give to the flesh),

the skin was only red. Across the belly, however, it had split open in tiny weals. If McCarthy had been pregnant, it must have been with some sort of parasite, a tapeworm or
a hookworm or something like that. Only there was stuff growing in his spilled blood, and
what had he said as he lay there in Jonesy’s bed with the blankets pulled up to his chin?
Behold, I stand at the door and knock
. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never

answered. In fact, he wished he had shot him. Yes. He saw more clearly now. He was hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the completely horrified mind, and in that state wished he had put a bullet in McCarthy before he saw the orange cap and the orange
flagman’s vest. It couldn’t have hurt and it might have helped.
“Stand at the door and knock on my ass,” Jonesy muttered.
“Jonesy? Is he still alive?”
“I don’t know.”

Jonesy took another step forward and felt Beaver’s fingers slide out of his; the Beav
had apparently come as close to McCarthy as he was able.
“Rick?” Jonesy asked in a hushed voice. A don’t-wake-the-baby voice. A viewing-
the-corpse voice. “Rick, are you-”
There was a loud, dank fart from beneath the man on the toilet, and the room
immediately filled with an eyewatering aroma of excrement and airplane glue. Jonesy

thought it a wonder that the shower curtain didn’t melt.
From the bowl there came a splash. Not the plop of a turd dropping-at least Jonesy
didn’t think so. It sounded more like a fish jumping in a pond.
“Christ almighty, the
stink
of it! “Beaver cried. He had the heel of his hand over his
mouth and nose and his words were muffled. “But if he can fart, he must be alive. Huh,
Jonesy? He must still be-”
“Hush,” Jonesy said in a quiet voice. He was astonished at its steadiness. “Just hush,

okay?” And the Beav hushed.
Jonesy leaned in close. He could see everything: the small stipple of blood in McCarthy’s right eyebrow, the red growth on his cheek, the blood on the blue plastic curtain, the joke sign-LAMAR’s THINKIN PLACE-that had hung in here when the toilet
was still of the chemical variety and the shower had to be pumped up before it could be
used. He saw the little gelid gleam from between McCarthy’s eyelids and the cracks in his

lips, which looked purple and liverish in this light. He could smell the noxious aroma of
the passed gas and could almost see that, too, rising in filthy dark yellow streamers, like
mustard gas.
“McCarthy? Rick? Can you hear me?”
He snapped his fingers in front of those nearly closed eyes. Nothing. He licked a spot
on the back of his wrist and held it first in front of McCarthy’s nostrils, then in front of his lips. Nothing.
“He’s dead, Beav,” he said, drawing back.

“Bullshit he is,” Beaver replied. His voice was ragged, absurdly offended, as if
McCarthy had violated all the rules of hospitality. “He just dropped a clinker, man, I heard
it. “‘I don’t think that was-”
Beav stepped past him, bumping Jonesy’s bad hip against the sin k hard enough to
hurt. “That’s enough, fella!” Beaver cried. He grabbed McCarthy’s round freckled
unmuscled shoulder and shook it. “Snap out of it! Snap-”

McCarthy listed slowly tubward and Jonesy had a moment when he thought Beaver
had been right after all, the guy was still alive, alive and trying to get up. Then McCarthy
fell off the throne and into the tub, pushing the shower curtain ahead of him in a filmy blue billow. The orange hat fell off. There was a bony crack as his skull hit the porcelain
and then Jonesy and Beaver were screaming and clutching each other, the sound of their

horror deafening in the little tile-lined room. McCarthy’s ass was a lopsided full moon with a giant bloody crater in its center, the site of some terrible impact, it seemed. Jonesy
saw it for only a second before McCarthy collapsed facedown into the tub and the curtain
floated back into place, hiding him, but in that second it seemed to Jonesy that the hole was a foot across. Could that be? A
foot?
Surely not.

In the toilet bowl, something splashed again, hard enough to spatter droplets of
bloody water up onto the ring, which was also blue. Beaver started to lean forward to look
in, and Jonesy slammed the lid down on the ring without even thinking about it. “No,” he
said.
“No?”
“No.”
Beaver tried to get a toothpick out of the front pocket of his overalls, came up with
half a dozen, and dropped them on the floor. They rolled across the bloody blue tiles like

jackstraws. The Beav looked at them, then looked up at Jonesy. There were tears standing
in his eyes. “Like Duddits, man,” he said.
“What in God’s name are you talking about?”
“Don’t you remember?
He
was almost naked, too. Fuckers snatched off his shirt and
his pants, didn’t leave him nothing but his underpants. But we saved him.” Beaver nodded vigorously, as if Jonesy-or some deep and doubtful part of himself-had scoffed at this idea.

Jonesy scoffed at nothing, although McCarthy didn’t remind him in the slightest of
Duddits. He kept seeing McCarthy going over sideways into the tub, his orange hat falling
off, the fatty deposits on his chest (
the tits of easy living
, Henry called them whenever he saw a pair underneath some guy’s polo shirt) wobbling. And then his ass turning up to the
light-that harsh fluorescent light that kept no secrets but blabbed everything in a droning

monotone. That perfect white man’s ass, hairless, just starting to turn flabby and settle down on the backs of the thighs; he had seen a thousand like it in the various locker rooms
where he had dressed and showered, was developing one himself (or had been until the guy had run him over, changing the physical configuration of his backside perhaps

forever), only he had never seen one like McCarthy’s was now, one that looked like something inside had fired a flare or a shotgun shell in order to-to what?
There was another hollow splash from the toilet. The Ed bumped up. It was as good
an answer as any. In order to get out, of course.
In order to get out.
“Sit on that,” Jonesy told Beaver.
“
Huh?
”
“
Sit
on it!” Jonesy almost shouted it this time and Beaver sat down on the closed Ed

in a hurry, looking startled. In the no-secrets, flat-toned light of the fluorescents, Beaver’s skin looked as white as freshly turned clay and every fleck of black stubble was a mole.
His lips were purple. Above his head was the old joke sign: LAMAR’s THINKIN
PLACE. Beav’s blue eyes were wide and terrified.
“I’m sittin, Jonesy-see?”Yeah. I’m sorry, Beav. But you just sit there, all right?

Whatever he had inside him, it’s trapped. Got nowhere to go but the septic tank. I’ll be back-”Where you goin? Cause I don’t want you to leave me sittin in the shithouse next to
a dead man, Jonesy. If we both run-”
“We’re not running,” Jonesy said grimly. “This is our place, and we’re not running.”
Which sounded noble but left out at least one aspect of the situation: he was mostly just
afraid the thing that was now in the toilet might be able to run faster than they could. Or

squiggle
faster. Or something. Clips from a hundred horror films-
Parasite
,
Alien
,
They
Came from Within-
ran through his mind at super-speed. Carla wouldn’t go to the movies
with him when one of those was playing, and she made him go downstairs and use the TV
in his study when he brought them home on tape. But one of those movies-something he’d

seen in one of them-just might save their lives. Jonesy glanced at the reddish-gold mildewy stuff growing on McCarthy’s bloody handprint. Save their lives from the thing in
the toilet, anyway. The mildewy stuff… who in God’s name knew?
The thing in the bowl leaped again, thudding the underside of the lid, but Beaver had
no trouble holding the lid down. That was good. Maybe whatever it was would drown in

there, although Jonesy didn’t see how they could count on that; it had been living inside
McCarthy, hadn’t it? It had been living inside old Mr Behold-I-stand-at-the-door-and-
knock for quite some time, maybe the whole four days he’d been lost in the woods. It had

slowed the growth of McCarthy’s beard, it seemed, and caused a few of his teeth to fall out; it had also caused McCarthy to pass gas that probably couldn’t have gone ignored even in the politest of polite society-farts like poison gas, to be perfectly blunt about it-but the thing itself had apparently been fine… lively… growing…
Jonesy had a sudden vivid image of a wriggling white tapeworm emerging from a
pile of raw meat. His gorge rose with a liquid chugging sound.

“Jonesy?” Beaver started to get up. He looked more alarmed than ever.
“Beaver, sit back down!”
Beaver did, just in time. The thing in the toilet leaped and hit the underside of the lid
with a hard, hollow rap.
Behold, I stand at the door and knock
.
“Remember that
Lethal Weapon
movie where Mel Gibson’s partner didn’t dare to get
off the crapper?” Beaver said. He smiled, but his voice was dry and his eyes were terrified.
“This is like that, isn’t it?”

“No,” Jonesy said, “because nothing’s going to blow up. Besides, I’m not Mel
Gibson and you’re too fucking white to be Danny Glover. Listen, Beav. I’m going out to
the shed-”
“Huh-uh, no way, don’t leave me here all by myself-”
“Shut up and listen. There’s friction tape out there, isn’t there?”
“Yeah, hangin on a nail, at least I think-”
“Hanging on a nail, that’s right. Near the paint-cans, I think. A big fat roll of it. I’m

going to get that, then come back and tape the Ed down. Then-”
It leaped again, furiously, as if it could hear and understand.
Well, how do we know it
can’t?
Jonesy thought. When it hit the bottom of the lid with a hard, vicious thud, the Beav winced.
“Then we’re getting out of here,” Jonesy finished.
“On the Cat?”
Jonesy nodded, although he had in fact forgotten all about the snowmobile. “Yeah, on
the Cat. And we’ll hook up with Henry and Pete-‘The Beav was shaking his head.

“Quarantine, that’s what the guy in the helicopter said. That must be why they haven’t come back yet, don’t you think? They musta got held out by the-”
Thud!
Beaver winced. So did Jonesy.
“-by the quarantine.”
“That could be,” Jonesy said. “But listen, Beav-I’d rather be quarantined with Pete and Henry than here with… than here, wouldn’t you?”
“Let’s just flush it down,” Beaver said. “How about that?” Jonesy shook his head.
“Why not?”

“Because I saw the hole it made getting out,” Jonesy said, “and so did you. I don’t know what it is, but we’re not going to get rid of it just by pushing a handle. It’s too big.”
“Fuck.” Beaver slammed the heel of his hand against his forehead.
Jonesy nodded.
“All right, Jonesy. Go get the tape.”
In the doorway, Jonesy paused and looked back. “And Beaver…?”
The Beav raised his eyebrows.
“Sit tight, buddy-”

Beaver started to giggle. So did Jonesy. They looked at each other, Jonesy in the doorway and the Beav sitting on the closed toilet seat, snorting laughter. Then Jonesy burned across the big central room (still giggling-sit tight, the more he thought about it the
funnier it seemed) toward the kitchen door. He felt hot and feverish, both horrified and hilarious. Sit tight. Jesus-Christ-Bananas.
2

Beav could hear Jonesy giggling all the way across the room, still giggling when he
went out the door. In spite of everything, Beav was glad to hear that sound. It had already
been a bad year for Jonesy, getting run over the way he had-for awhile there at first they’d
all thought he was going to step out, and that was awful, poor old Jonesy wasn’t yet thirty-

eight. Bad year for Pete, who’d been drinking too much, a bad year for Henry, who sometimes got a spooky absence about him that Beav didn’t understand and didn’t like…
and now he guessed you could say it had been a bad year for Beaver Clarendon, as well.
Of course this was only one day in three hundred and sixty-five, but you just didn’t get up

in the morning thinking that by afternoon there’d be a dead guy laying naked in the tub and you’d be sitting on a closed toilet seat in order to keep something you hadn’t even seen from-
“Nope,” Beaver said. “Not going there, okay? Just not going there.”
And he didn’t have to. Jonesy would be back with the friction tape in a minute or two, three minutes tops. The question was where
did
he want to go until Jonesy returned?

Where could he go and feel good?
Duddits, that was where. Thinking about Duddits always made him feel good. And
Roberta, thinking about her was good, too. Undoubtedly.
Beav smiled, remembering the little woman in the yellow dress who’d been standing
at the end of her walk on Maple Lane that day. The smile widened as he remembered how
she’d caught sight of them. She had called her boy that same thing. She had called him.
3
“
Duddits!

” she cries, a little graying wren of a woman in a flowered print dress, then
runs up the sidewalk toward them.
Duddits has been walking contentedly with his new friends, chattering away six licks
to the minute, holding his Scooby-Doo lunchbox in his left hand and Jonesy’s hand in his
right, swinging it cheerfully back and forth. His gabble seems to consist almost entirely of
open vowel-sounds. The thing which amazes Beaver the most about it is how much of it
he understands.

Now, catching sight of the graying birdie-woman, Duddits lets go of Jonesy’s hand
and runs toward her, both of them running, and it reminds Beaver of some musical about a
bunch of singers, the Von Cripps or Von Crapps or something like that. “Ah-mee, Ah-mee!” Duddits shouts exuberantly-
Mommy! Mommy!
“Where have you been? Where have you been, you bad boy, you bad old Duddits!”
They come together and Duddits is so much bigger-two or three inches taller, too-that

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