Dreamcatcher

this minute, but he could have it if he wanted it, if he-
“I don’t,” he said, and pushed the whole thing away.
There were a few sticks and twigs left on the ground. Pete fed them to the fire, then
looked at the woman. Her open eye had no menace in it now. It was dusty, the way a deer’s eyes got dusty after you shot it. All that blood around her… he supposed she’d hemorrhaged. Something inside had gone bust. Hell of a tough break. He supposed maybe

she’d known it was coming and had sat down in the road because she wanted to be sure of
being seen if someone came along. Someone had, but look how it had turned out. Poor bitch. Poor unlucky bitch.
Pete shifted to the left, slowly, until he could snag the tarp, then began to move forward again. It had been her makeshift sled; now it could be her makeshift shroud. “I’m

sorry,” he said. “Becky or whatever your name is, I’m really sorry. But I couldn’t have helped you by staying, you know; I’m not a doctor, I’m a fucking car salesman. You were-”
–
fucked from the start
was how he’d meant to finish, but the words dried up in his throat as he saw the back of her. That part hadn’t been visible until he got close, because

she had died facing the fire. The seat of her jeans was blown out, as if she’d finally finished farting fumes and had gotten down to the dynamite. Tom rags of denim fluttered
in the breeze. Also fluttering were fragments of the garments she had been wearing beneath, at least two pairs of longjohns-one heavy white cotton, the other pink silk. And
something was growing on both the legs of the jeans and the back of her parka. It looked

like mildew or some kind of fungus. Red-gold, or maybe that was just reflected firelight.
Something had come out of her. Something-
Yes. Something. And it’s watching me right now.
Pete looked into the woods. Nothing. The flood of animals had dried up. He was
alone.
Except I’m not.
No, he wasn’t. Something was out there, something that didn’t do well in the cold, something that preferred warm, wet places. Except-Except it got too big. And it ran out of food.

“Are you out there?”
Pete thought that calling out like that would make him feel foolish, but it didn’t.
What it made him feel was more frightened than ever.
His eye fastened on a sketchy track of that mildewy stuff. It stretched away from Becky-yeah, she was a Becky, all right, as Becky as Becky could be-and around the comer
of the lean-to. A moment later Pete heard a scaly scraping sound as something slithered on

the tin roof He craned up, following the sound with his eyes.
“Go away,” he whispered. “Go away and leave me alone. I… I’m fucked up.”
There was another brief slither as the thing moved farther up the tin. Yes, he was fucked up. Unfortunately, he was also food. The thing up there slithered again. Pete didn’t
think it would wait long, maybe
couldn’t
wait long, not up there; it would be like a gecko

in a refrigerator. What it was going to do was drop on him. And now he realized a terrible thing: he had gotten so fixated on the beer that he had forgotten the fucking guns.

His first impulse was to crawl deeper into the lean-to, but that might be a mistake, like running into a blind alley. He grabbed the jutting end of one of the fresh branches he’d just put on the fire instead. He didn’t take it out, not yet, just made a loose fist around it. The other end was burning briskly. “Come on,” he said to the tin roof “You like it hot?
I’ve got something hot for you. Come on and get it. Yum-fuckin-yum.”

Nothing. Not from the roof, anyway. There was a soft
flump
of snow falling from one
of the pines behind him as the lower branches shed their burden. Pete’s hand tightened on
his makeshift torch, half-lifting it from the fire. Then he let it settle back in a little swirl of sparks. “Come on, motherfucker. I’m hot, I’m tasty, and I’m waiting.” Nothing. But it was
up there. It couldn’t wait long, he was sure of it. Soon it would come.
3

Time passed. Pete wasn’t sure how much; his watch had given up entirely.
Sometimes his thoughts seemed to intensify, as they sometimes had when he and the
others were hanging with Duddits (although as they grew older and Duddits stayed the same, there had been less of that-it was as though their changing brains and bodies had lost the knack of picking up Duddits’s strange signals). This was like that, but not exactly

like that. Something new, maybe. Maybe even something to do with the lights in the sky.
He was aware that Beaver was dead and that something terrible might have happened to
Jonesy, but he didn’t know what.
Whatever had happened, Pete thought Henry knew about it, too, although not clearly;
Henry was deep inside his own head and he thought
Banbury Cross, Banbury Cross, ride
a cock horse to Banbury Cross.
The stick burned down further, closer to his hand, and Pete wondered what he’d do if

it burned down too far to be of use, if the thing up there could outwait him after all. And
then a new thought came to him, bright as day and red with panic. It filled his head and he
began to cry it aloud, masking the sound of the thing on the roof as it slithered quickly down the slope of the tin.
“Please don’t hurt us!
Ne nous blessez pas!
”
But they would, they would, because… what?

Because they are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give
them a New England Tel phone card so they can phone home, they are a
disease
. They are
cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do
you hear me, boys?
Pete didn’t know if
they

did, the boys to whom the voice spoke, but he did. They were coming, the boys were coming, the Crimson Pirates were coming and not all the
begging in the world would stop them. And still they begged, and Pete begged with them.
“Please don’t hurt us! Please!
S’il vous plait! Ne nous blessez pas! Ne nous faites pas
mal nous sommes sans defense!
“Weeping now. “
Please! For the love of God, we’re
helpless!”

In his mind he saw the hand, the dog-turd, the weeping nearly naked boy. And all the
time the thing on the roof was slithering, dying but not helpless, stupid but not entirely stupid, getting behind Pete while he screamed, while he lay on his side by the dead woman, listening as some apocalyptic slaughter began.
Cancer
, said the man with the white eyelashes.
“
Please!”
he screamed. “
Please, we’re helpless!”
But, lie or the truth, it was too late.
4

The snowmobile had passed Henry’s hiding place without slowing, and the sound of
it was now receding to the west. It was safe to come out, but Henry didn’t come out.
Couldn’t come out. The intelligence which had replaced Jonesy hadn’t sensed him, either
because it was distracted or because Jonesy had somehow-might somehow still be
But no. The idea that there could be
any
of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was
so much dreamwork.

And now that the thing was gone-receding, at least there were the voices. They filled
Henry’s head, making him feel half-mad with their babble, as Duddits’s crying had always
made him feel half-mad, at least until puberty had ended most of that crap. One of the voices belonged to a man who said something about a fungus
(dies easily unless it gets on a living host)
and then something about a New England Tel phone card and… chemotherapy? Yes,

a big hot radioactive shot. It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic. He had treated enough of them to judge, God knew.
The other voices were the ones which made him question his own sanity. He didn’t
know all of them, but he knew some: Walter Cronkite, Bugs Bunny, Jack Webb, Jimmy Carter, a woman he thought was Margaret Thatcher. Sometimes the voices spoke in
English, sometimes in French.
“
II n’y a pas d’infection ici,”

Henry said, and then began to weep, He was astounded
and exhilarated to find there were still tears in his heart, from which he thought all tears
and all laughter-true laughter-had fled. Tears of horror, tears of pity, tears that opened the
stony ground of self-regarding obsession and burst the rock inside. “There is no infection
here, please, oh God
stop
it, don’t, don’t,
nous sommes sans defense
,
NOUS SOMMES
SANS-
”

Then the human thunder began in the west and Henry put his hands to his head,
thinking that the screams and the pain in there would tear it apart. The bastards were-
5
The bastards were slaughtering them.
Pete sat by the fire, unmindful of the bellows of pain from his separated knee,
unaware that he was now holding the branch from the fire up beside his temple. The screams inside his head could not quite drown out the sound of the machine-guns in the

west, big machine-guns,.50s. Now the cries-please don’t hurt us, we are defenseless, there
is no infection-began to fade into panic; it wasn’t working, nothing
could
work, the deal was done.
Movement caught Pete’s eye and he turned just as the thing that had been on the roof

struck at him. He caught a blurred glimpse of a slender, weaselly body that seemed powered by a muscular tail rather than legs, and then its teeth sank into his ankle. He shrieked and yanked his good leg toward him so hard he almost clocked himself in the chin with his own knee. The thing came with it, clinging like a leech. Were these the things that were begging for mercy? Fuck them, if they were. Fuck them!

He reached for it with his right hand, the one he’d cut on the Bud bottle, without even
thinking about it; the torch he continued to hold up at the side of his head with his uninjured left. He seized something that felt like cool, fur-covered jelly. The thing let go of his ankle at once, and Pete caught just a glimpse of expressionless black eyes-shark’s eyes,

eagle eyes-before it sank the needle-nest of its teeth into his clutching hand, tearing it wide open along the perforation of the previous cut.
The agony was like the end of the world. The thing’s head if it had one-was buried in
the hand, ripping and tearing, digging deeper. Blood flew in splattery fans as Pete tried to
shake it off, stippling the snow and the sawdusty tarp and the dead woman’s parka.

Droplets flew into the fire and hissed like fat in a hot skillet. Now the thing was making a
ferocious chattering sound. Its tail, as thick as a moray eel’s body, wrapped around Pete’s
thrashing arm, endeavoring to keep it still.
Pete made no conscious decision to use the torch, because he’d forgotten he had it;

his only thought was to tear the terrible biting thing off his right hand with his left. At first, when it caught fire and flared up, as hot and bright as a roll of newspaper, he didn’t understand what was happening. Then he screamed, partly in fresh pain and partly in triumph. He bolted to his feet-for the time being, at least, his bulging knee did not hurt at

all-and swung his burdened right arm at one of the lean-to’s support posts in a great sweeping roundhouse. There was a crunch and the chattering sound was replaced by
muffled squealing. For one endless moment the knot of teeth planted in his hand burrowed
in deeper than ever. Then they loosened and the burning creature fell free and landed on

the frozen ground. Pete stamped on it, felt it writhe under his heel, and was filled with one moment of pure and savage triumph before his outraged knee gave way entirely and his leg bent inside out, the tendons torn loose.
He fell heavily on his side, face to face with Becky’s lethal hitchhiker, unaware that

the lean-to was beginning to shift, the pole he’d struck with his arm bowing slowly outward. For a moment the weasel-thing’s rudiment of a face was three inches from Pete’s
own. Its burning body flapped against his jacket. Its black eyes boiled. It had nothing so
sophisticated as a mouth, but when the bulge in the top of its body unhinged, revealing its
teeth, Pete screamed at it “
No! No! No!

”-and batted it into the fire, where it writhed and made its frantic, monkeylike chattering.
His left foot swung in a short arc as he shoved the thing farther into the fire. The tip
of his boot struck the tilting pole, which had just decided to hold the lean-to up a little longer. This was one outrage too many and the pole snapped, dropping half of the tin roof.

A second or two later, the other pole snapped as well. The rest of the roof fell into the fire, sending out a whirling squirt of sparks.
For a moment that was all. Then the fallen sheet of rusty tin began to heave itself up
and down, as if it were breathing. A moment later, Pete crawled out from under. His eyes

were glazed. His skin was pasty with shock. The left cuff of his jacket was on fire. He stared at this for a moment with his legs still under the fallen roof from the knees down,
then raised his arm in front of his face, drew in a deep breath, and blew out the flames rising from his jacket like a giant birthday candle.
Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy… or

whatever was left of him. The cloud. Pete didn’t think it would show him any mercy. This
was no day for mercy in the Jefferson Tract. He should hide. But the voice advising him of
that was distant, unimportant. One thing was good: he had an idea he had finally quit drinking.
He raised his savaged right hand in front of his face. One finger was gone,
presumably down the thing’s gullet. Two others lay in a swoon of severed tendons. He saw

that reddish-gold stuff already growing along the deepest slashes-the ones the monster had
inflicted and the one he’d done himself, crawling back into the Scout after the beer. He could feel a kind of fizzy sensation as whatever that stuff was fed on his flesh and blood.
Pete suddenly felt that he couldn’t die soon enough.
The sound of the machine-guns in the west had stopped, but it wasn’t over, not by a

long shot. And as if the thought had summoned it, a huge explosion hammered the day, blotting out the wasp-whine of the oncoming snowmobile and everything else. Everything
but the busy fizz in his hand, that was. In his hand, the crud was dining on him the way the
cancer that had killed his father had dined on the old man’s stomach and lungs.
Pete ran his tongue over his teeth, felt gaps where some of them had fallen out.
He closed his eyes and waited.
Part Two
GRAYBOYS

A ghost comes out of the unconscious mind
To grope my sill: It moans to be reborn!
The figure at my back is not my friend;
The hand upon my shoulder turns to horn
Theodore Roethke
Chapter Ten
KURTZ AND UNDERHILL
1
The only thing in the cps area was a little beer n deer store called Gosselin’s Country
Market. Kurtz’s cleaners began arriving there shortly after the snow began to fall. By the

time Kurtz himself got there, at ten-thirty, support was starting to appear. They were getting a grip on the situation.
The store was designated Blue Base. The barn, the adjacent stable (dilapidated but
still standing), and the corral had been designated Blue Holding. The first detainees had already been deposited there.
Archie Perlmutter, Kurtz’s new aide-de-camp (his old one, Calvert, had died of a

heart attack not two weeks before-goddam bad timing), had a clipboard with a dozen names on it. Perlmutter had arrived with both a laptop computer and a Palm Pilot only to
discover that electronic gear was currently FUBAR in the Jefferson Tract: tucked up beyond all recognition. The top two names on the clipboard were Gosselins: the old man
who ran the store and his wife.
“More on the way,” Perlmutter said.

Kurtz gave the names on Pearly’s clipboard a cursory look, then handed it back. Big
recreational vehicles were being parked behind them; semi trailers were being jacked and
leveled; light poles were going up. When night came, this place would be as well-lighted
as Yankee Stadium at World Series time.
“We missed two guys by this much,” Perlmutter said, and held up his right hand with
the thumb and forefinger a quarter of an inch apart. “They came in for supplies.

Principally beer and hot dogs.” Perlmutter’s face was pale, with a wild pink rose blooming
in each cheek. He had to raise his voice against the steadily increasing noise level.
Helicopters were coming in two by two and landing on the blacktop lane that eventually
made its way out to Interstate 95, where you could go north toward one dull town (Presque
Isle) or south toward any number of other dull towns (Bangor and Derry, for starters). The

helicopters were fine, as long as their pilots didn’t have to depend on all the sophisticated
navigational equipment, which was also FUBAR.
“Did those fellows go in or out?” Kurtz asked.
“Back in,” Perlmutter said. He could not quite bring himself to meet Kurtz’s eyes; he
looked everywhere but. “There’s a woods road, Gosselin says it’s called the Deep Cut Road. It’s not on the standard maps, but I have a Diamond International Paper survey map
that shows”

“That’s fine. Either they’ll come back out or stay in. Either way, it’s fine.” More helicopters, some unshipping their.50s now that they were safely away from the wrong
eyes. This could end up being as big as Desert Storm. Maybe bigger.
“You understand your mission here, Pearly, don’t you?” Perlmutter most definitely
did. He was new, he wanted to make an impression, he was almost jumping up and down.
Like a spaniel that smells lunch

, Kurtz thought. And he did it all without making eye contact. “Sir, my job is triune in nature.”
Triune
, Kurtz thought.
Triune, how about that?
“I am to a, intercept, b, turn intercepted persons over to medical, and c, contain and segregate pending further orders.
“‘Exactly. That’s-”But sir, beg your pardon, sit, but we don’t have any doctors here yet, only a few corpsmen, and-”

“Shut up,” Kurtz said. He didn’t speak loudly, but half a dozen men in unmarked
green coveralls (they were all wearing unmarked green coveralls, including Kurtz himself)
hesitated as they went double-timing on their various errands. They glanced toward where
Kurtz and Perlmutter were standing, then got moving again. Triple-time, As for
Perlmutter, the roses in his cheeks died at once. He stepped back, putting another foot between himself and Kurtz.

“If you ever interrupt me again, Pearly, I’ll knock you down. Interrupt me a second
time and I’ll put you in the hospital. Do you understand?”
With what was clearly a tremendous effort, Perlmutter brought his gaze up to Kurtz’s
face. To Kurtz’s eyes. He snapped off a salute so crisp it almost crackled with static electricity. “Sir, yes sir!”
“You can quit that too, you know better.” And when Perhnutter’s gaze began to drop:
“Look at me when I’m talking to you, laddie.”

Very reluctantly, Perlmutter did so. His complexion was now leaden. Although the
noise of the helicopters lined up along the road was cacophonous, it somehow seemed very quiet right here, as if Kurtz traveled in his own weird air-pocket. Perlmutter was convinced that everyone was watching them and that they could all see how terrified he was. Some of it was his new boss’s eyes-the cataclysmic absence in those eyes, as if there

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