Dreamcatcher

without idealism… and Kurtz thought Owen had bought it all, with hardly a single dicker.
Because in the end most people believed what they wanted to believe. John Dillinger had also been a survivor, the wiliest of the thirties desperadoes, but he had gone to the Biograph Theater with Anna Sage just the same.
Manhattan Melodrama

had been the show, and when it was over, the feds had shot Dillinger down in the alley beside the theater like the dog he was. Anna Sage had also believed what she wanted to believe, but
they deported her ass back to Poland just the same.
No one was going to leave Gosselin’s Market tomorrow except for his picked cadre-
the twelve men and two women who made up Imperial Valley. Owen Underhill would not

be among them, although he could have been. Until Owen had put the grayboys on the common channel, Kurtz had been sure he would be. But things changed. So Buddha had
said, and on that one, at least, the old chink heathen had spoken true.
“You let me down, buck,” Kurtz said. He had lowered his mask to smoke, and it

bobbed against his grizzled throat as he spoke. “You let me down.” Kurtz had let Owen Underhill get away with letting him down once. But twice?
“Never,” Kurtz said. “Never in life.”
Chapter Fourteen
GOING SOUTH
1
Mr Gray ran the snowmobile down into a ravine which held a small frozen creek. He
drove north along this for the remaining mile to 1-95. Two or three hundred yards from the
lights of the army vehicles (there were only a few now, moving slowly in the thickening

snow), he stopped long enough to consult the part of Jonesy’s mind that he-
it-
could get at.
There were files and files of stuff that wouldn’t fit into Jonesy’s little office stronghold, and Mr Gray found what he was looking for easily enough. There was no switch to turn
off the Arctic Cat’s headlight. Mr Gray swung Jonesy’s legs off the snowmobile, looked
for a rock, picked it up with Jonesy’s right hand, and smashed the headlight dark. Then he

remounted and drove on. The Cat’s fuel was almost gone, but that was all right; the vehicle had served its purpose.
The pipe which carried the creek beneath the turnpike was big enough for the
snowmobile, but not for the snowmobile and its rider. Mr Gray dismounted again.
Standing beside the snowmobile, he revved the throttle and sent the machine bumping and

yawing into the pipe. It went no more than ten feet before stopping, but that was far enough to keep it from being seen from the air if the snow lightened, allowing low-level
recon.
Mr Gray set Jonesy to climbing up the turnpike embankment. He stopped just shy of
the guardrails and lay down on his back. Here he was temporarily protected from the worst of the wind. The climb had released a last little cache of endorphins, and Jonesy felt

his kidnapper sampling them, enjoying them the way Jonesy himself might have enjoyed a
cocktail, or a hot drink after watching a football game on a brisk October afternoon.
He realized, with no surprise, that he hated Mr Gray.
Then Mr Gray as an entity-something that could actually be hated-was gone again,
replaced by the cloud Jonesy had first experienced back in the cabin when the creature’s
head had exploded. It was going out, as it had gone out in search of Emil Brodsky. It had

needed Dawg because the information about how to get the snowmobile started hadn’t
been in Jonesy’s files. Now it needed something else. A ride was the logical assumption.
And what was left here? What was left guarding the office where the last shred of Jonesy cowered-Jonesy who had been turned out of his own body like lint out of a pocket?
The cloud, of course; the stuff Jonesy had breathed in. Stuff that should have killed him
but had for some reason not done so.

The cloud couldn’t think, not the way Mr Gray could. The man of the house (who
was now Mr Gray instead of Mr Jones) had departed, leaving the place under the control
of the thermostats, the refrigerator, the stove. And, in case of trouble, the smoke detector
and the burglar alarm, which automatically dialed the police.

Still, with Mr Gray gone, he might be able to get out of the office. Not to regain control; if he tried that, the redblack cloud would report him and Mr Gray would return from his scouting expedition at once. Jonesy would almost certainly be seized before he could retreat to the safety of the Tracker Brothers office with its bulletin board and its dusty floor and its one dirt-crusted window on the world… only there were four crescent-shaped clean patches in that dirt, weren’t there? Patches where four boys had once leaned

their foreheads, hoping to see the picture that was pinned to the bulletin board now: Tina
Jean Schlossinger with her skirt up.
No, seizing control was far beyond his ability and he’d better accept that, bitter as it
was.
But he might be able to get to his files.
Was there any reason to risk it? Any advantage? There might be, if he knew what Mr
Gray wanted. Beyond a ride, that was. And speaking of that, a ride where?
The answer was unexpected because it came in Duddits’s voice:

Ow. Ih-her Ay onna
oh ow.
Mr Gray wanna go south.
Jonesy stepped back from his dirty window on the world. There wasn’t much to be
seen out there just now, anyway; snow and dark and shadowy trees. This morning’s snow
had been the appetizer; here was the main course.
Mr Gray wanna go south.
How far? And why? What was the big picture?
On these subjects Duddits was silent.
Jonesy turned and was surprised to see that the route-map and the picture of the girl

were no longer on the bulletin board. Where they had been were four color snapshots of
four boys. Each had the same background, Derryjunior High, and the same caption
beneath: SCHOOL DAYS, 1978. Jonesy himself on the far left, face split in a trusting ear-
to-ear grin that now broke his heart. Beav next to him, the Beav’s grin revealing the missing tooth in front, victim of a skating fall, which had been replaced by a false one a

year or so later… before high school, anyway. Pete, with his broad, olive-tinted face and
his shamefully short hair, mandated by his father, who said he hadn’t fought in Korea so
his kid could look like a hippie. And Henry on the end, Henry in his thick glasses that made Jonesy think of Danny Dunn, Boy Detective, star of the mysteries Jonesy had read
as a kid.
Beaver, Pete, Henry. How he had loved them, and how unfairly sudden the severing

of their long friendship had been. No, it wasn’t a bit fair-
All at once the picture of Beaver Clarendon came alive, scaring the hell out of
Jonesy. Beav’s eyes widened and he spoke in a low voice. “His head was off, remember?
It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. What a fuckarow! I mean, Jesus-
Christ-bananas.”
Oh my God,
Jonesy thought, as it came back to him-the one thing about that first

hunting trip to Hole in the Wall that he had forgotten… or suppressed. Had all of them suppressed it? Maybe so.
Probably so.
Because over the years since, they had talked about everything in their childhoods, all those shared memories… except that one.
His head was qff
…
his eyes were full of mud.
Something had happened to them then, something that had to do with what was happening to him now.
If only I knew what it was,
Jonesy thought.
If I only knew.
2

Andy Janas had lost the other three trucks in his little squadron had gotten ahead of
them because they weren’t used to driving in shit like this and he was. He had grown up in
northern Minnesota, and you better
believe
he was used to it. He was by himself in one of Chevrolet’s finer Army vehicles, a modified four-wheel-drive pickup, and he had the four-wheel drive engaged tonight. His father hadn’t raised any fools.

Still, the turnpike was mostly clear; a couple of Army plows had gone by an hour or
so ago (he would be catching up to them soon, he guessed, and when he did he would cut
speed and fall in behind them like a good boy), and no more than two or three inches had
piled up on the concrete since then. The real problem was the wind, which lifted the fluff
and turned the road into a ghost. You had the reflectors to guide you, though. Keeping the

reflectors in sight was the trick those other gomers didn’t understand… or maybe with the
convoy trucks and the Humvees, the headlights were set too high to pick the reflectors up
properly. And when the wind really gusted, even the reflectors disappeared; the goddam world went totally white and you had to take your foot off the go-pedal until the air stilled
again and just try to stay on course in the meantime. He would be all right, and if anything

happened, he was in radio contact and more plows would be coming up behind, keeping
the southbound barrel of the turnpike open all the way from Presque Isle to Millinocket.
In the back of his truck were two triple-wrapped packages. In one were the bodies of
two deer which had been killed by the Ripley. In the other-this Janas found moderately to
seriously gruesome was the body of a grayboy turning slowly to a kind of reddish-orange

soup. Both were bound for the docs at Blue Base, which had been set up at a place called…
Janas looked up at the driver’s visor. There, held in place by a rubber band, was a piece of notepaper and a ballpoint pen. Scrawled on the paper was GOSSELIN’s STO,
TAKE EX 16, TURN L.
He’d be there in an hour. Maybe less. The docs would undoubtedly tell him they had

all the animal samples they needed and the deer-carcasses would be burned, but they might want the grayboy, if the little fella hadn’t turned entirely to mush. The cold might
retard that process a little bit, but whether it did or didn’t was really none of Andy Janas’s
nevermind. His concern was to get there, turn over his samples, and then await debriefing
from whoever was in charge of asking questions about the q-zone’s northern-and most

quiet perimeter. While he was awaiting, he would grab some hot coffee and a great big plate of scrambled eggs. If the right someone was around, he might even be able to promote something to spike his coffee with. That would be good. Get a little buzz going,
then just hunker down and
pull over
Janas frowned, shook his head, scratched his ear as if something-a flea, perhaps-had
bitten him there. The goddam wind gusted hard enough to shake the truck. The turnpike

disappeared and so did the reflectors. He was encased in total white again and he had no
doubt that this scared the everloving bejabbers out of the other guys, but not him, he was
Mr Minnesota-Twins-Taking-Care-of-Business, just puff the old foot off the gas (and
never rm’nd the brake, when you were driving in a snowstorm the brake was the best way
he knew to turn a good n’de bad), just coast and wait for
pull over

“Huh?” He looked at the radio, but there was nothing there, just static and dim
background chatter.
pull over
“Ow!” Janas cried, and grabbed at his head, which suddenly hurt like a motherfucker.
The olive-green pickup swerved, skidded, then came back under control as his hands
automatically steered into the skid. His foot was still off the gas and the Chevy’s speedometer needle unwound rapidly.

The plows had made a narrow path down the center of the two southbound lanes.
Now Janas steered into the thicker snow to the right of this path, the truck’s wheels spurning up a haze of snow which the wind quickly whipped away. The guardrail
reflectors were very bright, glaring in the dark like cat’s eyes.
Janas screamed with pain. From a great distance he heard himself shouting, “Okay,
okay, I am! just stop it! Quit
yanking

me!” Through watering eyes he saw a dark form rear up on the far side of the guardrails not fifty feet ahead. As the headlights struck the shape
fully, he saw it was a man wearing a parka.
Andy Janas’s hands no longer felt like his own. They felt like gloves with someone
else’s hands inside them. This was an odd and entirely unpleasant sensation. They turned
the steering wheel farther to the left entirely without his help, and the pickup truck coasted
to a stop in front of the man in the parka.

3
This was his chance, with Mr Gray’s attention entirely diverted. Jonesy sensed that if
he thought about it he would lose his courage, so he didn’t think. He simply acted,
knocking back the bolt on the office door with the heel of his hand and yanking the door open.
He had never been inside Tracker Brothers as a kid (and it had been gone since the
big storm of “85), but he was pretty sure that it had never looked like what he saw now.

Outside the dingy office was a room so vast Jonesy couldn’t see the end of it. Overhead
were endless acres of fluorescent bars. Beneath them, stacked in enormous columns, were
millions of cardboard boxes.
No,
Jonesy thought.
Not millions. Trillions.
Yes, probably trillions was closer. Thousands of narrow aisles ran between them. He
was standing at one edge of eternity’s own warehouse, and the idea of finding anything in

it was ludicrous. If he ventured away from the door into his office hideout, he would become lost in no time. Mr Gray wouldn’t need to bother with him; Jonesy would wander
until he died, lost in a mind-boggling wasteland of stored boxes.
That’s not true. I could no more get lost in there than I could in my own bedroom.
Nor will I have to hunt for what I want. 7his is my place. Welcome to your own head, big
boy.

The concept was so huge that it made him feel weak… only he couldn’t afford to be
weak right now, or to hesitate. Mr Gray, everyone’s favorite invader from the Great Beyond, wouldn’t be occupied with the truck driver for long, If Jonesy meant to move some of these files to safety, he had to do it right now. The question was, which ones?
Duddits,
his mind whispered.
This has something to do with Duddits. You know it

does. He’s been o your mind a lot lately. The other guys were thinking of him, too. Duddits
is what held you and Henry and Pete and Beaver together-you’ve always known that, but
now you know something else, as well. Don’t you?
Yes. He knew that his accident in March had been caused by thinking he’d seen
Duddits once again being teased by Richie Grenadeau and his friends. Only “teased” was

a ludicrously inapt word for what had been going on behind Tracker Brothers that day, wasn’t it?
Tortured
was the word. And when he’d seen that torture being reenacted, he had plunged into the street without looking, and-His head was off, Beaver suddenly said from the storeroom’s overhead speakers, his
voice so loud and sudden it made Jonesy cringe.
It was laying in the ditch and his eyes

were full of mud, A d sooner or later every murderer pays the price. What a fuckarow!
Richie’s head. Richie Grenadeau’s head. And Jonesy had no time for this. He was a
trespasser in his
own
head now, and he’d do well to move quickly.
When he had first looked out at this enormous storeroom, all the boxes had been

plain and unmarked. Now he saw that those at the head of the row closest to him were labeled in black grease-pencil: DUDDITS. Was that surprising? Fortuitous? Not at all.
They were his memories, after all, stored flat and neatly folded in each of the trillions of
boxes, and when it came to memory, the healthy mind was able to access them pretty much at will.
Need something to move them with,
Jonesy thought, and when he looked around he

was not exactly amazed to see a bright red hand-dolly. This was a magic place, a make-it-up-as-you-go-along place, and the most marvelous thing about it, Jonesy supposed, was that everybody had one.
Moving quickly, he stacked some of the boxes marked DUDDITS on the dolly and
ran them into the Tracker Brothers office at a trot. He dumped them by tipping the dolly

forward, spilling them across the floor. Untidy, but he could worry about the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval later.
He ran back out, feeling for Mr Gray, but Mr Gray was still with the truck-driver…
Janas, his name was. There was the cloud, but the cloud didn’t sense him. It was as dumb
as… well, as dumb as fungus.
Jonesy got the rest of the DUDDITS boxes, and saw that the next stack had also

acquired scribbled grease-pencil labels. These latter said DERRY, and there were too many to take. The question was whether or not he needed to take any of them.
He pondered this as he pushed the second load of memory-boxes into the office. Of
course the Derry boxes would be stacked near the Duddits boxes; memory was both the act and the art of association. The question remained whether or not his Derry memories

mattered. How was he supposed to know that when he didn’t know what Mr Gray
wanted?
But he
did
know.
Mr Gray wanna go south.
Derry
was south.
Jonesy sprinted back into the memory storehouse, pushing the dolly ahead of him.
He’d take as many of the boxes marked DERRY as he could, and hope they were the right
ones. He would also hope that he sensed Mr Gray’s return in time. Because if he was caught out here, he would be swatted like a fly.
4

Janas watched, horrified, as his left hand reached out and opened the driver’s-side door of his truck, letting in the cold, the snow, and the relentless wind. “Don’t hurt me anymore, mister, please don’t, you can have a ride if you want a ride, just don’t hurt me
anymore, my
head-”
Something suddenly rushed through Andy Janas’s mind. It was like a whirlwind with
eyes. He felt it prying into his current orders, his expected arrival time at Blue Base… and

what he knew of Derry, which was nothing. His orders had taken him through Bangor, he’d never been to Derry in his life.
He felt the whirlwind pull back and had one moment of delirious relief-
I don’t have
what it needs, it’s going to let me go-
and then understood that the thing in his mind had no
intention of letting him go. It needed the truck, for one thing. It needed to shut his mouth, for another.

Janas put up a brief but bitterly energetic struggle. It was this unexpected resistance
that allowed Jonesy time to remove at least one stack of the boxes marked DERRY. Then
Mr Gray once more resumed his place at Janas’s motor controls.
Janas saw his hand shoot out and up to the driver’s-side visor. His hand gripped the
ballpoint pen and yanked it free, snapping the rubber band which held it.
No! Janas shouted, but it was too late. He caught a shiny zipping glitter as his hand,

which was gripping the ballpoint like a dagger, plunged the pen into his staring eye. There
was a popping sound and he jittered back and forth behind the wheel like a badly managed
puppet, his fist digging the pen in deeper and deeper, up to the halfway mark, then to the
three-quarter mark, his split eyeball now running down the side of his face like a freakish

tear. The tip struck something that felt like thin gristle, bound up for a moment, then passed through into the meat of his brain.
You bastard,
he thought,
what are you, you bas
-
There was a final brilliant flash of light inside his head and then everything went dark. Janas slumped forward over the wheel. The pickup’s horn began to blow.
5
Mr Gray hadn’t gotten much from Janas-mostly that unexpected struggle for control

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