Dreamcatcher

to turn the lower and draw the bolt on the upper. The son of a bitch was trying to hypnotize him, and doing a pretty good job of it.
“We always win,” said the voice on the other side of the door. It was soothing, which
was nice after such a stressful day, but it was also vilely complacent. The usurper who would not rest until he had it all… who took getting it all as a given. “Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.”

For a moment he almost did it, He was awake again, but he almost did it anyway.
Then he remembered two sounds: the tenebrous creak of Pete’s skull as the red stuff tightened on it, and the wet squittering Janas’s eye had made when the tip of the pen pierced it.
Jonesy realized he hadn’t been awake at all, not really. But now he was.
Now he was.
Dropping his hands away from the lock and putting his lips to the door, he said “Eat

shit and die” in his clearest voice. He felt Mr Gray recoil. He even felt the pain when Mr
Gray thumped back against the window, and why not? They were his nerves, after all. Not
to mention his head. Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr Gray’s outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr Gray already knew: the alien presence
in his head was more human now.
If you could come back as a physical entity, would you still be Mr

Gray? Jonesy wondered. He didn’t think so. Mr Pink, maybe, but not Mr Gray.
He didn’t know if the guy would try his Monsieur Mesmer routine again, but Jonesy
decided to take no chances. He turned and went to the office window, tripping over one of
the boxes and stepping over the rest. Christ, but his hip hurt. It was crazy to feel such pain
when you were imprisoned in your own head (which, Henry had once assured him, had no

nerves anyway, at least not once you got into the old gray matter), but the pain was there,
all right. He had read that amputees sometimes felt horrible agonies and unscratchable itches in limbs that no longer existed; probably this was the same deal.
The window had returned to a tiresome view of the weedy, double-rutted driveway
which had run alongside the Tracker Brothers depot back in 1978. The sky was white and

overcast; apparently when his window looked into the past, time was frozen at
midafternoon. The only thing the view had to recommend it was that, as he stood here taking it in, Jonesy was as far from Mr Gray as he could possibly get.
He guessed that he
could
change the view, if he really wanted to; could look out and
see what Mr Gray was currently seeing with the eyes of Gary Jones. He had no urge to do

that, however. There was nothing to look at but the snowstorm, nothing to feel but Mr Gray’s stolen rage.
Think of something else,
he told himself.
What?
I don’t know-anything. Why not
-
On the desk the telephone rang, and that was odd on an
Alice in Wonderland
scale,
because a few minutes ago there had been no telephone in this room, and no desk for it to

sit on. The litter of old used rubbers had disappeared. The floor was still dirty, but the dust on the tiles was gone. Apparently there was some sort of Janitor inside his head, a neatnik
who had decided Jonesy was going to be here for awhile and so the place ought to be at
least tolerably clean. He found the concept awesome, the implications depressing.
On the desk, the phone shrilled again. Jonesy picked up the receiver and said,
“Hello?”

Beaver’s voice sent a sick and horrible chill down his back. A telephone call from a
dead man-it was the stuff of the movies he liked.
Had
liked, anyway. “His head was off, Jonesy. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud. “There was a click, then
dead silence. Jonesy hung up the phone and walked back to the window. The driveway was gone.
Derry

was gone. He was looking at Hole in the Wall under a pale clear early-morning sky. The roof was black instead of green, which meant this was Hole in the Wall
as it had been before 1982, when the four of them, then strapping high-school boys (well,
Henry had never been what you’d call strapping), had helped Beav’s Dad put up the green
shingles the camp still wore.
Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he

needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver
would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver
would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young… and they had changed.

No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how
much they had changed.
Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.
The door opened.
Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.
Chapter Fifteen
HENRY AND OWEN
1
Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights.
Underhill’s head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his
mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly

flattened
, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was
blood,
blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.
2
Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream-blood, broken glass, the rich smells of
gasoline and burning rubber-to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits

up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete’s hairless chest covered with goosebumps.
Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping-bags because they lost the four-way toss.
Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but
now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood),
only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.
Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you,

Henry thinks for no appreciable reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires.
We got some work to do now
-
“Crashed,” Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like
Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed. “Yeah, went in the water,” Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn’t have the slightest idea what he’s talking

about. “Henry, you got his shoe-” “moccasin-‘Henry says, but he hasn’t any idea what
he’s
talking about either. Nor wants to. “Beav,” Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy
lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete’s hand. “
Ow!”
Pete cries. “Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you’re-” “shut up, shut up,” Henry says, grabbing Pete’s shoulder and giving it a shake. “Don’t wake up Mr Clarendon!”

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys” bedroom is open. So is the door
on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they’re cold, there’s a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it),
he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

“Where’s Duddits?” Jonesy asks in a dazed, I’m-still-dreaming voice. “Did he go out with Beaver?”
“He’s back in Derry, foolish,” Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal
undershirt. And he doesn’t feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that
Duddits was just here with them.
It was the dream,
he thinks.
Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He
was crying. He was so. He didn’t mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on
the breeze. It’s not Duddits, though; it’s the Beav. They leave the room in a line, pulling on
scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.
One good thing-judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it’ll take more than a couple of open doors and some
whispering kids to wake up Beaver’s Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry’s stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.
He sees the Beaver right away. He’s at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand
in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He’s wearing his

motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate’s finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a
damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there’s nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple’s nearly bare branches.
The Beav’s cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the
chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry’s feet is almost as hard and cold
as the granite doorstep.
He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears.
Because the Beav isn’t just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to
shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara

Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like
that
in the movies.
“Gross,” Pete says.
Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn’t looking at Beaver but past
him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night’s corn (Lamar Clarendon
believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and
strings of last night’s fried chicken. Henry’s stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just

as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.
“
Gross!”
Pete almost screams it this time.
Beaver doesn’t seem to even notice. “Henry!” he says. His eyes, submerged beneath
twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry’s face and into
the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.
“Beav, it’s okay. You had a bad dream.”
“Sure, a bad dream.” Jonesy’s voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries

to clear it with a thick
ratching
noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and
his bare back is covered with bumps.
Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and
puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav’s shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry. “His head was off,” Beaver whispers.

Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav,
Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy’s chin. He reaches
to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their
dream. It
is
the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.

Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching
Jonesy’s hand.
“It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.”
“Yeah,” Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. “Oh jeez, it was.”
“Said he’d see us again, remember?” Pete asks. “One at a time or all together. He
said
that.”
Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he’s back in the dream. Back

at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash-littered embankment where there is a
soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it’s on
Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his

chest and crying his eyes out.
A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It’s slim, the nails
painted candy-apple red. The car’s other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one’s facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the
masses of soaked blond hair.
It’s Duncan, the one who said you’re not gonna tell anyone
anything, because you’ll be fuckin dead.
Only Duncan’s the one who wound up dead.

Something floats against Henry’s shin. “Don’t pick that up!” Pete says urgently, but
Henry does. It’s a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver
and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in
the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably

convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter’s bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket
(What a lot of zippers!
Duddie’s Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver’s love and admiration forever) with the orange
bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren’t looking at the third body, the one lying
just outside the driver’s door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the

moccasin, like a small waterlogged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be.
Then he realizes that there’s nothing above the collar of the corpse’s high-school jacket.
Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what
should
have been above it.

They have seen Richie Grenadeau’s head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it’s Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to
feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker’s.
Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head

like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms
around each other.
“Beaver!
Beav!”
Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.

Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. “His head’s off,” he says, as if this were not evident. “Henry, his
head’s-”
“Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!”
“Yeah,” Pete says. He looks at Richie’s head, that final dead glare, then looks away,
mouth
twitching. “It’s drivin me fuckin bugshit.” “Like chalk on a chalkboard,” Jonesy
mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. “Make him stop,

Beav. “‘H-H-H-” “Don’t be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin
song!”
Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. “The lullaby, the goddam
lullaby!”
For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn’t understand, but then his eyes
clear a little and he says “Oh!” He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits
sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him.

Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits’s nostrils, and there’s a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of
it, something that looks like white plastic.
“Duddits,” the Beav says, climbing the embankment. “Duddle, honey, don’t. Don’t
cry no more, don’t look at it no more, it’s not for you to look at, it’s so fuckin gross…”
At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks,

He cried himself
into a nosebleed and that’s the blood part, but what’s that white thing sticking out of his
shoulder?
Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top
of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just
as he did a few weeks earlier, and be ins to sing in that high clear voice that you’d never
think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.
“
Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far…”

And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet. Speaking from the
comer of his mouth, Pete says: “Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck
are
we?”In a
dream,” Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold. “What?”
Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks,

reality comes all the way back. “What did you say, Henry?” Henry feels the withdrawal of
their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks,
We weren’t meant to be like this, none of us.
Sometimes being alone is better.
Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.
“I had a bad dream,” Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were
still

dreaming, he unzips one of his jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of
unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and be ins to roll it back and forth,
nipping and gnawing lightly. “I dreamed that-”
“Never mind,” Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. “We all know what
you dreamed.”
We ought to, we were there

trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He’s only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid.
When it’s laid,
it’s played
they say when they’re playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they’ll have to deal with it. If he doesn’t, then maybe…
just maybe it’ll go away.
“I don’t think it was your dream, anyhow,” Pete says. “I think it was Duddits’s dream
and we all-”

“I don’t give a shit
what
you think,” Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. “It was a
dream,
and I’m going to forget it. We’re all going to forget it, aren’t we, Henry?”
Henry nods at once.
“Let’s go back in,” Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. “My feet’re fre-
“One thing, though,” Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when
they need a leader, Henry is it.
And if you don’t like the way I do it,
he thinks resentfully,

someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.
“What?” Beaver asks, meaning
What now?
“When we go into Gosselin’s later on, someone’s got to call Duds. In case he’s
upset.”

No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first. “You know, that’s probably right,” Pete agrees
and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something

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