Dreamcatcher

DERRY. The latter ones he’d taken as an afterthought. Mr Gray thought he still had the memories he needed-
the information
he needed-but if Jonesy was right about where they
were going (and it made perfect sense), Mr Gray was in for a surprise. Jonesy didn’t know
whether to be glad or afraid, and found he was both.
Here was a green sign reading EXIT 25-WITCHAM STREET. His hand flicked on
the Ram’s turnsignal.

At the top of the ramp, he turned left onto Witcham, then left again, half a mile later,
onto Carter Street. Carter went up at a steep angle, heading back toward Upmile Hill and
Kansas Street on the other side of what had once been a high, wooded ridge and the site of
a thriving Micmac Indian village. The street hadn’t been plowed in several hours, but the
four-wheel drive was up to the task. The Ram threaded its way among the snow-covered

humps on either side-cars that had been street-parked in defiance of municipal snow-emergency regulations.
Halfway up Mr Gray turned again, this time onto an even narrower track called Carter Lookout. The Ram skidded, its rear end fishtailing. Lad looked up briefly, whined,
then put his nose back down on the floormat as the tires took hold, biting into the snow
and puffing the Ram the rest of the way up.

Jonesy stood at his window on the world, fascinated, waiting for Mr Gray to
discover… well, to discover.
At first Mr Gray wasn’t dismayed when the Ram’s high beams showed nothing at the
crest but more swirling snow. He was confident he’d see it in a few seconds, of course he
would… just a few more seconds and he’d see the big white tower which stood here overlooking the drop to Kansas Street, the tower with the windows marching around it in a

rising spiral. In just a few more seconds…
Except now there
were
no more seconds. The Ram had chewed its way to the top of
what had once been called Standpipe Hill. Here Carter Lookout-and three or four other similar little lanes-ended in a large open circle. They had come to the highest, most open
spot in Derry. The wind howled like a banshee, a steady fifty miles an hour with gusts up
to seventy and even eighty. In the Ram’s high beams, the snow flew horizontally, a storm

of daggers.
Mr Gray sat motionless. Jonesy’s hands slid off the wheel and clumped to either side
of Jonesy’s body like birds shot out of the sky. At last he muttered, “Where is it?”
His left hand rose, fumbled at the doorhandle, and at last pulled it up. He swung a leg
out, then fell to Jonesy’s knees in a snowdrift as the howling wind snatched the door out of

his hand. He got up again and floundered around to the front of the truck, his jacket rippling around him and the legs of his jeans snapping like sails in a gale. The wind-chill
was well below zero (in the Tracker Brothers” office, the temperature went from cool to
cold in the space of a few seconds), but the redblack cloud which now inhabited most of
Jonesy’s brain and drove Jonesy’s body could not have cared less.
Where is it?”

Mr Gray screamed into the howling mouth of the storm.
Where’s the
fucking STANDPIPE?”
There was no need for Jonesy to shout; storm or no storm, Mr Gray would hear even
a whisper.
“Ha-ha, Mr Gray,” he said. “Hardy-fucking-har. Looks like the joke’s on you. The
Standpipe’s been gone since 1985.”
6
Jonesy thought that if Mr Gray had remained still, he would have done a full-fledged

pre-schooler’s tantrum, perhaps right down to the rolling around in the snow and the kicking of the feet; in spite of his best efforts not to, Mr Gray was bingeing on Jonesy’s
emotional chemistry set, as helpless to stop now that he had started as an alcoholic with a
key to McDougal’s Bar.
Instead of throwing a fit or having a snit, he thrust Jonesy’s body across the bald top
of the hill and toward the squat stone pedestal that stood where he had expected to find the

storage facility for the city’s drinking water: seven hundred thousand gallons of it. He fell
in the snow, floundered back up, limped forward on Jonesy’s bad hip, fell again and got up
again, all the time spitting Beaver’s litany of childish curses into the gale: doodlyfuck, kiss my bender, munch my meat, bite my bag, shit in your fuckin hat and wear it backward, Bruce. Coming from Beaver (or Henry, or Pete), these had always been amusing. Here, on

this deserted hill, screamed into the teeth of the storm by this lunging, falling monster that
looked like a human being, they were awful.
He, it, whatever Mr Gray was, at last reached the pedestal, which stood out clearly enough in the glow cast by the Ram’s headlights. It had been built to a child’s height, about five feet, and of the plain rock which had shaped so many New England stone walls.

On top were two figures cast in bronze, a boy and a girl with their hands linked and their
heads lowered, as if in prayer or in grief.
The pedestal was drifted to most of its height in snow, but the top of the plaque screwed to the front was visible. Mr Gray fell to Jonesy’s knees, scraped snow away, and
read this:
TO THOSE LOST IN THE STORM MAY 31, 1985 AND TO THE CHILDREN
ALL THE CHILDREN LOVE FROM BILL, BEN, BEV, EDDIE, RICHIE, STAN, MIKE
THE LOSERS” CLUB

Spray-painted across it jagged red letters, also perfectly visible in the truck’s
headlights, was this further message:
7
Mr Gray knelt looking at this for nearly five minutes, ignoring the creeping
numbness in Jonesy’s extremities. (And why would he take care? Jonesy was just your basic rental job, drive it as hard as you want and butt out your cigarettes on the floormat.)

He was trying to make sense of it. Storm? Children? Losers? Who or what was
Pennywise? Most of all,
where was the Standpipe,
which Jonesy’s memories had insisted
was here?
At last he got up, limped back to the truck, got in, and turned up the heater. In the blast of hot air, Jonesy’s body began to shake. Soon enough, Mr Gray was back at the locked door of the office, demanding an explanation.

“Why do you sound so angry?” Jonesy asked mildly, but he was smiling. Could Mr
Gray sense that? “Did you expect me to help you? Come on, pal-I don’t know the
specifics, but I have a pretty good idea what the overall plan is: twenty years from now and the whole planet is one big redheaded ball, right? No more hole in the ozone layer, but
no more people, either.”
“Don’t you smartass me! Don’t you dare!”

Jonesy fought back the temptation to taunt Mr Gray into another tantrum. He didn’t
believe his unwelcome guest would be capable of huffing down the door between them no
matter how angry he became, but what sense was there in putting that idea to the test? And
besides, Jonesy was emotionally exhausted, his nerves jumping and his mouth full of a burnt-copper taste.
“How can it not be here?”
Mr Gray brought one hand down on the center of the steering wheel. The horn

honked. Lad the border collie raised his head and looked at the man behind the wheel with
large, nervous eyes. “You can’t lie to me! I have your memories!”
“Well…
I did
get a few. Remember?”
“Which ones? Tell me.”
“Why should I?” Jonesy asked. “What’ll you do for me?”
Mr Gray fell silent. Jonesy felt him accessing various files. Then, suddenly, smells began to waft into the room from under the door and through the heating and cooling vent.

They were his favorite aromas: popcorn, coffee, his mother’s fish chowder. His stomach immediately began to roar.
“Of course I can’t promise you your mother’s chowder,” Mr Gray said. “But I’ll feed
you. And you’re hungry, aren’t you?”With you driving my body and pigging out on my emotions, it’d be a wonder if I wasn’t,” Jonesy replied. “There’s a place south of here-Dysart’s. According to you, it’s open twenty-four hours a day,

which is a way of saying all the time.
Or are you lying about that, too?”
“I never lied,” Jonesy replied. “As you said, I can’t. You’ve got the controls, you’ve
got the memory banks, you’ve got everything but what’s in here.”
“Where
is
there? How can there
be
a there?”
“I don’t know,” Jonesy said truthfully. “How do I know you’ll feed me?”
“Because
I have
to,” Mr Gray said from his side of the door, and Jonesy realized Mr

Gray was also being truthful. If you didn’t pour gas into the machine from time to time,
the machine stopped running. “But if you satisfy my curiosity, I’ll feed you the things you
like. If you don’t…”
The smells from under the door changed, became the greenly assaultive odor of
broccoli and brussels sprouts. “All right,” Jonesy said. “I’ll tell you what I can, and you
feed me pancakes and bacon at Dysart’s. Breakfast twenty-four hours a day, you know.

Deal?” “Deal. Open the door and we’ll shake on it.”
Jonesy was surprised into a smile-it was Mr Gray’s first attempt at humor, and really
not such a bad one. He glanced into the rearview mirror and saw an identical smile on the mouth which was no longer his. That was a little creepy.
“Maybe we’ll skip the handshake part,” he said. “Tell me.” “Yes, but a word of
warning-break a promise to me, and you’ll never get to make another one.” “I’ll keep it in
mind.”

The truck sat at the top of Standpipe Hill, rocking slightly on its springs, its
headlamps blazing out cylinders of snow-filled light, and Jonesy told Mr Gray what he knew. It was, he thought, the perfect place for a scary story.
8
The years of 1984 and “85 were bad ones in Derry. In the summer of 1984, three
local teenagers had thrown a gay man into the Canal, killing him. In the ten months which

followed, half a dozen children had been murdered, apparently by a psychotic who
sometimes masqueraded as a clown.
“Who is this John Wayne Gacey?” Mr Gray asked. “Was he the one who killed the
children?”
“No, just someone from the midwest who had a similar
modus operandi,”
Jonesy said. “You don’t understand many of the cross-connections my mind makes, do you? Bet
there aren’t many poets out where you come from.”

Mr Gray made no reply to this. Jonesy doubted if he knew what a poet was. Or cared.
“In any case,” Jonesy said, “the last bad thing to happen was a kind of freak
hurricane. It hit on May thirty-first, 1985. Over sixty people died. The Standpipe blew over. It rolled down that hill and into Kansas Street.” He pointed to the right of the truck,
where the land sloped sharply away into the dark.

“Almost three quarters of a million gallons of water ran down Upmile Hill, then into
downtown, which more or less collapsed. I was in college by then. The storm happened during my Finals Week. My Dad called and told me about it, but of course I knew-it was
national news.”
Jonesy paused, thinking, looking around the office which was no longer bare and

dirty but nicely finished (his subconscious had added both a couch that he had at home and an Eames chair he’d seen in the Museum of Modem Art catalogue, lovely but out of
his financial reach) and really quite pleasant… certainly nicer than the blizzardy world his
body’s usurper was currently having to deal with.
“Henry was in school, too. Harvard. Pete was bumming around the West Coast, doing

his hippie thing. Beaver was trying a junior college downstate. Majoring in hashish and video games, is what he said later.” Only Duddits had been here in Derry when the big storm blew through… but Jonesy discovered he didn’t want to speak Duddits’s name.
Mr Gray said nothing, but Jonesy got a clear sense of his impatience. Mr Gray cared only about the Standpipe. And how Jonesy had fooled him. “Listen, Mr Gray-if there was

any fooling going on, you did it to yourself I got a few of the DERRY boxes, that’s all, and
brought them in here while you were busy killing that poor soldier.” “The poor soldiers came in ships from the sky and massacred all of my kind that they could
find.”
“Spare me. You guys didn’t come here to welcome us into the Galactic Book Circle.”
“Would things have been any different if we had?”
“You can also spare me the hypotheticals,” Jonesy said. “After what you did to Pete

and the Army guy, I could care less about having an intellectual discussion with you.”
“We do what we have to do.”
“That might be, but if you expect me to help you, you’re mad.”
The dog was looking at Jonesy with even more unease apparently not used to masters
who held animated conversations with themselves.
“The Standpipe fell over in 1985-sixteen years ago-but you stole this memory?”
“Basically, yeah, although I don’t think you’d have much luck with that in a court of

law, since the memories were mine to begin with.”
“What else have you stolen?”
“That’s for me to know and you to think about.”
There was a hard and ill-tempered thump at the door. Jonesy was once more
reminded of the story about The Three Little Pigs. Huff and puff, Mr Gray; enjoy the dubious pleasures of rage.But Mr Gray had apparently left the door.
“Mr Gray? “Jonesy called. “Hey, don’t go “way mad, okay?” Jonesy guessed that Mr

Gray might be off on another information search. The Standpipe was gone but Derry was
still here; ergo, the town’s water had to be coming from
somewhere.
Did Jonesy know the location of that somewhere?
Jonesy didn’t. He had a vague memory of drinking a lot of bottled water after coming
back from college for the summer, but that was all. Eventually water had started coming
out of their taps again, but what was that to a twenty-one-year-old whose biggest concern

had been getting into Mary Shratt’s pants? The water came, you drank it. You didn’t worry
about where it came from as long as it didn’t give you the heaves or the squatters.
A sense of frustration from Mr Gray? Or was that just his imagination? Jonesy most
sincerely hoped not.
This had been a good one… what the four of them, in the days of their misspent
youth, would undoubtedly have called “a fuckin pisser”.
9

Roberta Cavell woke up from some unpleasant dream and looked to her right, half-expecting to see only darkness. But the comforting blue numbers were still glowing from
the clock by her bed, so the power hadn’t gone out. That was pretty amazing, considering
the way the wind was howling.
1:04 A.M… the blue numbers said. Roberta turned on the bedside lamp-might as well
use it while she could-and drank some water from her glass. Was it the wind that had awakened

her? The bad dream? It had been bad, all right, something about aliens with deathrays
and everyone running, but she didn’t think that was it, either.
Then the wind dropped, and she heard what had waked her: Duddits’s voice from
downstairs. Duddits…
singing?
Was that possible? She didn’t see how, considering the terrible afternoon and evening the two of them had put in.
“
Eeeyer-eh!’
” for most of the hours between two and five-
Beaver’s dead!

Duddits seemingly inconsolable, finally bringing on a nosebleed. She feared these. When Duddits
started bleeding, it was sometimes impossible to get him stopped without taking him to the
hospital. This time she
had
been able to stop it by pushing cotton-wads into his nostrils and then pinching his nose high up, between the eyes. She had called Dr Briscoe to ask if

she could give Duddits one of his yellow Valium tablets, but Dr Briscoe was off in Nassau, if you please. Some other doctor was on call, some whitecoat johnny who had never seen Duddits in his life, and Roberta didn’t even bother to call him. She just gave
Duddits the Valium, painted his poor dry lips and the inside of his mouth with one of the
lemon-flavored glycerine swabs that he liked-the inside of his mouth was always

developing cankers and ulcers. Even when the chemo was over, these persisted. And the
chemo
was
over. None of the doctors-not Briscoe, not any of them-would admit it, and so the plastic catheter stayed in, but it was over. Roberta would not let them put her boy through that hell again.
Once he’d taken his pill, she got in bed with him, held him (being careful of his left
side, where the indwelling catheter hid under a bandage), and sang to him. Not Beaver’s

lullaby, though. Not today.
At last he had begun to quiet, and when she thought he was asleep, she had gently pulled the cotton wads from his nostrils. The second one stuck a little, and Duddits’s eyes
had opened-that beautiful flash of green. His eyes were his true gift, she sometimes thought, and not that other business… seeing the line and all that went with it.
“Urnma?”
“Yes, Duddie.”
“Eeeyer in hen?”

She felt such sorrow at that, and at the thought of Beaver’s absurd leather jacket, which he had loved so much and finally worn to tatters. If it had been someone else,
anyone
else but one of his four childhood friends, she would have doubted Duddie’s premonition. But if Duddits said Beaver was dead, then Beaver almost certainly was.
“Yes, honey, I’m sure he’s in heaven. Now go to sleep.”

For another long moment those green eyes had looked into hers, and she had thought
he would start crying again-indeed, one tear, large and perfect,
did
roll down his stubbly cheek. It was so hard for him to shave now, sometimes even the Norelco started little cuts
that dribbled for hours. Then his eyes had closed again and she had tiptoed out.
After dark, while she was making him oatmeal (all but the blandest foods were now

apt to set off vomiting, another sign that the end was nearing), the whole nightmare started
again. Terrified already by the increasingly strange news coming out of the Jefferson Tract, she had raced back to his room with her heart hammering. Duddits was sitting upright again, whipping his head from side to side in a child’s gesture of negation. The nosebleed had re-started, and at each jerk of his head, scarlet drops flew. They spattered

his pillowcase, his signed photograph of Austin Powers
(“Groovy,baby!”
was written across the bottom), and the bottles on the table: mouthwash, Compazine, Percocet, the multi-vitamins that seemed to do absolutely no good, the tall jar of lemon swabs.
This time it was Pete he claimed was dead, sweet (and not terribly bright) Peter
Moore. Dear God, could it be true? Any of it? All of it?

The second bout of hysterical grief hadn’t gone on as long, probably because Duddits
was already exhausted from the first. She had gotten the nosebleed stanched again-lucky
her-and had changed his bed, first helping him to his chair by the window. There he’d sat,
looking out into the renewing storm, occasionally sobbing, sometimes heaving great,
watery sighs that hurt her inside. Just
looking
at him hurt her: how thin he was, how pale he was, how
bald

he was. She gave him his Red Sox hat, signed across the visor by the
great Pedro Martinez
(you get so many nice things when you’re dying,
she sometimes mused), thinking his head would be cold there, so close to the glass, but for once Duddits
wouldn’t put it on. He only held it on his lap and looked out into the dark, his eyes big and
unhappy.
At last she had gotten him back into bed, where once again her son’s green eyes

looked up at her with all their terrible dying brilliance.
“Eeet in hen, ooo?”
“I’m sure he is.” She hadn’t wanted to cry, desperately hadn’t wanted to-it might set
him off again-but she could feel the tears brimming. Her head was pregnant with them, and the inside of her nose tasted of the sea each time she pulled in breath.
“In hen wif Eeeyer?”
“Yes, honey.”
“I eee Eeeyer n Eeet in hen?”
“Yes, you will. Of course you will. But not for a long while.”

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