Dreamcatcher

had gone crazy, God love him. Perhaps it took one to know one.
“I told him the God’s truth. I’m out of touch with all of them now.” But then Archie
laid his finger alongside his nose and looked slyly up into the mirror again.
“We catch them, I think there’s a good chance we can get you cured up, laddie.”

Kurtz said this in his driest just-making-my-report voice. “Now which of them are you still in touch with? Jonesy? Or is it the new one? Duddits?” What Kurtz actually said was
“Dud-Duts”.
“Not him. None of
them.”
But still the finger by the nose, still the sly look.
“Tell me and you get water,” Kurtz said. “Continue to yank my crank, soldier, and I
will put a bullet in you and roll you out into the snow. Now you go on and read my mind
and tell me that’s not so.”

Pearly looked at him sulkily in the rearview a moment longer and then said, “Jonesy
and Mr Gray are still on the turnpike. They’re down around Portland, now. Jonesy told Mr
Gray how to go around the city on 295. Only it isn’t like telling. Mr Gray is in his head,
and when he wants something, I think he just takes it.”
Kurtz listened to this with mounting awe, all the time calculating.
“There’s a dog,” Pearly said. “They have a dog with them. His name is Lad. He’s the

one I’m in contact with. He’s… like me.” His eyes met Kurtz’s again in the mirror, only
this time the slyness was gone. In its place was a miserable half-sanity. “Do you think there’s really a chance I could be… you know… myself again?”
Knowing that Perlmutter could see into his mind made Kurtz proceed cautiously. “I

think there’s a chance you could be delivered of your burden, at least. With a doctor in attendance who understands the situation? Yes, I think that could be. A big whiff of cbloro, and when you wake up… poof.” Kurtz kissed the ends of his fingers, then turned
to Freddy. “If they’re in Portland, what’s their lead on us?”
“Maybe seventy miles, boss.”
“Then step it up a little, praise Jesus. Don’t put us in the ditch, but step it up.”

Seventy miles. And if Owen and Devlin and “Dud-Duts” knew what Archie Perlmutter knew, they were still on track.
“Let me get this straight, Archie. Mr Gray is in Jonesy-”
“Yes-”
“And they have a dog with them that can read their minds?”
“The dog hears their thoughts, but he doesn’t understand them. He’s stiff only a dog.
Boss, I’m thirsty.”
He’s listening to the dog like it’s a fucking radio,
Kurtz marvelled.

“Freddy, next exit. Drinks all around.” He resented having to make a pit-stop-resented losing even a couple of miles on Owen-but he needed Perlmutter. Happy, if possible.
Up ahead was the rest area where Mr Gray had traded his plow for the cook’s Subaru,
where Owen and Henry had also briefly pulled in because the line went in there. The parking lot was crammed, but among the three of them they had enough change for the vending machines out front.

Praise God.
7
Whatever the triumphs and failures of the so-called “Florida” Presidency (that record
is in large part still unwritten), there will always be this: he put an end to the Space Scare
with his speech that November morning.
There were differing views on why the speech worked (“It wasn’t leadership, it was
timing,” one critic sniffed), but it
did

work. Hungry for hard information, people who were already on the run pulled off the highway to see the President speak. Appliance stores in
malls filled up with crowds of silent, staring people. At the food-fuel stops along 1-95, the
counters shut down. TVs were placed beside the quiet cash-registers. Bars filled up. In many places, people threw their homes open to others who wanted to watch the speech.

They could have listened on their car radios (as Jonesy and Mr Gray did) and kept on trucking, but only a minority did. Most people wanted to see the leader’s face. According

to the President’s detractors, the speech did nothing but break the momentum of the panic-“Porky Pig could have given a speech at that particular time and gotten that particular result,” one of them opined. The other took a different view. “It was a pivotal moment in the crisis,” this fellow said. “There were maybe six thousand people on the road. If the President had said the wrong thing, there would have been sixty thousand by

two in the afternoon and maybe six hundred thousand by the time the wave hit New York-
the biggest wave of DPs since the Dust Bowl. The American people, especially those in
New England, came to their narrowly-elected leader for help… for comfort and
reassurance. He responded with what may have been the greatest my-fellow-Americans
speech of all time. Simple as that.”
Simple or not, sociology or great leadership, the speech was about what Owen and

Henry had expected… and Kurtz could have predicted every word and turn. At the center were two simple ideas, both presented as absolute facts and both calculated to soothe the
terror which beat that morning in the ordinarily complacent American breast. The first idea was that, while they had not come waving olive branches and handing out free introductory gifts, the newcomers had evinced absolutely no signs of aggressive or hostile

behavior. The second was that, while they had brought some sort of virus with them, it had
been contained within the Jefferson Tract (the President pointed it out on a Chroma-Key
green-screen as adeptly as any weatherman pointing out a low-pressure system). And even
there it was dying, with absolutely no help from the scientists and military experts who were on the scene.

“While we cannot say for sure at this Juncture,” the President told his breathless watchers (those who found themselves at the New England end of the Northeast Corridor
were, perhaps understandably, the most breathless of all), “we believe that our visitors brought this virus with them much as travellers from abroad may bring certain insects into

their country of origin in their luggage or on the produce they’ve purchased. This is something customs officials look for, but of course”-big smile from Great White
Father-“our recent visitors did not pass through a customs checkpoint.”
Yes, a few people had succumbed to the virus. Most were military personnel. The
great in majority of those who contracted it (“a fungal growth not unlike athlete’s foot,”

said the Great White Father) beat it quite easily on their own. A quarantine had been imposed around the area, but the people outside that zone were in no danger, repeat, no danger. “If you are in Maine and have left your homes,” said the President, “I suggest you
return. In the words of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, we have nothing to fear but fear itself.”
Nothing about the slaughter of the grayboys, the blown ship, the interred hunters, the fire

at Gosselin’s, or the breakout. Nothing about the last of Gallagher’s Imperial Valleys being
hunted down like dogs (they
were
dogs, in the view of many; worse than dogs). Nothing
about Kurtz and not a whisper about Typhoid Jonesy. The President gave them just enough
to break the back of the panic before it surged out of control.
Most people followed his advice and went home.
For some, of course, this was impossible.
For some, home had been cancelled.
8

The little parade moved south under dark skies, led by the rusty red Subaru that
Marie Turgeon of Litchfield would never see again. Henry, Owen, and Duddits were fifty-
five miles, or about fifty minutes, behind. Pulling out of the Mile 81 rest area (Pearly was

greedily glugging down his second bottle of Naya water by the time they rejoined the traffic flow), Kurtz and his men were roughly seventy-five miles behind Jonesy and Mr Gray, twenty miles behind Kurtz’s prime quarry.
If not for the cloud cover, a spotter in a low-flying plane might have been able to see all three at the same time, the Subaru and both Humvees, at 11:43 EST, when the President

finished his speech by saying, “God bless you, my fellow Americans, and God bless
America.”
Jonesy and Mr Gray were crossing the Kittery-Portsmouth bridge into New
Hampshire; Henry, Owen, and Duddits were passing Exit 9, which gives access to the communities of Falmouth, Cumberland, and Jerusalem’s Lot; Kurtz, Freddy, and
Perlmutter (Perlmutter’s belly was swelling again; he lay back groaning and passing

noxious gas, perhaps a kind of critical comment on the Great White Father’s speech) were
near the Bowdoinham exit of 295, not far north of Brunswick. All three vehicles would have been easy enough to pick out because so many people had pulled in somewhere to
watch the President give his soothing, Chroma-Key-aided lecture.
Drawing on Jonesy’s admirably organized memories, Mr Gray left 95 for 495 just

after crossing over the New Hampshire Massachusetts border… and directed by Duddits,
who saw Jonesy’s passage as a bright yellow line, the lead Humvee would follow. At the
town of Marlborough, Mr Gray would leave 495 for 1-90, one of America’s major east-west highways. In the Bay State this road is known as the Mass Pike. Exit 8, according to
Jonesy, was marked Palmer, UMass, Amherst, and Ware. Six miles beyond Ware was the
Quabbin.

Shaft 12 was what he wanted; Jonesy said so, and Jonesy couldn’t lie, much as he might have liked to. There was a Massachusetts Water Authority office at the Winsor Dam, on the south end of the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy could get him that far, and then
Mr Gray would do the rest.
9

Jonesy couldn’t sit behind the desk anymore-if he did, he’d start to blubber. From blubbering he would no doubt progress to gibbering, from gibbering to yammering, and once he started to yammer, he’d probably be out and rushing into Mr Gray’s arms, totally
bonkers and ready to be extinguished.
Where are we now, anyway?
he wondered.
Marlborough yet? Leaving 495 for 90?
7hat sounds about right.

Not that there was any way to tell for sure, with his window shuttered. Jonesy looked
at the window… and grinned in spite of himself. Had to. GIVE UP COME OUT had been
replaced with what he’d been thinking of-SURRENDER DOROTHY.
I did that,
he thought,
and I bet I could make the goddam shutters vanish, if I wanted
to.
And so what? Mr Gray would put up another set, or maybe just slop some black paint
on the glass. If he didn’t want Jonesy looking out, Jonesy would stay blind. The point was,

Mr Gray controlled the outside part of him. Mr Gray’s head had exploded, he’d sporulated right in front of Jonesy’s eyes-Dr Jekyll turns into Mr Byrus-and Jonesy had inhaled him.
Now Mr Gray was…
He’s a pain,
Jonesy thought.
Mr Gray is the pain in my brain.
Something tried to protest this view, and he actually had a coherent dissenting
thought-
No, you’ve got it all backward, you were the one who got out, who escaped-

but he pushed it away. That was pseudo-intuitive bullshit, a cognitive hallucination, not much different than a thirsty man seeing a nonexistent oasis in the desert. He was locked in here.
Mr Gray was out there, eating bacon and ruling the roost. If Jonesy allowed himself to think differently, he’d be an April Fool in November.
Got to slow him down. If I can’t stop him, is there a way I can at least throw a
monkeywrench into the works?

He got up and began to walk around the edge of the office. It was thirty-four paces.
Hell of a short round-trip. Still, he supposed, it was bigger than your average jail cell; guys in Walpole or Danvers or Shawshank would think this was the cat’s ass. In the middle of
the room, the dreamcatcher danced and turned. One part of Jonesy’s mind counted paces;
the other wondered how close they were getting to Exit 8 of the Mass Pike.
Thirty-one, thirty-two, thirty-three, thirty-four.

And here he was, back behind his chair again. Time for Round Two. They’d be in Ware soon enough… not that they’d stop
there. Unlike the Russian woman, Mr Gray knew exactly where he wanted to go.
Thirty-
two, thirty-three, thirty-four, thirty-five, thirty-six.
Behind his chair again and ready for another spin.
He and Carla had had three children by the time they turned thirty (number four had

come less than a year ago), and neither of them had expected to own a summer cottage,
not even a modest one like the place on Osborne Road in North Ware, any time soon.
Then there had been a seismic shift in Jonesy’s department. A good friend had assumed the chairmanship, and Jonesy had found himself an associate professor at least three years
earlier than his most optimistic expectations. The salary bump had been considerable.

Thirty-five, thirty-six, thirty-seven, thirty-eight,
and behind his chair again. This was good. It was pacing the cell, no more than that, but it was calming him.
That same year, Carla’s grandmother had passed away, and there had been a

considerable estate, settled between Carla and her sister, as the close blood kin in the intervening generation had died. So they got the cottage, and that first summer they’d taken the kids up to the Winsor Dam. From there they’d gone on one of the regularly scheduled summer tours. Their guide, an MWA employee in a forest-green uniform, had
told them the area around the Quabbin Reservoir was called “the accidental wilderness”,

and had become the major nesting area for eagles in Massachusetts. (John and Misha, the
older kids, had hoped to see an eagle or two, but they had been disappointed.) The Reservoir had been formed in the thirties by flooding three fanning communities, each with its own little market-town. At that time the land surrounding the new lake had been
tame. In the sixty or so years since, it had returned to what all of New England must have

been like before the tillage and industry began midway through the seventeenth century. A
tangle of rutted, unpaved roads ran up the east side of the lake-one of the purest reservoirs
in North America, their guide had told them-but that was it. If you wanted to go much beyond Shaft 12 on the East Branch, you’d need your hiking shoes. That was what the guide said. Lorrington, his name had been.

There had been maybe a dozen other people on the tour, and by then they had been
about back to their starting place again. Standing on the edge of the road which ran across
Winsor Dam, looking north at the Reservoir (the Quabbin bright blue in the sunlight, sparkling with a million points of light, Joey fast asleep in the Papoose carrier on Jonesy’s

back). Lorrington had been wrapping up his spiel, just about to wish them a nice day, when some guy in a Rutgers sweatshirt had raised his hand like a school kid and said:
Shaft 12, Isn’t that where the Russian woman…?
Thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty, forty-one,
and back to the desk chair. Counting without really thinking about the numbers, something he did all the time. Carla said it was

a sign of obsessive-compulsive disorder. Jonesy didn’t know about that, but he knew that
the counting was soothing him, and so he set off on another round.
Lorrington’s mouth had tightened at the words “Russian woman”. Not part of the
lecture, apparently; not part of the good vibes the Water Authority wanted visitors to take
with them. Depending upon which municipal pipes it flowed through during the last eight

or ten miles of its journey, Boston tap water could be the purest, best tap water in the world:
that
was the gospel they wanted to spread.
I really don’t know much about that, sir,
Lorrington had said, and Jonesy had thought:
My goodness, I think our guide just told a little fibby-wibby,
Forty-one, forty-two, forty-three,

back behind the chair and ready to start around again. Walking a little faster now. Hands clasped behind his back like a ship’s captain pacing the foredeck… or pacing the brig after a successful mutiny. He supposed that was
really more like it.
Jonesy had been a history teacher most of his life, and curiosity came as second
nature. He had gone to the library one day later that week, had looked for the story in the

local paper, and had eventually found it. It had been brief and dry-there were stories about
lawn-parties inside that had more detail and color-but their postman had known more and
had been happy to share. Old Mr Beckwith. Jonesy still remembered his final words
before he’d put his blue-and-white mail-truck back in gear and rolled on down Osborne Road to the next rural box; there was a lot of mail to be delivered on the south end of the

lake in summertime. Jonesy had walked back to the cottage, their unexpected gift,
thinking it was no wonder Lorrington hadn’t wanted to talk about the Russian woman.
Not good public relations at all.
10
Her name is either Ilena or Elaina Timarova-no one seems sure which. She turns up

in Ware in the early fall of 1995 in a Ford Escort with a discreet yellow Hertz sticker on the windshield. The car turns out to be stolen, and a story makes the rounds-unsubstantiated but juicy-that she obtained it at Logan Airport, swapping sex for a set of
car keys. Who knows, it could have happened that way.
However it happens, she is clearly disoriented, not quite right in the head. Someone

remembers the bruise on the side of her face, someone else the fact that her blouse is buttoned wrong. Her English is poor, but good enough for her to get across what she wants: directions to the Quabbin Reservoir. These she writes down (in Russian) on a slip

of paper. That evening, when the road across the Winsor Dam is closed, the Escort is found, abandoned, in the picnic area at Goodnough Dike. When the car is still there the next morning, two Water Authority guys (who knows, perhaps Lorrington was one of
them) and two Forest Service rangers start looking for her.
Two miles up East Street, they find her shoes. Two miles farther up, where East

Street goes to dirt (it winds through the wilderness on the east shore of the Reservoir and
is really not a street at all but a Massachusetts version of the Deep Cut Road) they find her
shirt… oh-oh. Two miles beyond the abandoned shirt, East Street ends, and a rutty logging
stripe-Fitzpatrick Road-leads away from the lake. The searchers are about to go this way
when one of them sees something pink hangin from a tree-limb down by the water.
It proves to be the lady’s bra.

The ground here is damp-not quite marshy-and they can follow both her tracks and
the broken branches through which she has pushed, doing damage they don’t like to think
of to her bare skin. Yet the evidence of the damage is there, and they must see it, like it or
not-the blood on the branches and then on the rocks is part of her trail.
A mile from where East Street ends, they come to a stone building which stands on

an outcropping. It looks across the East Branch at Mount Pomery. This building houses Shaft 12, and is accessible by car only from the north. Why Ilena or Elaina did not just
start
from the north is a question that will never be answered.
The water-bearing aqueduct which begins at the Quabbin runs sixty-five miles dead

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