Dreamcatcher

east to Boston, picking up more water from the Wachusett and Sudbury Reservoirs as it goes (the latter two sources are smaller and not quite so pure). There are no pumps; the aqueduct-pipe, thirteen feet high and eleven feet wide, needs none to do its job. Boston’s
water supply is provided by simple gravity feed, a technique used by the Egyptians thirty-
five centuries before. Twelve vertical shafts run between the ground and the aqueduct.

These serve as vents and pressure-regulation points. They also serve as points of access,
should the aqueduct become clogged. Shaft 12, the one closest to the Reservoir, is also known as the Intake Shaft. Water purity is tested there, and female virtue has often been
tested there, as well (the stone building isn’t locked, and is a frequent stopping place for
lovers in canoes).
On the lowest of the eight steps leading up to the door, they find the woman’s jeans,

neatly folded. On the top step is a pair of plain white cotton underpants. The door is open.
The men look at each other, but no one speaks. They have a good idea of what they’re going to find inside: one dead Russian lady, hold the clothes.
But they don’t. The circular iron cover over the top of Shaft 12 has been moved just

enough to create a crescent moon of darkness on the Reservoir side. Beyond it is the crowbar the woman used to shift the lid-it would have been leaning behind the door, where there are a few other tools. And beyond the crowbar is the Russian woman’s purse.
On top of it is her billfold, open to show her identification card. On top of the billfold-the
apex of the pyramid, so to speak-is her passport. Poking out of it is a slip of paper, covered

with chicken-scratches that have to be Russian, or Cyrillic, or whatever they call it. The
men believe it is a suicide note, but upon translation it proves to be nothing but the Russian woman’s directions. At the very bottom she has written
When road ends, walk
along shore
. And so she did, disrobing as she went, unmindful of the branches which poked and the bushes which scratched.

The men stand around the partially covered shaft-head, scratching their heads and
listening to the babble of the water as it starts on its way to the taps and faucets and fountains and back-yard hoses of Boston. The sound is hollow, somehow dank, and there’s
good reason for that: Shaft 12 is a hundred and twenty-five feet deep. The men cannot understand why she chose to do it the way she did, but they can see
what

she did all too clearly, can see her sitting on the stone floor with her feet dangling; she looks like a nakedy version of the girl on the White Rock labels. She takes a final look over her shoulder, perhaps, to make sure her billfold and her passport are still where she put them.
She wants someone to know who passed this way, and there is something hideously,
unassuageably sad about that. One look back, and then she slips into the eclipse between

the partially dislodged cover and the side of the shaft. Perhaps she held her nose, like a kid
cannonballing into the community swimming pool. Perhaps not. Either way, she is gone in
less than a second. Hello darkness my old friend.
11
Old Mr Beckwith’s final words on the subject before driving on down the road in his
mail-truck had been these:
Way I heard it, the folks in Boston’ll be drinking her in their
morning coffee tight around Valentine’s Day.

Then he’d given Jonesy a grin.
I don’t drink
the water myself, I stick to beer.
In Massachusetts, as in Australia, you say that
beah.
12
Jonesy had paced around his office twelve or fourteen times now. He stopped for a moment behind his desk chair, absently rubbing his hip, then set off again, still counting,
good old obsessive-compulsive Jonesy.
One…two…three…
The story of the Russian woman was certainly a fine one, a superior example of the

Small Town Creepy Yarn (haunted houses where multiple murders had taken place and the
sites of terrible roadside accidents were also good), and it certainly cast a clear light on Mr Gray’s plans for Lad, the unfortunate border collie, but what good did it do
him
to know where Mr Gray was going? After all…
Back to the chair again,
forty-eight, forty-nine, fifty,
and
wait

a minute, just wait a goddam minute. The first time he’d gone around the room, he’d done it in just thirty-four
paces, hadn’t he? So how could it be fifty this time? He wasn’t shuffling, taking baby steps, anything like that, so how-You’ve been making it bigger. Walking around it and making it bigger. Because you

were restless. It’s your room, after all. I bet you could make it as big as the Waldorf-Astoria ballroom, if you wanted to…and Mr Gray couldn’t stop you.
“Is that possible?” Jonesy whispered. He stood by his desk chair, one hand on the back, like a man posing for a portrait. He didn’t need an answer to his question; eyesight
was enough. The room
was
bigger.
Henry was coming. If he had Duddits with him, following Mr Gray would be easy

enough no matter how many times Mr Gray changed vehicles, because Duddits saw the
line. He had led them to Richie Grenadeau in a dream, later he had led them to Josie Rinkenhauer in reality, and he could direct Henry now as easily as a keen-nosed hound leads a hunter to the fox’s earth. The problem was the
lead,
the goddam
lead
that Mr Gray had. An hour at least. Maybe more. And once Mr Gray had chucked the dog down Shaft

12, there went your ballgame. There’d be time to shut off Boston’s water supply-
theoretically-but could Henry convince anyone to take such an enormous, disruptive step?
Jonesy doubted it. And what about all the people along the way who would drink the water almost immediately? Sixty-five hundred in Ware, eleven thousand in Athol, over a
hundred and fifty thousand in Worcester. Those people would have weeks instead of
months. Only days in some cases.

Was there any way to slow the son of a bitch down? Give Henry a chance to catch
up?
Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, and as he did, something in the room changed-
there was a sigh, almost, the sort of sound ghosts are reputed to make at seances. But this
was no ghost, and Jonesy felt his arms prickle. At the same time his eyes filled with tears.
A line from Thomas Wolfe occurred to him-
o lost, a stone, a leaf, a unfound door.

Thomas Wolfe, whose thesis had been that you can’t go home again.
“Duddits?” he whispered. The hair on his neck had stiffened. “Duddie, is that you?”
No answer… but when he looked at the desk where the useless phone had stood, he
saw that something new had been added. Not a stone or a leaf, not an unfound door, but a
cribbage board and a deck of cards.
Someone wanted to play the game.
13
Hurt pretty much all the time now. Mumma know, he tell Mumma. Jesus know, he

tell Jesus. He don’t tell Henry, Henry hurts too, Henry tired and make sad. Beaver and Pete are in heaven where they sitteth at the right hand of God the Father all mighty, maker
of heaven and earth forever and ever, Jesus” sake, hey man. That makes him sad, they were good friends and played games but never made fun. Once they found Josie and once
they saw a tall guy, he a cowboy, and once they play the game.
This a game too, only Pete used to say

Duddits it doesn’t matter if you win or booze
it’s how you play the game
only this time it
does
matter, it
does,
Jonesy say it does, Jonesy hard of hearing but pretty soon it’ll be better, pretty soon. If only he don’t hurt. Even his
Perco don’t help. His throat make sore and his body shakes and his belly make hurry kind
of like when he has to go poopoo,
kind
of like that, but he doesn’t
have

to go poopoo, and when he cough sometimes make blood. He would like to sleep but there is Henry and his
new friend Owen that was there the day they found Josie and they say
If only we could
slow him down
and
If only we could catch up
and he has to stay awake and help them but he has to close his eyes to hear Jonesy and they think he’s asleep, Owen says
Shouldn’t we
wake him up, what if the son of a bitch turns off somewhere,
and Henry says
I tell you I

know where he’s going, but we’ll wake him up at 1-90 just to be sure. For now let him
sleep, my God, he looks so tired.
And again, only this time thinking it:
If only we could
slow the son of a bitch down.
Eyes closed. Arms crossed over his aching chest. Breathing slow, Mumma say
breathe slow when you cough. Jonesy’s not dead, not in heaven with Beaver and Pete, but

Mr Gray say Jonesy locked and Jonesy believes him. Jonesy’s in the office, no phone and
no facts, hard to talk to because Mr Gray is mean and Mr Gray is scared. Scared Jonesy
will find out which one is really locked up.
When did they talk most?
When they played the game.
The game.
A shudder racks him. He has to make hard think and it hurts, he can feel it stealing

away his strength, the last little bits of his strength, but this time it’s more than just a game, this time it matters who wins and who boozes, so he gives his strength, he makes
the board and he makes the cards, Jonesy is crying, Jonesy thinks
o lost
, but Duddits Cavell isn’t lost, Duddits sees the line, the line goes to the office, and this time he will do more than peg the pegs.
Don’t cry Jonesy,

he says, and the words are clear, in his mind they always are, it is only his stupid mouth that mushes them up.
Don’t cry, I’m not lost.
Eyes closed. Arms crossed.
In Jonesy’s office, beneath the dreamcatcher, Duddits plays the game.
14
“I’ve got the dog,” Henry said. He sounded exhausted. “The one Perlmutter’s homed
in on. I’ve got it. We’re a little bit closer. Christ, if there was just a way to slow them down!”

It was raining now, and Owen could only hope they’d be south of the freeze-line if it
went over to sleet. The wind was gusting hard enough to sway the Hummer on the road. It
was noon, and they were between Saco and Biddeford. Owen glanced into the rearview mirror and saw Duddits in the back seat, eyes closed, head back, skinny arms crossed on
his chest. His complexion was an alarming yellow, but a thin line of bright blood trickled
from the comer of his mouth.

“Is there any way your friend can help?” Owen asked.
“I think he’s trying.”
“I thought you said he was asleep.”
Henry turned, looked at Duddits, then looked at Owen. “I was wrong,” he said.
15
Jonesy dealt the cards, threw two into the crib from his hand, then picked up the other
hand and added two more.
“Don’t cry, Jonesy. Don’t cry, I’m not lost.”
Jonesy glanced up at the dreamcatcher, quite sure the words had come from there.

“I’m not crying, Duds. Fuckin allergies, that’s all. Now I think you want to play-”
“Two,” said the voice from the dreamcatcher.
Jonesy played the deuce from Duddits’s hand-not a bad lead, actually-then played a
seven from his own. That made nine. Duddits had a six in his hand; the question was whether or not-
“Six for fifteen,” said the voice from the dreamcatcher. “Fifteen for two. Kiss my bender!”

Jonesy laughed in spite of himself It was Duddits, all right, but for a moment he had
sounded just like the Beav. “Go on and peg it, then.” And watched, fascinated, as one of
the pegs on the board rose, floated, and settled back down in the second hole on First Street.
Suddenly he understood something.
“You could play all along, couldn’t you, Duds? You used to peg all crazy just because

it made us laugh.” The idea brought fresh tears to his eyes. All those years they’d thought they were playing with Duddits, he had been playing with them. And on that day behind
Tracker Brothers, who had found whom? Who had saved whom?
“Twenty-one,” he said. “Thirty-one for two.” From the dreamcatcher. And once again

the unseen hand lifted the peg and played it two holes farther on. “He’s blocked to me, Jonesy.” “I know.” Jonesy played a three. Duddits called thirteen, and Jonesy played it out
of Duddits’s hand. “But you’re not. You can talk to him.”
Jonesy played his own deuce and pegged two. Duddits played, pegged one for last
card, and Jonesy thought:
Outpegged by a retard-what do you know.
Except this Duddits
wasn’t
retarded. Exhausted and dying, but not retarded.

They pegged their hands, and Duddits was far ahead even though it had been
Jonesy’s crib. Jonesy swept the cards together and began to shuffle them.
“What does he want, Jonesy? What does he want besides water?”
Murder,
Jonesy thought.
He likes to kill people.
But no more of that. Please God, no more of that.
“Bacon,” he said. “He does like bacon.”
He began to shuffle the cards… then froze as Duddits filled his mind. The real

Duddits, young and strong and ready to fight.
16
Behind them, in the back seat, Duddits groaned loudly. Henry turned and saw fresh
blood, red as byrus, running from his nostrils. His face was twisted in a terrible cramp of
concentration. Beneath their closed lids, his eyeballs rolled rapidly back and forth.
“What’s the matter with him?” Owen asked. “I don’t know.”
Duddits began to cough: deep and racking bronchial sounds. Blood flew from
between his lips in a fine spray.

“Wake him up, Henry! For Christ’s sake, wake him up!”
Henry gave Owen Underhill a frightened look. They were approaching
Kennebunkport now, no more than twenty miles from the New Hampshire border, a
hundred and ten from the Quabbin Reservoir. Jonesy had a picture of the Quabbin on the
wall of his office; Henry had seen it. And a cottage nearby, in Ware.
Duddits cried out: a single word repeated three times between bursts of coughing.

The sprays of blood weren’t heavy, not yet, the stuff was coming from his mouth and throat, but if his lungs began to rupture-
“Wake him up! He says he’s aching! Can’t you hear him-”
“He’s not saying aykin.”
“What, then? What?”
“He’s saying
bacon.”
17
The entity which now thought of itself as Mr Gray-who thought of
himself
as Mr Gray-had a serious problem, but at least it
(he)
knew it.
Forewarned is forearmed

was how Jonesy put it. There were hundreds of such sayings in Jonesy’s storage cartons, perhaps thousands. Some of them Mr Gray found
utterly incomprehensible-
A nod’s as good as a wink to a blind horse
was one such,
What
goes around comes around
was another-but
forewarned is forearmed
was a good one.
His problem could be best summed up with how he felt about Jonesy… and of course
that he felt at all was bad enough. He could think

Now Jonesy is cut off and I have solved
my problem; I have quarantined him just as their military tried to quarantine us. I am
being followed-chased, intact-but barring engine trouble or a flat tire, neither group of
followers has much chance of catching me. I have too great a lead.
These things were facts-truth-but they had no savor. What had savor was the idea of
going to the door behind which his reluctant host was imprisoned and yelling: “
I fixed you,

didn’t I? I fixed your little red wagon, didn’t I?”
What a wagon, red or otherwise, had to do with any of this Mr Gray didn’t know, but it was an emotional bullet of fairly high caliber from Jonesy’s armory-it had a deep and satisfying childhood resonance. And then
he would stick Jonesy’s tongue (my
tongue now,
Mr Gray thought with undeniable satisfaction) between Jonesy’s lips and “give him the old raspberry”.

As for the followers, he wanted to drop Jonesy’s pants and show them Jonesy’s
buttocks. This was as senseless as
What goes around comes around,
as senseless as
little
red wagon,
but he wanted to do it. It was called “mooning the assholes” and he wanted to do it.

He was, Mr Gray realized, infected with this world’s byrus. It began with emotion, progressed to sensory awareness (the taste of food, the undeniable savage pleasure of making the State Trooper beat his head in against the tiled bathroom wall-the hollow
thud-thud
of it), and then progressed to what Jonesy called
higher thinking.
This was a joke, in Mr Gray’s view, not much different from calling shit reprocessed food or genocide ethnic
cleansing. And yet

thinking
had its attractions for a being which had always existed as part of a vegetative mind, a sort of highly intelligent not-consciousness.
Before Mr Gray had shut him up, Jonesy had suggested that he give over his mission
and simply enjoy being human. Now he discovered that desire in himself as his previously
harmonious mind,
his not-conscious

mind, began to fragment, to turn into a crowd of opposing voices, some wanting A, some wanting B, some wanting Q squared and divided
by Z. He would have thought such babble would be horrible, the stuff of madness. Instead he found himself enjoying the wrangle.
There was bacon. There was “sex with Carla”, which Jonesy’s mind identified as a

superlatively enjoyable act, involving both sensory and emotional input. There was fast driving and bumper pool in O’Leary’s Bar near Fenway Park and beer and live bands that
played loud and Patty Loveless singing “Blame it on your lyin cheatin cold deadbeatin two-timin double-dealin mean mistreatin lovin heart” (whatever
that
meant). There was the look of the land rising from the fog on a summer morning. And murder, of course.
There was that.

His problem was that if he didn’t finish this business quickly, he might never finish it
at all. He was no longer byrum but Mr Gray. How long before he left Mr Gray behind and
became Jonesy?
It’s not going to happen,
he thought. He pressed the accelerator down, and although it didn’t have much, the Subaru gave him a little more. In the back seat the dog yipped…
then howled in pain. Mr Gray sent out his mind and touched the byrum growing inside the

dog. It was growing fast. Almost too fast. And here was something else-there was no pleasure in meeting its mind, none of the warmth that comes when like encounters like.
The mind of the byrum felt cold… rancid…
“
Alien,”
he muttered.
Nevertheless, he quieted it. When the dog went into the water supply, the byrum
should still be inside. It would need time to adapt. The dog would drown, but the byrum

would live yet awhile, feeding on the dog’s dead body, until it was time. But first he had to
get there.
It wouldn’t be long now.
As he drove west on I-90, past little towns
(shitsplats, Jonesy
thought them, but not
without affection) like Westborough, Grafton, and Dorothy Pond (getting closer now,
maybe forty miles to go), he looked for a place to put his new and uneasy consciousness

where it wouldn’t get him in trouble. He tried Jonesy’s kids, then backed away-far too emotional. Tried Duddits again, but that was still a blank; Jonesy had stolen the memories.
Finally he settled on Jonesy’s work, which was teaching history, and his specialty, which
was gruesomely fascinating. Between 1860 and 1865, it seemed America had split in two,

as byrus colonies did near the end of each growth cycle. There had been all sorts of causes, the chief of which had to do with “slavery”, but again, this was like calling shit or
vomit reprocessed food. “Slavery” meant nothing. “Right of secession” meant nothing.
“Preserving the Union” meant nothing. Basically, they had just done what these creatures

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