Dreamcatcher

He set off up East Street through the thickening snow, wearing the sleeping border collie like a fur stole.
2
The new snow was extremely slippery, and once they were on Route 32, Freddy was

forced to drop his speed back to forty. Kurtz felt like howling with frustration. Worse, Perlmutter was slipping away from him, into something like a semi-coma. And this at a time, goddam him, when he had suddenly been able to read the one Owen and his new friends were after, the one they called Mr Gray.

“He’s too busy to hide,” Pearly said. He spoke dreamily, like someone on the edge of sleep. “He’s afraid. I don’t know about Underhill, boss, but Jonesy… Henry… Duddits…
he’s afraid of them. And he’s right to be afraid. They killed Richie.”
“Who’s Richie, buck?” Kurtz didn’t give much of a squirt, but he wanted Perlmutter
to stay awake. He sensed they were coming to a place where he wouldn’t need Perlmutter
anymore, but for now he still did.

“Don’t… know…” The last word became a snore. The Humvee skidded almost
sideways. Freddy cursed, fought the wheel, and managed to regain control just before the
Hummer hit the ditch. Kurtz took no notice. He leaned over the seat and slapped
Perlmutter on the side of the face, hard. As he did so, they passed the store with the sign
reading BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT? in the window.
“
Owwww!
Pearly” s eyes fluttered open. The whites were now yellowish. Kurtz cared

about this no more than he cared about Richie
. “Dooon’t, boss…
“Where are they now?”
“The water,” Pearly said. His voice was weak, that of a petulant invalid. The belly under his coat was a distended, occasionally twitching mountain.
Ma Joad in her ninth
month, God bless and keep us,
Kurtz thought. “The waaaa…”
His eyes closed again. Kurtz drew his hand back to slap.
“Let him sleep,” Freddy said.
Kurtz looked at him, eyebrows raised.

“It’s got to be the Reservoir he means. And if it is, we don’t need him anymore.” He
pointed through the windshield at the tracks of the few cars that had been out this afternoon ahead of them on Route 32. They were black and stark against the fall of fresh
white snow. “There won’t be anyone up there today but us, boss. Just us.”
“Praise God.” Kurtz sat back, picked his nine-millimeter up off the seat, looked at it,
and put it back in its holster. “Tell me something, Freddy.”

“I will if I can.”
“When this is over, how does Mexico sound to you?”
“Good. As long as we don’t drink the water.”
Kurtz burst out laughing and patted Freddy on the shoulder. Beside Freddy, Archie
Perlmutter slipped deeper into coma. Inside his lower intestine, in that rich dump of discarded food and worn-out dead cells, something for the first time opened its black eyes.
3
Two stone posts marked the entrance to the vast acreage surrounding the Quabbin

Reservoir. Beyond them, the road closed down to what was essentially a single lane, and Henry had a sense of having come full circle. It wasn’t Massachusetts, but Maine, and although the sign said Quabbin Access, it was really the Deep Cut Road all over again, He

actually found himself looking up at the leaden sky, half-expecting to see the dancing lights. What he saw instead was a bald eagle, soaring almost close enough to touch. It landed on the lower branch of a pine tree and watched them go by.
Duddits raised his head from where it had lain against the cool glass and said, “Isser
Ay walkin now. “Henry’s heart leaped. “Owen, did you hear?”
“I heard,” Owen said, and pressed the Humvee a little harder. The wet snow beneath

them was as treacherous as ice, and with the state roads behind them, there was now only
a single set of tracks leading north toward the Reservoir.
We’ll be leaving our own set,
Henry thought.
If Kurtz gets this far, he won’t need
telepathy.
Duddits groaned, clutched his middle, and shivered all over. “Ennie, I sick. Duddits
sick.”
Henry brushed Duddits’s hairless brow, not liking the heat
of

the skin. What came next? Seizures, probably. A big one might take Duds off in a hurry, given his weakened condition, and God knew that might be a mercy. The best thing. Still, it hurt to think of it.
Henry Devlin, the potential suicide. And instead of him, the darkness had swallowed his
friends, one by one.
“You hang in there, Duds. Almost done now.” But he had an idea the toughest part
might still be ahead.
Duddits’s eyes opened again. “Isser Ay-ot
tuck.”

“What?” Owen asked. “I didn’t get that one.”
“He says Mr Gray got stuck,” Henry said, still brushing Duddit’s brow. Wishing there
was hair to brush, and remembering when there had been. Duddits’s fine blond hair. His
crying had hurt them, had chopped into their heads like a dull blade, but how happy his
laughter had made them-you heard Duddits Cavell laugh and for a little while you

believed the old lies again: that life was good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, had some purpose. That there was light as well as darkness.
“Why doesn’t he just throw the goddam dog into the Reservoir?” Owen asked. His
voice cracked with weariness. “Why does he feel he has to go all the way to this Shaft 12?
Is it just because the Russian woman did?”
“I don’t think the Reservoir is sure enough for him,” Henry said. “The Standpipe

would have been good, but the aqueduct is even better. It’s an intestine sixty-five miles long. And Shaft 12 is the throat. Duddits, can we catch him?”
Duddits looked at him from his exhausted eyes, then shook his head. Owen pounded
his own thigh in frustration. Duddits wet his lips. Spoke two words in a hoarse near-whisper. Owen heard them but couldn’t make them out.
“What? What did he say?”
“‘Only Jonesy.””
“What does that mean? Only Jonesy what?”

“Only Jonesy can stop him, I guess.”
The Hummer skidded again and Henry grabbed hold of the seat. A cold hand closed
over his, Duddits was looking at him with desperate intensity. He tried to speak and began
coughing instead, gruesome wet hacking sounds. Some of the blood that came out of his
mouth was markedly lighter, frothy and almost pink. Henry thought it was lung-blood.
And even while the coughs shook him, Duddits’s grip on Henry’s hand didn’t loosen.

“Think it to me,” Henry said. “Can you think it to me, Duds?” For a moment there
was nothing but Duddits’s cold hand closed over his, Duddits’s eyes locked on his. Then
Duddits and the khaki interior of the Humvee, with its faded scent of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes, was gone. In its place Henry sees a pay telephone-the old-fashioned kind with different-sized holes on top, one for quarters, one for dimes, one for nickels. The

rumble of men’s voices and a clack-clacking sound, hauntingly familiar. After a moment
he realizes it’s the sound of checkers on a checkerboard. He’s looking at the pay phone in
Gosselin’s, the one from which they called Duddits after the death of Richie Grenadeau.
Jonesy made the actual call, because he was the only one with a phone he could bill it to.
The others gathered around, all of them still with their jackets on because it was so cold in

the store, even living in the big woods with trees all around him, Old Man Gosselin wouldn’t throw an extra log in the stove, what a fuckin pisser. There are two signs over the
phone. One reads PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS.
The other one-
There was a crunching bang. Duddits was thrown against the back of Henry’s seat
and Henry was thrown into the dashboard. Their hands parted. Owen had skidded off the

road and into the ditch. Ahead of them, the Subaru’s tracks, fading now under fresh cover,
ran off into the thickening snow.
“Henry! You all right?”
“Yeah. Duds? Okay?”
Duddits nodded, but the cheek he had struck was turning black with amazing speed.
Your Leukemia at Work for You.
Owen dropped the Humvee’s transmission into low range and began to creep up the
ditch. The Humvee was canted at a severe angle-maybe thirty degrees-but it rolled pretty
well once Owen got it moving.

“Fasten your seatbelt. First fasten his, though. “‘He was trying to tell me s-” “I don’t
give a damn what he was trying to tell you. This time we were all right, next time we could roll three-sixty. Fasten his belt, then your own.”
Henry did as he was told, thinking about the other sign over the pay phone. What had
it said? Something about Jonesy. Only Jonesy could stop Mr Gray now, that was the Gospel According to Duddits.
What had that other sign said?
4

Owen was forced to drop his speed to twenty. It made him crazy to creep like this,
but the wet snow was falling furiously now and visibility was back to nearly zero.
Just before the Subaru’s tracks disappeared entirely they came to the car itself, nose-
down in a water-carved ditch running across the road, passenger door open, rear wheels in
the air.
Owen stepped on the emergency brake, drew his Glock, opened his door. “Stay here,
Henry,” he said, and got out. He ran to the Subaru, bent low.

Henry unlatched his seatbelt and turned to Duddits, who was now sprawled against
the back seat, gasping for breath, held in a sitting position only by the seatbelt. One cheek
was a waxy yellow; the other had been engulfed by spreading blood under the skin. His
nose was bleeding again, the wads of cotton sticking out of the nostrils soaked and dripping.
“Duds, I’m so sorry,” Henry said. “This is a fuckarow.”

Duddits nodded, then raised his arms. He could only hold them up for a few seconds,
but to Henry his meaning seemed obvious enough. Henry opened his door and got out just
as Owen came running back, his Glock now stuffed in his belt. The air was so thick with
snow, the individual flakes so huge, that breathing had become difficult.
“I thought I told you to stay where you were,” Owen said.
“I only want to get in the back with him.”
“Why?”

Henry spoke clearly enough, although his voice trembled slightly. “Because he’s
dying,” he said. “He’s dying, but I think he has one more thing to tell me first.”
5
Owen looked in the rearview mirror, saw Henry with his arms around Duddits, saw
they were both wearing their seatbelts, and fastened his own.
“Hold him good,” he said. “There’s going to be a hell of a jounce.
He reversed a hundred feet, put the Hummer in low, and drove forward, aiming for

the spot between the abandoned Subaru and the righthand ditch. The crack in the road looked a little narrower on that side.
There was indeed a hell of a jounce. Owen’s seatbelt locked and he saw Duddits’s body leap in Henry’s arms. Duddits’s bald head bounced against Henry’s chest. Then they
were over the crack and once more rolling up East Street. Owen could just make out the
last phantom shapes of shoeprints on the now-white ribbon of the road. Mr Gray was on

foot and they were still rolling. If they could catch up before the bastard cut into the woods-But they didn’t.
6
With a final tremendous effort, Duddits raised his head. Now, Henry saw with dismay
and horror, Duddits’s eyes were also filling with blood.
Clack. Clack-clack.
The dry chuckles of old men as someone accomplishes the fabled
triple jump. The phone began to swim into his field of vision again. And the signs over it.

“No, Duddits,” Henry whispered. “Don’t try. Save your strength.”
But for what? For what if not for this?
The sign on the right: PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, Smells of tobacco,
smells of woodsmoke, the old brine of pickles. His friend’s arms around him.
And the sign on the left: CALL JONESY NOW.
“Duddits…” His voice floating in the darkness. Darkness, his old friend. “Duddits, I
don’t know
how.”
Duddits’s voice came to him a final time, very tired but calm:

Quick, Henry-I can
only hold on a little longer-you need to talk to him.
Henry picks the telephone’s receiver out of its cradle. Thinks absurdly (but isn’t the
whole situation absurd?) that he doesn’t have any change not so much as a crying dime.
Holds the phone to his ear.
Roberta Cavell’s voice comes, impersonal and businesslike: “Massachusetts General
Hospital, how may I direct your call?”
7
Mr Gray flailed Jonesy’s body along the path which ran up the east side of the

Reservoir from the point where East Street ended, slipping, falling, grabbing branches, getting up again. Jonesy’s knees were lacerated, the pants tom open and soaked with
blood. His lungs were burning, his heart beating like a steam-hammer. Yet the only thing that concerned him was Jonesy’s hip, the one he’d broken in the accident. It was a hot and
throbbing ball, shooting pain all the way down the thigh to the knee, and up to the middle

of his back along the road of his spine. The weight of the dog made things worse. It was
still asleep, but the thing inside was wide awake, held in place only by Mr Gray’s will.
Once, as he was rising to his feet, the hip locked up entirely and Mr Gray had to beat it
repeatedly with Jonesy’s gloved fist to make it let go again. How much farther? How much farther through the cursed, stifling, blinding, neverending snow? And what was

Jonesy up to? Anything? Mr Gray didn’t dare let go of the byrum’s restless hunger-it had
nothing even approaching a mind-long enough to go to the door of the locked room and
listen.
A phantom shape appeared ahead in the snow. Mr Gray paused, gasping and peering
at it, and then fought his way forward again, holding the dog’s limp paws and dragging Jonesy’s right foot.
Here was a sign nailed to the trunk of a tree: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM

SHAFT HOUSE. Fifty feet beyond it, stone steps rose up from the path. Six of them… no,
eight. At the top was a stone building on a stone foundation that jutted out into the snowy
gray nothing where the Reservoir lay-Jonesy’s ears could hear water lapping against stone
even over the rushing, labored beat of his heart.
He had come to the place. Clutching the dog and using the last of Jonesy’s depleted
strength, Mr Gray began to totter up the snow-covered steps.
8

As they passed between the stone posts marking the entrance to the Reservoir, Kurtz
said: “Pull over, Freddy. Side of the road.”
Freddy did as he was asked without question.
“You got your auto, laddie?”
Freddy lifted it. The good old M-16, tried and true. Kurtz nodded.
“Sidearm?”
“.44 Magnum, boss.”
And Kurtz with the nine, which he liked for close work. He
wanted
this to be close
work. He wanted to see the color of Owen Underhill’s brains.
“Freddy?”
“Yes, boss.”

“I just wanted you to know that this is my final mission, and I couldn’t have hoped
for a finer companion.” He reached out and gave Freddy’s shoulder a squeeze. Beside
Freddy, Perlmutter snored with his Ma Joad face tipped up toward the roof Five minutes or so before reaching the stone pillars he had passed several long, spectacularly
odoriferous farts. After that, Pearly’s distended gut had gone down again. Probably for the
last time, Kurtz thought.

Freddy’s eyes, meanwhile, had grown gratifyingly bright. Kurtz was delighted. He
had not entirely lost his touch even now, it seemed.
“All right, buck,” Kurtz said. “Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Right?”
“Right, sir.” Kurtz guessed
sir
was okay again now. They could pretty well put the protocols of the mission behind them. They were Quantrill’s boys, now; two final
jayhawkers riding the western Massachusetts range.

With an unmistakable little grimace of distaste, Freddy jerked a thumb at Perlmutter.
“Want me to try waking him up, sir? He may be too far gone, but-”
“Why bother?” Kurtz asked. Still gripping Freddy’s shoulder, he pointed ahead,
where the access road disappeared into a wall of white: the snow. The goddam snow that
had chased them all his way, a grim fucking reaper dressed in white instead of black. The

tracks of the Subaru were now entirely gone, but those of the Humvee Owen had stolen
were still visible. If they moved along briskly, praise God, following these tracks would be
a walk in the park. “I don’t think we need him anymore, which I personally find a great
relief Go, Freddy. Go.”
The Humvee flirted her tail and then steadied. Kurtz drew his nine and held it against
his leg.
Coming for you, Owen. Coming for you, buck. And you better get your speech

ready for God, because you’re going to be making it just about an hour from now.
9
The office which he had furnished so beautifully-furnished out of his mind and his memories-was now falling apart.
Jonesy limped restlessly back and forth, looking around the room, lips pressed so
tightly together they were white, forehead beaded with sweat even though it had gotten damned cold in here,

This was The Fall of the Office of Jonesy instead of the House of Usher. The furnace
was howling and clanking beneath him, making the floor shake. White stuff-frost crystals,
maybe-puffed in through the vent and left a powdery triangular shape on the wall. Where
it touched it went to work on the wood paneling, simultaneously rotting it and warping it.
The pictures fell one by one, tumbling to the floor like suicides. The Eames chair-the one

he’d always wanted, the very one-split in two as if it had been hacked by an invisible axe.
The mahogany panels on the walls began to split and peel free like dead skin. The drawers
juddered out of their places in the desk and clattered one by one to the floor. The shutters
Mr Gray had installed to block his view of the outside world were vibrating and shaking,
producing a steady metallic squalling that set Jonesy’s teeth on edge.

Crying out to Mr Gray, demanding to know what was going on, would be useless…
and besides, Jonesy had all the information he needed. He had slowed Mr Gray down, but
Mr Gray had first risen to the challenge and then above it.
Viva
Mr Gray, who had either reached his goal or almost reached it. As the paneling fell off the walls, he could see the
dirty Sheetrock beneath: the walls of the Tracker Brothers office as four boys had seen it

in 1978, lined up with their foreheads to the glass, their new chum standing behind them
as bidden, waiting for them to be done with whatever it was they were doing, waiting for
them to take him home. Now another wood panel tore loose, coming off the wall with a

sound like tearing paper, and beneath it was a bulletin board with a single photo, a Polaroid, tacked to it. Not a beauty queen, not Tina Jean Schlossinger, but just some woman with her skirt hiked to the bottom of her panties, pretty stupid. The nice rug on the
floor suddenly shrivelled like skin, revealing dirty Tracker Brothers tile beneath, and those
white tadpoles, scumbags left by couples who came in here to screw beneath the

disinterested gaze of the Polaroid woman who was no one, really, just an artifact of a hollow past.

He paced, lurching on his bad hip, which hadn’t hurt this badly since just after the accident, and he understood all of this, oh yes indeed, you had better believe it. His hip was full of splinters and ground glass; his shoulders and neck ached with a fierce tiredness. Mr Gray was beating his body to death as he made his final charge and there was nothing Jonesy could do about it.

The dreamcatcher was still okay. Swaying back and forth in great looping arcs, but still okay. Jonesy fixed his eyes on it. He had thought himself ready to die, but he didn’t

want to go like this, not in this stinking office. Outside of it, they had once done something good, something almost noble. To die in here, beneath the dusty, indifferent gaze of the woman pinned to the bulletin board… that didn’t seem fair. Never mind the rest of the world; he, Gary Jones of Brookline, Massachusetts, once of Derry, Maine, lately of the Jefferson Tract, deserved better.
“
Please, I deserve better than this!”

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