Dreamcatcher

“Plenty of time,” he muttered, and that might be true of Kurtz, but what about the other end? Where was Mr Gray now?Holding the MP5 by the strap, Owen started down
the path that led to Shaft 12.
14
Mr Gray had discovered another unlovely human emotion: panic. He had come all
this way-light-years through space, miles through the snow-to be balked by Jonesy’s

muscles, which were weak and out of shape, and the iron shaft cover, which was much heavier than he had expected. He yanked down on the crowbar until Jonesy’s back-muscles screamed in agonized protest… and was finally rewarded by a brief wink of
darkness from beneath the edge of the rusty iron. And a grinding sound as it moved a bit-
perhaps no more than an inch or two-on the concrete. Then Jonesy’s lower back muscles

locked up and Mr Gray staggered away from the shaft, crying out through clenched teeth
(thanks to his immunity, Jonesy still had a full set of them) and pressing his hands to the
base of Jonesy’s spine, as if to keep it from exploding.

Lad let out a series of yipping whines. Mr Gray looked at him and saw that things had now reached the critical juncture. Although he was still asleep, Lad’s abdomen was now so grotesquely swelled that one of his legs stuck stiffly up in the air. The skin of his
lower belly had stretched to the point of splitting, and the veins there pulsed with clocklike
rapidity. A trickle of bright blood spilled out from beneath his tall.

Mr Gray looked balefully at the crowbar jutting from the slot in the iron cover. In Jonesy’s imagination, the Russian woman had been a slim beauty with dark hair and dark
tragic eyes. In reality, Mr Gray thought, she must have been broad-shouldered and
muscular. How else could she have-
There was a blast of gunfire, alarmingly close. Mr Gray gasped and looked around.
Thanks to Jonesy, the human corrosion of doubt was also part of his makeup now, and for

the first time he realized that he might be balked-yes, even here, so close to his goal that he could
hear
it, the sound of rushing water starting on its sixty-mile underground journey.
And all that stood between the byrum and this whole world was a circular iron plate weighing a hundred and twenty pounds.
Screaming a thin and desperate litany of Beaver-curses, Mr Gray rushed forward,

Jonesy’s failing body jerking back and forth on the defective pivot-point of its right hip.
One of them was coming, the one called Owen, and Mr Gray dared not believe he could
make this Owen turn his weapon on himself Given time, given the element of surprise, maybe. Now he had neither. And this man who was coming had been trained to kill; it was
his career.
Mr Gray leaped into the air. There was a snap, quite audible, as Jonesy’s overstressed

hip broke free of the swollen socket which had held it. Mr Gray landed on the crowbar with Jonesy’s full weight. The edge lifted again, and this time the cover slid almost a foot
across the concrete. The black crescent through which the Russian woman had slipped appeared again. Not much of a crescent, really no more than a delicate capital C drawn with a calligrapher’s pen but enough for the dog.

Jonesy’s leg would no longer support Jonesy’s weight (and where
was
Jonesy, anyway? Still not a murmur from his troublesome host), but that was all right. Crawling
would do now. Mr Gray worked his way in such fashion across the cold cement floor to
where the sleeping border collie lay, seized Lad by his collar, and began to drag him back
to Shaft 12.
15

The Hall of Memories-that vast repository of boxes-is also on the verge of shaking itself apart. The floor shudders as if in the grip of an endless slow earthquake. Overhead,
the fluorescents flicker on and off, giving the place a stuttery, hallucinatory look. In places tall stacks of cartons have fallen over, blocking some of the corridors.

Jonesy runs as best he can, He moves from corridor to corridor, threading his way through this maze purely on instinct. He tells himself repeatedly to ignore the goddam hip,
he is nothing but mind now, anyway, but he might as well be an amputee trying to convince his missing limb to stop throbbing.
He runs past boxes marked AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN WAR and DEPARTMENTAL
POLITICS and CHILDREN’s STORIES and CONTENTS OF UPSTAIRS CLOSET. He

hurdles a pile of tumbled boxes marked CARLA, Comes down on his bad leg, and
screams at the pain.
He clutches more boxes (these marked GETTYSBURG) in order to keep from
falling, and at last sees the far side of the storage room. Thank God; it seems to him that
he has run miles.
The door is marked ICU and QUIET PLEASE and NO VISITORS W/O PASS. And
that is right; this is where they took him; this is where he had awakened and heard crafty

old Mr Death pretending to call for Marcy.
Jonesy bangs through the door and into another world, one he recognizes: the blue-
over-white ICU corridor where he took his first painful, tentative steps four days after his
surgery. He stumbles a dozen feet down the tiled corridor, sees the splotches of byrus growing on the walls, hears the Muzak, which is decidedly un-hospital-like; although it’s
turned low, it appears to be the Rolling Stones singing “Sympathy for the Devil”.

He has no more than identified this song when his hip suddenly goes nuclear. Jonesy
utters a surprised scream and falls to the black-and-red ICU tiles, clutching at himself This
is how it was Just after he was hit: an explosion of red agony. He rolls over and over, looking up at the glowing light-panels, at the circular speakers from which the music
(“Anastasia screamed in vain”)
is coming, music from another world, when the pain is this bad

everything
is in another world, pain makes a shadow of substance and a mockery even of love, that is something he learned in March and must learn again now. He rolls and he rolls, hands clutching at his swollen hip, eyes bulging, mouth pulled back in a vast
rictus, and he knows what has happened, all right: Mr Gray. That son of a bitch Mr Gray
has re-broken his hip.
Then, from far away in that other world, he hears a voice he knows, a kid’s voice.
Jonesy!

Echoing, distorted… but not that far away. Not this corridor, but one of the adjacent
ones. Whose voice? One of his own kids? John, maybe? No-
Jonesy, you have to hurry! He’s coming to kill you! Owen is coming to kill you!
He doesn’t know who Owen is, but he knows who that voice belongs to: Henry
Devlin. But not as it is now, or as it was when he last saw Henry, going off to Gosselin’s
Market with Pete; this is the voice of the Henry he grew up with, the one who told Richie

Grenadeau that they’d tell on him if he didn’t stop, that Richie and his friends would never
catch Pete because Pete ran like the fucking
wind.
I can’t!
he calls back, still rolling on the floor. He is aware that something has changed, is still changing, but not what,
I can’t, he broke my hip again, the son of a bitch
broke
-
And then he realizes what is happening to him:
the pain is running backward.

It’s like watching a videotape as it rewinds-the milk flows up from the glass to the carton, the flower which should be blooming through the miracle of time-lapse photography closes up, instead.
The reason is obvious when he looks down at himself and sees the bright orange
jacket he’s wearing. It’s the one his mother bought him in Sears for his first hunting trip to
Hole in the Wall, the trip when Henry got his deer and they all killed Richie Grenadeau

and his friends-killed them with a dream, maybe not meaning to but doing it just the same.
He has become a child again, a kid of fourteen, and there is no pain. Why would there be? His hip will not be broken for another twenty-three years. And then it all comes
together with a crash in his mind: there was never any Mr Gray, not really; Mr Gray lives in the dreamcatcher and nowhere else. He is no more real than the pain in his hip.
I was
immune,
he thinks, getting up.

I never got so much as a speck of the byrus. What’s in my
head isn’t quite a memory, not that, but a true ghost in the machine. He’s me. Dear God,
Mr Gray is me.
Jonesy scrambles to his feet and begins to run, almost losing his feet as he swerves
around a corner. He stays up, though; he is agile and quick as only a fourteen-year-old can
be, and there is no pain, no pain.
The next corridor is one he knows. There is a parked gurney with a bedpan on it.

Walking past it, moving delicately on tiny feet, is the deer he saw that day in Cambridge
just before he was struck. There is a collar around its velvety neck and swinging from it
like an oversized amulet is his Magic 8-Ball. Jonesy sprints past the deer, which looks at
him with mild, surprised eyes.
Jonesy!
Close now. Very close.
Jonesy, hurry!
Jonesy redoubles his speed, feet flying, young lungs breathing easily, there is no

byrus because he is immune, there is no Mr Gray, not in
him
, at least, Mr Gray is in the hospital and always was, Mr Gray is the phantom limb you still feel, the one you could swear is still there, Mr Gray is the ghost in the machine, the ghost on life support, and the
life support is him.
He turns another comer. Here are three doors which are standing open. Beyond them,

by the fourth door, the only one that is closed, Henry is standing. Henry is fourteen, as Jonesy is; Henry is wearing an orange coat, as Jonesy is. His glasses have slid down on his
nose just as they always did, and he is beckoning urgently.
Hurry up! Hurry up, Jonesy! Duddits can’t hold on much longer! If he dies before we
kill Mr Gray-
Jonesy joins Henry at the door. He wants to throw his arms around him, embrace
him, but there’s no time.
This is all my fault,

he tells Henry, and his voice is higher in pitch than it has been in years.
Not true,
Henry says. He’s looking at Jonesy with the old impatience that awed Jonesy and Pete and Beaver as children Henry always seemed farther ahead, always on the
verge of sprinting into the future and leaving the rest of them behind. They always seemed
to be holding him back.
But
-
You might as well say that Duddits murdered Richie Grenadeau and that we were his

accomplices. He was what he was, Jonesy, and he made us what we are…but not on
purpose. It was all he could do to tie his shoes on purpose, don’t you know that?
And Jonesy thinks:
Fit wha? Fit neek?
Henry…is Duddits
-
He’s holding on for us, Jonesy, I told you. Holding us together.
In the dreamcatcher.
That’s tight. So are we going to stand out here arguing in the hall while the world

goes down the chute, or are we going to-We’re going to kill the son of a bitch,
Jonesy says, and reaches for the doorknob.
Above it is a sign reading THERE IS NO INFECTION HERE, IL N’Y A PAS
D’INFECTION ICI, and suddenly he sees both of that sign’s bitter edges. It’s like one of
those Escher optical illusions. Look at it from one angle and it’s true. Look at it from another and it’s the most monstrous lie in the universe.
Dreamcatcher,

Jonesy thinks, and turns the knob.
The room beyond the door is a byrus madhouse, a nightmare jungle overgrown with
creepers and vines and lianas twisted together in blood-colored plaits. The air reeks of sulfur and chilly ethyl alcohol, the smell of starter fluid sprayed into a balky carb on a subzero January morning. At least they don’t have the shit-weasel to worry about, not in

here; that’s on another strand of the dreamcatcher, in another place and time. The byrum is
Lad’s problem now; he’s a border collie with a very dim future.
The television is on, and although the screen is overgrown with byrus, a ghostly
black-and-white image comes straining through. A man is dragging the corpse of a dog across a concrete floor. Dusty and strewn with dead autumn leaves, it’s like a tomb in one

of the fifties horror flicks Jonesy still likes to watch on his VCR. But this isn’t a tomb; it is filled with the hollow sound of rushing water.
In the center of the floor there is a rusty circular cover with MWRA stamped on it:
Massachusetts Water Resources Authority. Even through the reddish serum on the TV
screen, these letters stand out. Of course they do. To Mr Gray-who died as a physical being all the way back at Hole in the Wall-they mean everything.

They mean, quite literally, the world.
The shaft-lid has been partly pushed aside, revealing a crescent shape of absolute
darkness. The man dragging the dog is himself, Jonesy realizes, and the dog isn’t quite dead. It is leaving a trail of frothy pink blood behind on the concrete, and its back legs are
twitching. Almost paddling.
Never mind the movie,

Henry almost snarls, and Jonesy turns his attention to the figure in the bed, the gray thing with the byrus-speckled sheet pulled up to its chest, which
is a plain gray expanse of poreless, hairless, nippleless flesh. Although he can’t see now
because of the sheet, Jonesy knows there is no navel, either, because this thing was never
born. It is a child’s rendering of an alien, trolled directly from the subconscious minds of

those who first came in contact with the byrum. They never existed as actual creatures, aliens, ETs. The grays as physical beings were always created out of the human
imagination, out of the dreamcatcher, and knowing this affords Jonesy a measure of relief.
He wasn’t the only one who got fooled. At least there is that.
Something else pleases him: the look in those horrid black eyes.
It’s fear.
16

“I’m locked and loaded,” Freddy said quietly, drawing to a stop behind the Humvee
they had chased all these miles.
“Outstanding,” Kurtz said. “Recon that HMW. I’ll cover you.” “Right.” Freddy
looked at Perlmutter, whose belly was swelling again, then at Owen’s Hummer. The
reason for the rifle-fire they’d heard earlier was clear now: the Hummer had been shot up
pretty good. The only question left to be answered was who had been on the giving end

and who on the receiving. Tracks led away from the Hummer, growing indistinct under the
rapid snowfall, but for now clear enough to read. A single set. Boots. Probably Owen.
“Go on now, Freddy!”
Freddy got out into the snow. Kurtz slid out behind him and Freddy heard him rack
the slide of his personal. Depending on the nine-millimeter. Well, maybe that was all right;
he was good with it, no question of that.

Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn’t it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different.
Owen had crossed the line.
Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn’t like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn’t like that at all.
17
As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr Gray begins to push the CALL

button repeatedly, but nothing happens. I
think the works must be choked with byrus,
Jonesy thinks.
Too bad, Mr Gray-too bad for you.
He glances up at the TV and sees that his film self has gotten the dog to the edge of the shaft. Maybe they’re too late after all;
maybe not. There’s no way to tell. The wheel is still spinning.
Hello, Mr Gray, I’ve so much wanted to meet you,

Henry says. As he speaks, he removes the byrus-splotched pillow from beneath Mr Gray’s narrow, earless head. Mr
Gray tries to wriggle toward the other side of the bed, but Jonesy holds him in place, grasping the alien’s child-thin arms. The skin in his hands is neither hot nor cold. It doesn’t feel like skin at all, not really. It feels like-Like nothing, he thinks.
Like a dream.
Mr Gray?
Henry asks.

7his is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.
And he puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.
Beneath Jonesy’s hands, Mr Gray be ins to struggle and thrash.
Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.
Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.
18
Mr Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up

through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.
If it were done when “tis done, then “twere well it were done quickly-that from a box
marked SHAKESPEARE. The dog’s rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr Gray could
hear the wet sound of tearing flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the
other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog’s tail, the chattering had started, a sound like an

angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely
have to be born the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.
Mr Gray tried to shove the dog’s head into the gap between the cover and the

concrete and couldn’t get it through. The neck bent and the dog’s senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.
And it wouldn’t go through the gap.
“
Fuck me Freddy!”
Mr Gray screamed. He was barely aware of the snarling ache in
Jonesy’s hip now, certainly not aware that Jonesy’s face was strained and pale, the hazel

eyes wet with tears of effort and frustration. He
was
aware-terribly aware-that something was going on.
Going on behind my back,
Jonesy would have said. And who else could it
be? Who else but Jonesy, his reluctant host?
“
Fuck YOU!”
he screamed at the damned, hateful, stubborn, just-a-little-too-big dog
.
“You’re going down, do you hear me? DO YOU-”

The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn’t yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn’t
breathe,
let alone yell. What was Jonesy doing to him?
He expected no answer, but one came-a stranger’s voice, full of cold rage:
This is
how we say welcome to Planet Earth.
19

The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and
actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise
featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn’t really exist at all-not even in Jonesy’s brain, at least as a physical artifact-it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what

Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants… what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his
black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his
blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but
in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its

ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.
But I don’t think you will,
Henry says in a voice that is calm, almost soothing.
I don’t
think so, my friend.
And once more puts the pillow over Mr Gray’s face.
20
Mr Gray’s airway opened. He got one breath of the cold shaft-house air… two… and
then the airway closed up again. They were smothering him, stifling him, killing him.

Все материалы, размещенные в боте и канале, получены из открытых источников сети Интернет, либо присланы пользователями  бота. 
Все права на тексты книг принадлежат их авторам и владельцам. Тексты книг предоставлены исключительно для ознакомления. Администрация бота не несет ответственности за материалы, расположенные здесь