Dreamcatcher

Dreamcatcher

Stephen King

No!! Kiss my bender! Kiss my fucking bender! YOU CAN’T DO THIS!
He yanked the dog back and turned it sideways; it was almost like watching a man
already late for his plane trying to make one last bulky article fit into his suitcase.
It’li go through this way,
he thought.
Yes. It would. Even if he had to collapse the dog’s bulging middle with Jonesy’s
hands and allow the byrum to squirt free. One way or another, the damned thing
would
go through.

Face swelling, eyes bulging, breath stopped, a single fat vein swelling in the middle
of Jonesy’s forehead, Mr Gray shoved Lad deeper into the crack and then began to thump
the dog’s chest with Jonesy’s fists.
Go through, damn you, go through.
GO THROUGH!
21
Freddy Johnson pointed his carbine inside the abandoned Hummer while Kurtz,
stationed shrewdly behind him (in that way it was like the attack on the grayboy ship all
over again), waited to see what would develop.

“Two guys, boss. Looks like Owen decided to put out the trash before moving on.”
“Dead?”
“They look pretty dead to me. Got to be Devlin and the other one, the one they
stopped for.”
Kurtz joined Freddy, took a brief glance in through the shattered window, and
nodded. They looked pretty dead to him, too, a pair of white moles lying entwined in the
back seat, covered with blood and shattered glass. He raised his nine-millimeter to make

sure of them one each in the head couldn’t hurt-then lowered it again. Owen might not have heard their engine. The snow was amazingly heavy and wet, an acoustical blanket, and that was very possible. But he would hear gunshots. He turned toward the path instead.
“Lead the way, buck, and mind the footing-looks slippery. And we may still have the
element of surprise. I think we should bear that in mind, don’t you?” Freddy nodded.Kurtz

smiled. It turned his face into a skull’s face. “With any luck, buck, Owen Underhill will be
in hell before he even knows he’s dead.”
22
The TV remote, a rectangle of black plastic covered with byrus, is lying on Mr
Gray’s bedtable. Jonesy grabs it. In a voice that sounds eerily like Beaver’s, he says “Fuck
this shit” and slams it down as hard as he can on the table’s edge, like a man cracking the

shell of a hardboiled egg. The controller shatters, spilling its batteries and leaving a jagged plastic wand in Jonesy’s hand. He reaches below the pillow Henry is holding over the thrashing thing’s face. He hesitates for just a moment, remembering his first meeting with
Mr Gray his
only
meeting. The bathroom knob coming free in his hand as the rod snapped.
The sense of darkness which was the creature’s shadow falling over him. It had been real

enough then, real as roses, real as raindrops. Jonesy had turned and seen him… it…
whatever Mr Gray had been before he was Mr Gray… standing there in the big central room. The stuff of a hundred movies and “unexplained mysteries” documentaries, only
old. Old and sick. Ready even then for this hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit.
Marcy,
it had said, plucking the word straight out of Jonesy’s brain. Pulling it like a cork. Making

the hole through which it could enter. Then it had exploded like a noisemaker on New Year’s Eve, spraying byrus instead of confetti, and…

and I imagined the rest. That was it, wasn’t it? Just another case of intergalactic
schizophrenia. Basically, that was it.
Jonesy!
Henry shouts.
If you’re goina do it, then do it!
Here it comes, Mr Gray
, Jonesy thinks.
Get ready for it. Because payback’s-
23

Mr Gray had gotten Lad’s body halfway into the gap when Jonesy’s voice filled his
head.
Here it comes, Mr Gray. Get ready for it. Because payback’s a bitch.
There was a ripping pain across the middle of Jonesy’s throat.
Mr Gray raised Jonesy’s hands, making a series of gagging grunts that would not

quite attain the status of screams. He didn’t feel the beard-stubbled, unbroken skin of Jonesy’s throat but his own ragged flesh. What he felt most strongly was shocked
disbelief: it was the last of Jonesy’s emotions upon which he drew.
7his could not be
happening.
They always came in the ships of the old ones, those artifacts; they always raised their hands in surrender;
they always won.
This could not be happening.

And yet somehow it was.
The byrum’s consciousness did not so much fade as disintegrate. Dying, the entity
once known as Mr Gray reverted to its former state. As
he
became
it
(and just before
it
could become
nothing),
Mr Gray gave the dog’s body a final vicious shove. It sank into the gap yet still not quite far enough to go through.
The byrum’s last Jonesy-tinged thought was
I should have taken him up on it. I

should have gone na-
24
Jonesy slashes the jagged end of the TV controller across Mr Gray’s naked wattled
neck. Its throat peels open like a mouth and a cloud of reddish-orange matter puffs out, staining the air the color of blood before falling back to the counterpane in a shower of dust and fluff.
Mr Gray s body twitches once, galvanically, beneath Jonesy’s and Henry’s hands.

Then it shrivels like the dream it always was and becomes something familiar. For a moment Jonesy can’t make the connection and then it comes. Mr Gray’s remains look like
one of the condoms they saw on the floor of the deserted office in the Tracker Brothers depot.
He’s
-
-dead!
is how Jonesy means to finish, but then a terrible bolt of pain tears through him. Not his hip this time but his head. And his throat. All at once his throat is wearing a

necklace of fire. And the whole room is transparent, damned if it isn’t. He’s looking through the wall and into the shaft house, where the dog stuck in the crack is giving birth
to a vile red creature that looks like a weasel crossed with a huge, blood-soaked worm. He
knows well enough what it is: one of the byrum.
Streaked with blood and shit and the remains of its own membranous placenta, its
brainless black eyes staring
(they’re
his
eyes,
Jonesy thinks,

Mr Gray’s eyes),
it is being born in front of him, stretching its body out, trying to pull free, wanting to drop into the
darkness and fall toward the sound of running water. Jonesy looks at Henry.
Henry looks back.
For just a moment their young and startled eyes meet… and then
they
are
disappearing, as well.
Duddits,
Henry says. His voice comes from far away.
Duddits is going. Jonesy…
Goodbye. Perhaps Henry means to say goodbye. Before he can, they’re both gone.
25

There was a moment of vertigo when Jonesy was exactly nowhere, a sense of utter
disconnection. He thought it must be death, that he had killed himself as well as Mr Gray-
cut his own throat, as the saying went.
What brought him back was pain. Not in his throat, that was gone and he could
breathe again-he could hear the air going in and out of him in great dry gasps. No, this pain was an old acquaintance. It was in his hip. It caught him and swung him back into the

world around its swollen, howling axis, winding him up like a tether-ball on a post. There
was concrete under his knees, his hands were full of fur, and he heard an inhuman chattering sound.
At least this part is real,
he thought.
This part is outside the
dreamcatcher.
That godawful chattering sound.
Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only

by its tail, which wasn’t yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands
around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.
He rocked backward, his bad hip throbbing, holding the writhing, yammering thing above his head like a carny performer with a boa constrictor. It whipped back and forth,

teeth gnashing at the air, bending back on itself, trying to get at Jonesy’s wrist and snagging the right sleeve of his parka instead, tearing it open and releasing near-weightless
tangles of white down filling.
Jonesy pivoted on his howling hip and saw a man framed in the broken window
through which Mr Gray had wriggled. The newcomer, his face long with surprise, was dressed in a camouflage parka and holding a rifle.

Jonesy flung the wriggling weasel as hard as he could, which wasn’t very hard. It flew perhaps ten feet, landed on the leaf-littered floor with a wet thump, and immediately
began slithering back toward the shaft. The dog’s body plugged part of it, but not enough.
There was plenty of room.

Shoot
it!” Jonesy screamed at the man with the rifle. “
For God’s sake shoot it before
it can get into the water!”

But the man in the window did nothing. The world’s last hope only stood there with
his mouth hanging open.
26
Owen simply couldn’t believe what he was seeing. Some sort of red thing, a freakish
weasel with no legs. To hear about such things was one matter; to actually
see
one was another. It squirmed toward the hole in the middle of the floor. A dog with its stiffening
paws held up as if in surrender was wedged there.

The man-it had to be Typhoid Jonesy-was screaming at him to shoot the thing, but
Owen’s arms simply wouldn’t come up. They seemed to be coated in lead. The thing was
going to get away; after all that had happened, what he had hoped to prevent was going to
happen right in front of him. It was like being in hell.
He watched it wriggle forward, making a godawful monkey-sound that he seemed to

hear in the center of his head; he watched Jonesy lunging with desperate awkwardness, hoping to catch it or at least head it off. It wasn’t going to work. The dog was in the way.
Owen again commanded his arms to raise the gun and point it, but nothing happened.
The MP5 might as well have been in another universe. He was going to let it get away. He
was going to stand here like a post and let it get away. God help him.
God help them all.
27

Henry sat up in the back seat of the Humvee, dazed. There was stuff in his hair. He brushed at it, still feeling caught in the dream of the hospital
(except that was no dream,
he thought, and then a sharp prick of pain restored him to something like reality. It was glass.
His hair was filled with glass. More of it, Saf-T-Glas crumbles of it, covered the seat. And
Duddits.
“Dud?” Useless, of course. Duddits was dead. Must be dead. He had expended the

last of his failing energy to bring Jonesy and Henry together in that hospital room. But Duddits groaned. His eyes opened, and looking into them brought Henry all the way back
to this snowy dead-end road. Duddits’s eyes were red and bloody zeroes, the eyes of a sibyl.

Ooby!”
Duddits cried. His hands rose and made a weak aiming gesture, as if he held
a rifle. “
Ooby-Doo! Ot-sum urk-ooo do now!”

From somewhere up ahead in the woods, two rifle shots came in answer. A pause, then a third one.
“Dud?” Henry whispered. “Duddits?”
Duddits saw him. Even through his bloody eyes, Duddits saw him. Henry more than
felt this; for a moment he actually saw
himself

through Duddits’s eyes. It was like looking into a magic mirror. He saw the Henry who had been: a kid looking out at the world through horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face and always sliding down to the
end of his nose. He felt Duddits’s love for him, a simple and uncomplicated emotion untinctured by doubt or selfishness or even gratitude, Henry took Duddits in his arms, and
when he felt the lightness of his old friend’s body, Henry began to cry.

“You were the lucky one, buddy,” he said, and wished Beaver were here. Beaver
could have done what Henry could not; Beav could have sung Duddits to sleep. “You were
always the lucky one, that’s what I think.”
“Ennie,” Duddits said, and touched Henry’s cheek with one hand. He was smiling,
and his final words were perfectly clear. “I love you, Ennie.”
28
Two shots rang out up ahead-carbine whipcracks. Not far up ahead, either. Kurtz

stopped. Freddy was about twenty feet ahead of him, standing by a sign Kurtz could just
make Out: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE.
A third shot, then silence.
“Boss?” Freddy murmured. “Some kind of building up ahead.” “Can you see
anyone?”
Freddy shook his head.
Kurtz joined him, amused even at this point at the slight jump Freddy gave when Kurtz put his hand on Freddy’s shoulder. And he was right to jump. If Abe Kurtz survived

the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he intended to go forward alone into whatever brave new world there might be. No one to slow him down; no witnesses to this final guerrilla
action. And while he might suspect, Freddy couldn’t know for sure. Too bad the telepathy
was gone. Too bad for Freddy.
“Sounds like Owen found someone else to kill.” Kurtz spoke low into Freddy’s ear,
which still sported a few curls of the Ripley, now white and dead.
“Do we go get him?”

“Goodness, no,” Kurtz replied. “Perish the thought. I believe the time has come-
regrettably, it comes in almost every life-when we must step off the path, buck. Mingle with the trees. See who stays and who comes back. If anyone does. We’ll give it ten minutes, shall we? I think ten minutes should be more than enough.”
29
The words which filled Owen Underhill’s mind were nonsensical but unmistakable:
Scooby! Scooby-Doo! Got some work to do now!

The carbine came up. He wasn’t the one who did it, but when the force lifting the rifle left him, Owen was able to take over smoothly. He flicked the auto’s selector-switch
to single-shot fire, sighted, and squeezed the trigger twice. The first round missed, hitting
the concrete in front of the weasel and ricocheting. Chips of concrete flew. The thing pulled back, turned, saw him, and bared its mouthful of needle teeth.

“That’s right, beautiful,” Owen said. “Smile for the camera.”
His second shot went right through the weasel’s humorless grin. It tumbled
backward, struck the wall of the shaft house, then fell to the concrete. Yet even with its rudiment of a head blown off, its instincts remained. It began to crawl slowly forward again. Owen aimed, and as he centered the sight, he thought of the Rapeloews, Dick and

Irene. Nice people. Good neighbors. If you needed a cup of sugar or a pint of milk (or a
shoulder to cry on, for that matter), you could always go next door and get fixed up.
7hey
said it was a stroke!
Mr Rapeloew had called, only Owen had thought he was saying
stork.
Kids got everything wrong.
So this was for the Rapeloews. And for the kid who had kept getting it wrong. Owen

fired a third time. This slug caught the byrum amidships and tore it in two. The ragged pieces twitched… twitched… lay still.With that done, Owen swung his carbine in a short
arc. This time he settled the sight on the middle of Gary Jones’s forehead. Jonesy looked

unblinkingly back at him. Owen was tired almost to death, that was what it felt like-but this guy looked far past even that point. Jonesy raised his empty hands. “You have no reason to believe this,” he said, “but Mr Gray is dead. I cut his throat while Henry held a
pillow over his face-it was right out of
The Godfather.” “
really,” Owen said. There was no inflection in his voice whatsoever. “And where, exactly, did you perform this execution?”

“In a Massachusetts General Hospital of the mind,” Jonesy said. He then uttered the
most joyless laugh Owen had ever heard in his life. “One where deer roam the halls and
the only TV program is an old movie called
Sympathy for the Devil.”
Owen jerked a little at that.
“Shoot me if you have to, soldier. I saved the world-with a little ninth-inning relief help from you, I freely admit. You might as well pay me for the service in the traditional

manner. Also, the bastard broke my hip again. A little going-away present from the little
man who wasn’t there. The pain is… “Jonesy bared his teeth. “It’s very large.”
Owen held the gun where it was a moment longer, then lowered it. “You can live with
it,” he said.
Jonesy fell backward on the points of his elbows, groaned, turned his weight as well
as he could on to his unhurt side. “Duddits is dead. He was worth both of us put together-

more-and he’s dead.” He covered his eyes for a moment, then dropped his arm. “Man, what a fuckarow this is. That’s what Beaver would have called it, a total fuckarow. That is
opposed to a fuckaree, you understand, which in Beaver-ese means a particularly fine time, possibly but not necessarily of a sexual nature.”
Owen had no idea what the man was talking about; likely he was delirious. “Duddits

may be dead, but Henry’s not. There are some people after us, Jonesy. Bad people. Do you
hear them? Know where they are?”
Lying on the cold, leaf-littered floor, Jonesy shook his head. “I’m back to the
standard five senses, I’m afraid. ESP’s all gone. The Greeks may come bearing gifts, but
they’re Indian givers.” He laughed.” Jesus, I could lose my job for a crack like that. Sure
you don’t want to just shoot me?”

Owen paid no more attention to this than he had to the semantical differences
between fuckarow and fuckaree. Kurtz was coming, that was the problem he had to deal
with now. He hadn’t heard him arrive, but he might not have done. The snow was falling
heavily enough to damp all but loud sounds. Gunshots, for instance.
“I have to go back to the road,” he said. “You hang in there.” “What choice?” Jonesy

asked, and closed his eyes. “Man, I wish I could go back to my nice warm office. I never
thought I’d say that, but there it is.”
Owen turned and went back down the steps, slipping and sliding but managing to
keep his feet. He scanned the woods to either side of the path, but not closely. If Kurtz and
Freddy were laid up, waiting someplace between here and the Hummer, he doubted be
would see them in time to do anything. He might see tracks, but by then he’d be so close

to them they’d likely be the
last
things he saw. He had to hope he was still ahead, that was all. Had to trust to plain old baldass luck, and why not? He’d been in plenty of tight places, and baldass luck had always pulled him through. Maybe it would do so ag-The first bullet took him in the belly, knocking him backward and blowing the back
of his coat out in a bee-shape. He pumped his feet, trying to stay upright, also trying to

hang onto the MP5. There was no pain, just a feeling of having been sucker-punched by a large boxing glove on the fist of a mean opponent. The second round shaved the side of
his head, producing a bum-and-sting like rubbing alcohol poured into an open wound. The
third shot hit him high up on the right side of the chest and that was Katie bar the door; he
lost both his feet and the carbine.
What had Jonesy said? Something about having saved the world and getting paid off

in the traditional manner. And this wasn’t so bad, really; it had taken Jesus six hours, they’d put a joke sign over His head, and come cocktail hour they’d given Him a stiff vinegar-and-water.
He lay half on and half off the snow-covered path, vaguely aware that something was
screaming and it wasn’t him. It sounded like an enormous pissed-off blue jay.
That’s an eagle,
Owen thought.


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