Dreamcatcher

did best: they “got mad,” which was really the same thing as “going mad” but more socially acceptable. Oh, but on such a scale!
Mr Gray was investigating boxes and boxes of fascinating weaponry-grapeshot,
chainshot, minie balls, cannonballs, bayonets, landmines-when a voice intruded.
bacon
He pushed the thought aside, although Jonesy’s stomach gurgled. He’d
like

some bacon, yes, bacon was fleshy and greasy and slippery and satisfying in a primitive,
physical way, but this was not the time. Perhaps after he’d gotten rid of the dog. Then, if
he had time before the others caught up, he could eat himself to death if he so chose. But
this was not the time. As he passed Exit 10-only two to go, now-he turned his mind back

to the Civil War, to blue men and gray men running through the smoke, screaming and stabbing each other in the guts, fixing little red wagons without number, pounding the stocks of their rifles into the skulls of their enemies, producing those intoxicating
thud-thud
sounds, and-
bacon
His stomach gurgled again. Saliva squirted into Jonesy’s mouth and he remembered

Dysart’s, the brown and crispy strips on the blue plate, you picked it up with your fingers,
the texture was hard, the texture of dead and tasty flesh-
Can’t think of this.
A horn honked irritably, making Mr Gray jump, making Lad whine. He had
wandered into the wrong lane, what Jonesy’s mind identified as “the passing lane”, and he
pulled over to let one of the big trucks, going faster than the Subaru could go, sweep by. It

splashed the small car’s windshield with muddy water, momentarily blinding him, and Mr
Gray thought
Catch you kill you beat the brains out of your head you unsafe johnny reb of
a driver you, thud-thud, fix your wagon your little red
bacon sandwich
That one was like a gunshot in his head. He fought it but the strength of it was something entirely new. Could that be Jonesy? Surely not, Jonesy wasn’t that strong. But

suddenly he seemed an stomach, and the stomach was hollow, hurting, craving. Surely he
could stop long enough to assuage it. If he didn’t he was apt to drive right off the
Mr Gray let out an inarticulate cry, unaware that he’d begun to drool helplessly.
18
“I hear him,” Henry said suddenly. He put his fists to his temples, as if to contain a
headache. “Christ, it hurts. He’s so
hungry.”
“Who?” Owen asked. They had just crossed

the state line into Massachusetts. In front of the car, the rain fell in silver, wind-slanted lines. “The dog? Jonesy? Who?” “
Him
,” Henry said. “Mr Gray.” He looked at Owen, a sudden wild hope in his eye. “I think he’s pulling over.
I think he’s stopping.”
19
“Boss.”
Kurtz was on the verge of dozing again when Perlmutter turned-not without effort-
and spoke to him. They had just gone through the New Hampshire tolls, Freddy Johnson

being careful to use the automated exact-change lane (he was afraid a human toll-taker might notice the stench in the Humvee’s cabin, the broken window in back, the
weaponry… or all three).
Kurtz looked into Archie Perlmutter’s sweat-streaked, haggard face with interest.
With fascination, even. The colorless bean-counting bureaucrat, he of the briefcase on station and clipboard in the field, hair always neatly combed and parted ruler-straight on

the left? The man who could not for the life of him train himself out of using the word
sir?
That man was gone. Thin though it was, he thought Pearly’s countenance had somehow richened.
He’s turning into Ma Joad,
Kurtz thought, and almost giggled.
“Boss, I’m still thirsty.” Pearly cast longing eyes on Kurtz’s Pepsi, then blew out another hideous fart.
Ma Joad on trumpet in hell
Kurtz thought and this time he
did

giggle. Freddy cursed, but not with his former shocked disgust; now he sounded resigned,
almost bored.
“I’m afraid this is mine, buck,” Kurtz. “And I’m a wee parched myself.”
Perlmutter began to speak, then winced as a fresh pain struck him. He fatted again,
the sound thinner this time, not a trumpet but an untalented child blowing over a piccolo.
His eyes narrowed, became crafty. “Give me a drink and I’ll tell you something you want
to know.” A pause. “Something you
need
to know.”

Kurtz considered. Pain slapped the side of the car and came in through the busted window. The goddamned window was a pain in the ass, praise Jesus, the arm of his jacket
was soaked right through, but he would have to bear up. Who was responsible, after all?
“
You
are,” Pearly said, and Kurtz jumped. The mind-reading thing was just so
spooky.
You thought you were getting used to it and then realized that no negative, you were not.
“
You’re

responsible. So give me a fucking drink.
Boss.”
“
Watch your mouth, cheeseboy,” Freddy rumbled.
“Tell me what you know and you can have the rest of this.” Kurtz raised the Pepsi bottle, waggling it in front of Pearly’s tortured gaze. Kurtz was not without humorous self-loathing as he did this. Once he had commanded whole units and had used them to alter
entire geopolitical landscapes. Now his command was two men and a soft drink. He had
fallen low.
Pride

had brought him low, praise God. He had the pride of Satan, and if it was a fault, it was a hard one to give up. Pride was the belt you could use to hold up your pants
even after your pants were gone.
“Do you promise?” Pearly’s red-fizzed tongue came out and licked at his parched
lips.
“If I’m lyin I’m dyin,” Kurtz said solemnly. “Hell, buck, read my fucking mind!”
Pearly studied him for a moment and Kurtz could almost feel the man’s creepy little

fingers (mats of red stuff now growing under each nail) in his head. An awful sensation, but he bore it.At last Perlmutter seemed satisfied. He nodded. “I’m getting more now,” he
said, and then his voice lowered to a confidential, horrified whisper. “It’s eating me, you
know. It’s eating my guts. I can feel it.”
Kurtz patted him on the arm. just now they were passing a sign which read
WELCOME TO MASSACHUSETTS. “I’m going to take care of you, laddie-buck; I

promised, didn’t I? Meantime, tell me what you’re getting.”
“Mr Gray is stopping. He’s hungry. “Kurtz had left his hand on Perlmutter’s arm.
Now he tightened his grip, turning his fingernails into talons. “Where?”
“Close to where he’s going. It’s a store.” In a chanting, childish voice that made Kurtz’s skin crawl, Archie Perlmutter said: “‘Best bait, why wait? Best bait, why wait?””

Then, resuming a more normal tone: “Jonesy knows Henry and Owen and Duddits are
coming. That’s why he made Mr Gray stop.”
The idea of Owen’s catching Jonesy/Mr Gray filled Kurtz with panic. “Archie, listen
to me carefully.”
“I’m thirsty,” Perlmutter whined. “I’m
thirsty,
you son of a bitch.”
Kurtz held the Pepsi bottle up in front of Perlmutter’s eyes, then slapped away
Perlmutter’s hand when Pearly reached for it.

“Do Henry, Owen, and Dud-Duts know Jonesy and Mr Gray have stopped?”
“Dud-
dits,
you old fool!” Perlmutter snarled, then groaned with pain and clutched at
his stomach, which was on the rise again. “
Dits, dits,
Dud-
dits! Yes,
they know! Duddits helped make Mr Gray hungry! He and Jonesy did it together!”
“I don’t like this,” Freddy said.
Join the club,
Kurtz thought.
“Please, boss,” Pearly said. “I’m so thirsty.”

Kurtz gave him the bottle, watched with a jaundiced eye as Perlmutter drained it.
“495, boss,” Freddy announced. “What do I do?”
“Take it,” Perlmutter said. “Then 90 west.” He burped. It was loud but blessedly
odorless. “
It
wants another Pepsi. It likes the sugar. Also the caffeine.”
Kurtz pondered. Owen knew their quarry had stopped, at least temporarily. Now

Owen and Henry would sprint, trying to make up as much of that ninety to a hundred-minute lag as they could. Consequently, they must sprint, as well.
Any cops who got in their way would have to die, God bless them. One way or the
other, this was coming to a head.
“Freddy.”
“Boss.”
“Pedal to the metal. Make this bitch strut, God love you. Make her strut.”
Freddy Johnson did as ordered.
20
There was no barn, no corral, no paddock, and instead Of OUT-OF-STATE LICS the

sign in the window showed a photograph of the Quabbin Reservoir over the legend BEST
BAIT, WHY WAIT?, but otherwise the little store could have been Gosselin’s all over again: same ratty siding, same mud-brown shingles, same crooked chimney dribbling
smoke into the rainy sky, same rusty gas-pump out front. Another sign leaned against the
pump, this one reading NO GAS BLAME THE RAGHEADS.
On that early afternoon in November the store was empty save for the proprietor, a

gentleman named Deke McCaskell. Like most other folks, he had spent the morning glued
to the TV. All the coverage (repetitive stuff, for the most part, and with that part of the North Woods cordoned off, no good pictures of anything but Army, Navy, and Air Force
hardware) had led up to the President’s speech. Deke called the President Okeefenokee, on
account of the fucked-up way he’d been elected-couldn’t anybody down there fucking

count? Although he had not exercised his own option to vote since the Gipper (now
there
had been a President), Deke hated President Okeefenokee, thought he was an oily,
untrustworthy motherfucker with big teeth (good-looking wife, though), and he thought the President’s eleven o’clock speech had been the usual blah-dee-blah. Deke didn’t
believe a word old Okeefenokee said. In his view, the whole thing was probably a hoax,

scare tactics calculated to make the American taxpayer more willing to hike defense spending and thus taxes. There was nobody out there in space, science had proved it. The
only aliens in America (except for President Okeefenokee himself, that was) were the beaners who swam across the border from Mexico. But people were scared, sitting home

and watching TV. A few would be in later for beer or bottles of wine, but for now the place was as dead as a cat run over in the highway.
Deke had turned off the TV half an hour ago-enough was enough, by the Christ-and
when the bell over his door jangled at quarter past one, he was studying a magazine from
the rack at the back of the store, where a sign proclaimed B 21 OR B GONE. This particular periodical was titled
Lasses in Glasses,

a fair title since all the lasses within were wearing spectacles. Nothing else, but glasses,
si
.
He looked up at the newcomer, started to say something like “How ya doin” or
“Roads gettin slippery yet,” and then didn’t. He felt a bolt of unease, followed by a sudden
certainty that he was going to be robbed… and if robbery was all, he’d be off lucky. He
never
had

been robbed, not in the twelve years he’d owned the place-if a fellow wanted to risk prison for a handful of cash, there were places in the area where bigger handfuls could
be had. A guy would have to be…
Deke swallowed.
A guy would have to be crazy,
he’d been thinking, and maybe this
guy
was,
maybe he was one of those maniacs who’d just offed his whole family and then
decided to ramble around a bit, kill a few more folks before turning one of his guns on himself.

Deke wasn’t paranoid by nature (he was
lumpish
by nature, his ex-wife would have
told you), but that didn’t change the fact that he felt suddenly menaced by the afternoon’s
first customer. He didn’t care very much for the fellows who sometimes turned up and loafed around the store, talking about the patriots or the Red Sox or telling stories about
the whoppers they’d caught up to the Reservoir, but he wished for a few of them now. A
whole gang of them, actually.

The man just stood there inside the door at first, and yeah, there was something

wrong with him. He was wearing an orange hunting coat and deer season hadn’t started yet in Massachusetts, but that could have been nothing. What Deke didn’t like were the scratches on the man’s face, as if he had spent at least some of the last couple of days going cross-country through the woods, and the haunted, drawn quality of the features themselves. His mouth was moving, as though he was talking to himself. Something else,

too. The gray afternoon light slanting in through the dusty front window glinted oddly on
his lips and chin.
That sonofabitch is drooling,
Deke thought.
Be goddamned if he ain’t.
The newcomer’s head snapped around in quick little tics while his body remained
perfectly still, reminding Deke of the way an owl remains perfectly still on its branch as it

looks for prey. Deke thought briefly of sliding out of his chair and hiding under the counter, but before he could do more than begin to consider the pros and cons of such a
move (not a particularly quick thinker, his ex-wife would have told you that, as well), the
guy’s head did another of those quick flicks and was pointing right at him.

The rational part of Deke’s mind had been harboring the hope (it was not quite an articulated idea) that he was imagining the whole thing, just suffering the whimwhams from all the weird news and weirder rumors, each dutifully reported by the press, coming
out of northern Maine. Maybe this was just a guy who wanted smokes or a six-pack or maybe a bottle of coffee brandy and a stroke-book, something to get him through a long,

sleety night in a motel outside of Ware or Belchertown.
That hope died when the man’s eyes met his.
It wasn’t the gaze of a family-murdering maniac off on his own private cruise to
nowhere; it almost would have been better if that had been the case. The newcomer’s eyes,
far from empty, were too full. A million thoughts and ideas seemed to be crossing them,
like one of those big-city
tickertapes being run at super speed. They seemed almost to be hopping in their

sockets.
And they were the
hungriest
eyes Deke McCaskell had seen in his entire life.
“We’re closed,” Deke said. The words came out in a croak that didn’t sound like his
voice at all. “Me and my partner-he’s in the back-we closed for the day. On account of the
goings-on up north. I-
we,
I mean-just forgot to flip over the sign. We-”
He might have run on for hours-days, even-but the man in the hunting coat
interrupted him. “Bacon,” he said. “Where is it?”

Deke knew, suddenly and absolutely, that if he didn’t have bacon, this man would kill
him. He might kill him anyway, but without bacon… yes, certainly. He
did
have bacon.
Thank God, thank Christ, thank Okeefenokee and all the hopping ragheads, he
did
have bacon.
“Cooler in back,” he said in his new, strange voice. The hand lying on top of his magazine felt as cold as a block of ice. In his head, he heard whispering voices that didn’t

seem to be his own. Red thoughts and black thoughts.
Hungry
thoughts.
An inhuman voice asked,
What’s a cooler?
A tired voice,
very
human, responded:
Go
on up the aisle, handsome. You’ll see it.
Hearing voices,
Deke thought.
Aw, Jesus, no. That’s what happens to people just
before they flip out.
The man moved past Deke and up the center aisle. He walked with a heavy limp.
There was a phone by the cash-register. Deke looked at it, then looked away. It was

within reach, and he had 911 on the speed-dialer, but it might as well have been on the moon. Even if he was able to summon enough strength to reach for the phone-I’ll know, the inhuman voice said, and Deke let out a breathless little moan. It was inside his head, as if someone had planted a radio in his brain.
There was a convex mirror mounted over the door, a gadget that came in especially

handy in the summer, when the store was full of kids headed up to the Reservoir with their
parents the Quabbin was only eighteen miles from here-for fishing or camping or just a picnic. Little bastards were always trying to kite stuff, particularly the candy and the girly
magazines. Now Deke looked into it, watching with dread fascination as the man in the orange coat approached the cooler. He stood there a moment, gazing in, then grabbed not

just one package of bacon but all four of them.
The man came back down the middle aisle with the bacon, limping along and
scanning the shelves. He looked dangerous, he looked hungry, and he also looked
dreadfully tired-like a marathon runner going into the last mile. Looking at him gave Deke

the same sense of vertigo he felt when he looked down from a high place. It was like looking not at one person but at several, overlaid and shifting in and out of focus. Deke
thought fleetingly of a movie he’d seen, some daffy cunt with about a hundred
personalities.
The man stopped and got a jar of mayonnaise. At the foot of the aisle he stopped again and snagged a loaf of bread. Then he was at the counter again. Deke could almost

smell the exhaustion coming out of his pores. And the craziness.
He set his purchases down and said, “Bacon sandwiches on white, with mayo. Those
are the best.” And smiled. It was a smile of such tired, heartbreaking sincerity that Deke
forgot his fear for a moment.
Without thinking, he reached out. “Mister, are you all r-”
Deke’s hand stopped as if it had run into a wall. It trembled for a moment over the
counter, then flew up and slapped his own face-
crack!

It drew slowly away and stopped, floating like a Hovercraft.
The third and fourth fingers folded slowly down against the palm.
Don’t kill him!
Come out and stop me!
If you make me try, you might get a surprise.
These voices were in his head.
His Hovercraft hand floated forward and the first two fingers plunged into his
nostrils, plugging them. For a moment they were still, and then oh dear Christ they began

to dig. And while Deke McCaskell had many questionable habits, chewing his nails was
not one of them. At first his fingers didn’t want to move much up there close quarters-but
then, as the lubricating blood began to flow, they became positively frisky. They squirmed
like worms. The dirty nails dug like fangs. They shoved up further, burrowing
brainward… he could feel cartilage tearing… could hear it…
Stop it, Mr Gray, stop it!

And suddenly Deke’s fingers belonged to him again. He pulled them free with a wet
plop. Blood pattered down on the counter, on the rubber change-pad with the Skoal logo
on it, also on the unclad lass in glasses whose anatomy he had been studying when this creature had come in.
“How much do I owe you, Deke?”
“Take it!” Still that crow-croak, but now it was a
nasal
croak
,

because his nostrils were plugged with blood. “Aw, man, just take it and go! The fuck outta here!”
“No, I insist. This is commerce, in which items of real worth are exchanged for
currency plain.”
“Three dollars!” Deke cried. Shock was setting in. His heart was beating wildly, his
muscles thrumming with adrenaline. He believed the creature might be going, and this made everything infinitely worse: to be so close to a continued life and still know it could

be snatched away at this fucking loony’s least whim.
The loony brought out a battered old wallet, opened it, and rummaged for what
seemed an age. Saliva drizzled steadily from his mouth as he bent over the wallet. At last
he came out with three dollars. He put them on the counter. The wallet went back into his
pocket. He rummaged in his nasty-looking jeans
(rode hard and put away wet,

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