Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

He turned his head slightly and saw Perlmutter staring at him-big dark eyes in a pallid, red-spotted face.

“What are you looking at?” Freddy asked.

Perlmutter turned away without saying anything more. He looked out into the night.

Chapter Nineteen

THE CHASE CONTINUES

1

Mr Gray enjoyed bingeing on human emotions, Mr Gray enjoyed human food, but Mr Gray most definitely did not enjoy evacuating Jonesy’s bowels. He refused to look at what he’d produced, simply snatched up his pants and buttoned them with hands that trembled slightly.

Jesus, aren’t you going to wipe? Jonesy asked. At least flush the damned toilet!

But Mr Gray only wanted to get out of the stall. He paused long enough to run his hands beneath the water in one of the basins, then turned toward the exit.

Jonesy was not exactly surprised to see the State Trooper push in through the door.

“Forgot to zip your fly, my friend,” the Trooper said.

“Oh. So I did. Thank you, officer.”

“Come from up north, did you? Big doins up there, the radio says. When you can hear it, that is. Space aliens, maybe.”

“I only came from Derry,” Mr Gray said. “I wouldn’t know.”

“What brings you out on a night like this, could I ask?”

Tell him a sick friend, Jonesy thought, but felt a prickle of despair. He didn’t want to see this, let alone be a part of it.

“A sick friend,” Mr Gray said.

“Really. Well, sir, I’d like to see your license and regis-”

Then the Trooper’s eyes came up double zeros. He walked in stilted strides toward the wall with the sign on it reading SHOWERS ARE FOR TRUCKERS ONLY. He stood there for a moment, trembling, trying to fight back… and then began to beat his head against the tile in big, sweeping jerks. The first strike knocked his Stetson off. On the third the claret began to flow, first beading on the beige tiles, then splattering them in dark ropes.

And because he could do nothing to stop it, Jonesy scrambled for the phone on his desk.

There was nothing. Either while he had been eating his second order of bacon or taking his first shit as a human being, Mr Gray had cut the line. Jonesy was on his own.

2

In spite of his horror-or perhaps because of it-Jonesy burst out laughing as his hands wiped the blood from the tiled wall with a Dysart’s towel. Mr Gray had accessed Jonesy’s knowledge concerning body concealment and/or disposal, and had found the motherlode. As a lifelong connoisseur of horror movies, suspense novels, and mysteries, Jonesy was, in a manner of speaking, quite the expert. Even now, as Mr Gray dropped the bloody towel on the chest of the Trooper’s sodden uniform (the Trooper’s jacket had been used to wrap the badly bludgeoned head), a part of Jonesy’s mind was running the disposal of Freddy Miles’s corpse in The Talented Mr Ripley, both the film version and Patricia Highsmith’s novel. Other tapes were running, as well, so many overlays that looking too deeply made Jonesy dizzy, the way he felt when looking down a long drop. Nor was that the worst part. With Jonesy’s help, the talented Mr Gray had discovered something he liked more than crispy bacon, even more than bingeing on Jonesy’s well of rage.

Mr Gray had discovered murder.

3

Beyond the showers was a locker room. Beyond the lockers was a hallway leading to the truckers” dorm. The hall was deserted. On the far side of it was a door which opened on the rear of the building, where there was a snow-swirling cul-de-sac, now deeply drifted. Two large green Dumpsters emerged from the drifts. One hooded light cast a pallid glow and tall, lunging shadows. Mr Gray, who learned fast, searched the Trooper’s body for his car keys and found them. He also took the Trooper’s gun and put it in one of the zippered pockets of Jonesy’s parka. Mr Gray used the bloodstained towel to keep the door to the cul-de-sac from latching shut, then dragged the body behind one of the Dumpsters.

All of it, from the Trooper’s gruesome induced suicide to Jonesy’s re-entry to the back hall, took less than ten minutes. Jonesy’s body felt light and agile, all weariness gone, at least for the time being: he and Mr Gray were enjoying another burst of endorphin euphoria. And at least some of this wetwork was the responsibility of Gary Ambrose Jones. Not just the body-disposal knowledge, but the bloodthirsty urges of the id under the thin candy frosting of “it’s just make-believe”. Mr Gray was in the driver’s seat Jonesy was at least not burdened with the idea that he was the primary murderer-but he was the engine.

Maybe we deserve to be erased, Jonesy thought as Mr Gray walked back through the shower-room (looking for blood-splatters with Jonesy’s eyes and bouncing the Trooper’s keys in one of Jonesy’s palms as he went). Maybe we deserve to be turned into nothing but a bunch of red spores blowing in the wind. That might be the best thing, God help us.

4

The tired-looking woman working the cash-register asked him if he’d seen the Trooper.

“Sure did,” Jonesy said. “Showed him my driver’s license and registration, as a matter of fact.”

“Been a bunch of mounties in ever since late afternoon,” the cashier said. “Storm or no storm. They’re all nervous as hell. So’s everyone else. If I wanted to see folks from some other planet, I’d rent me a video. You heard anything new?”

“On the radio they’re saying it’s all a false alarm, he replied, zipping his jacket. He looked at the windows between the restaurant and the parking lot, verifying what he had already seen: with the combination of frost on the glass and the snow outside, the view was nil. No one in here was going to see what he drove away in.

“Yeah? Really?” Relief made her look less tired. Younger.

“Yeah. Don’t be looking for your friend too soon, darlin. He said he had to lay a serious loaf.”

A frown creased the skin between her eyebrows. “He said that?”

“Good night. Happy Thanksgiving. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year.”

Some of that, Jonesy hoped, was him. Trying to get through. To be noticed.

Before he could see if it was noticed, the view before his office window revolved as Mr Gray turned him away from the cash-register. Five minutes later he was heading south on the turnpike again, the chains on the Trooper’s cruiser thrupping and zinging, allowing him to maintain a steady forty miles an hour.

Jonesy felt Mr Gray reaching out, reaching back. Mr Gray could touch Henry’s mind but not get inside it-like Jonesy, Henry was to some degree different. No matter; there was the man with Henry, Overhill or Underhill. From him, Mr Gray was able to get a good fix. They were seventy miles behind, maybe more… and pulling off the turnpike? Yes, pulling off in Derry.

Mr Gray cast back farther yet, and discovered more pursuers. Three of them… but Jonesy felt this group’s main focus was not Mr Gray, but Overhill/Underhill. He found that both incredible and inexplicable, but it seemed to be true. And Mr Gray liked that just fine. He didn’t even bother to look for the reason why Overhill/Underhill and Henry might be stopping.

Mr Gray’s main concern was switching to another vehicle, a snowplow, if Jonesy’s driving skills would allow him to operate it. It would mean another murder, but that was all right with the increasingly human Mr Gray.

Mr Gray was just getting warmed up.

5

Owen Underhill is standing on the slope very near to the pipe which juts out of the foliage, and he sees them help the muddy, wild-eyed girl-Josie-out of the pipe. He sees Duddits (a large young man with shoulders like a football player’s and the improbable blonde hair of a movie idol) sweep her into a hug, kissing her dirty face in big smacks. He hears her first words: “I want to see my Mommy.”

It’s good enough for the boys; there’s no call to the police, no call for an ambulance. They simply help her up the slope, through the break in the board fence, across Strawford Park (the girls in yellow have been replaced by girls in green; neither they nor their coach pay any attention to the boys or their filthy, draggle-haired prize), and then down Kansas Street to Maple Lane. They know where Josie’s Mommy is. Her Daddy, too.

Not just the Rinkenhauers, either. When the boys get back, there are cars parked the length of the block on both sides of the Cavell house. Roberta was the one who proposed calling the parents of Josie’s friends and classmates. They will search on their own, and they will paper the town with the MISSING, posters, she says. Not in shadowy, out-of-the-way places (which is where missing children posters in Derry tend to wind up) either, but where people must see them. Roberta’s enthusiasm is enough to light some faint hope in the eyes of Ellen and Hector Rinkenhauer.