Dreamcatcher by Stephen King

“No. Oh please say no.” The tears coming again. Don’t do that, lady, Owen wanted to say. Things are bad enough already. Please don’t do that.

“There’s a man coming. A very bad man. We have to be gone when he gets here.”

Roberta’s distracted, sorrowing face filled with resolution. “All right, then. If you have to. But I’m coming with you.”

“Roberta, no,” Henry said.

“Yes! Yes, I can take care of him… give him his pills… his Prednisone… I’ll make sure to bring his lemon swabs and-”

“Umma, oo ay ere.”

“No, Duddie, no!”

“Umma, oo ay ere! Ayfe! Ayfe!” Safe, safe. Duddits growing agitated now.

“We really don’t have any more time,” Owen said.

“Roberta,” Henry said. “Please.”

“Let me come!” she cried. “He’s all I have!”

“Umma,” Duddits said. His voice was not a bit childish. “Ooo… ay… ERE.”

She looked at him fixedly, and her face sagged. “Allnight,” she said. “Just one more minute. I have to get something.” She went into Duddits’s room and came back with a paper bag, which she handed to Henry.

“It’s his pills,” she said. “He has his Prednisone at nine o’clock. Don’t forget or he gets wheezy and his chest hurts. He can have a Percocet if he asks, and he probably will ask, because being out in the cold hurts him.”

She looked at Henry with sorrow but no reproach. He almost wished for reproach. God knew he’d never done anything which had made him feel this ashamed. It wasn’t just that Duddits had leukemia; it was that he’d had it for so long and none of them had known.

“Also his lemon swabs, but only on his lips, because his gums bleed a lot now and the swabs sting him. There’s cotton for his nose if it bleeds. Oh, and the catheter. See it there on his shoulder?” Henry nodded. A plastic tube protruding from a packing of bandage. Looking at it gave him a weirdly strong feeling of deja vu.

“If you’re outside, keep it covered… Dr Briscoe laughs at me, but I’m always afraid the cold will get down inside… a scarf will work… even a handkerchief breaking through.

She was crying again, the sobs

“Roberta-” Henry began. Now he was looking at the clock, too.

“I’ll take care of him,” Owen said. “I saw my Pop through to the end of it. I know about Prednisone and Percocet.” And more: bigger steroids, better painkillers. At the end, marijuana, methadone, and finally pure morphine, so much better than heroin. Morphine, death’s sleekest engine.

He felt her in his head, then, a strange, tickling sensation like bare feet so light they barely touched down. Tickly, but not unpleasant. She was trying to make out if what he’d said about his father was the truth or a lie. This was her little gift from her extraordinary son, Owen realized, and she had been using it so long she no longer even knew she was doing it… like Henry’s friend Beaver chewing on his toothpicks. It wasn’t as powerful as what Henry had, but it was there, and Owen had never in his life been so glad he had told the truth.

“Not leukemia, though,” she said.

“Lung cancer. Mrs Cavell, we really have to-”

“I need to get him one more thing.”

“Roberta, we can’t-” Henry began.

“In a flash, in a flash.” She darted for the kitchen.

Owen felt really frightened for the first time. “Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter-Henry, I can’t tell where they are! I’ve lost them!”

Henry had unrolled the top of the bag and looked inside. What he saw there, lying on top of the box of lemon-flavored glycerine swabs, transfixed him. He replied to Owen, but his voice seemed to be coming from the far end of some previously undisclosed-hell, unsuspected-valley. There was such a valley, he knew that now. A trough of years. He would not, could not, say he had never suspected that such geography existed, but how in God’s name could he have suspected so little?

“They just passed Exit 29,” he said. “Twenty miles behind us now. Maybe even closer.”

“What’s wrong with you?”

Henry reached into the brown bag and brought out the little creation of string, so like a cobweb, which had hung over Duddits’s bed here, and over the bed at the Maple Lane house before Alfie had died.

“Duddits, where did you get this?” he asked, but of course he knew. This dreamcatcher was smaller than the one which had hung in the main room at Hole in the Wall, but was otherwise its twin.

“Eeeyer,” Duddits said. He had never taken his eyes off Henry. It was as if he could still not entirely believe that Henry was here. “Eeeyer ent ooo cee. Or eye Issmuss ass-eek.”

Although his mind-reading ability was fading rapidly as his body beat back the byrus, Owen understood this easily enough; Beaver sent to me, Duddits said. For my Christmas last week. Down’s sufferers had difficulty expressing concepts of time past and time to come, and Owen suspected that to Duddits the past was always last week, the future always next week. It seemed to Owen that if everyone thought that way, there would be a lot less grief and rancor in the world.

Henry looked at the little string dreamcatcher a moment longer, then returned it to the brown bag just as Roberta bustled back in. Duddits broke into a huge grin when he saw what she’d gone for. “Oooby-Doo!” he cried. “Ooby-Doo unnox!” He took it and gave her a kiss on each cheek.

“Owen,” Henry said. His eyes were bright. “I have some extremely good news.” “Tell me.” “The bastards just hit a detour-jackknifed tractor-trailer just shy of Exit 28. It’s going to cost them ten, maybe twenty minutes.”

“Thank Christ. Let’s use them.” He glanced at the coat-tree in the corner. Hanging from it was a huge blue duffel coat with RED SOX WINTER BALL printed on the back in bright scarlet. “That yours, Duddits?”

“Ine!” Duddits said, smiling and nodding. “I-acket.” And, as Owen reached for it: “Ooo saw us ine Osie.” He got that one, too, and it sent a chill up his back. You saw us find Josie.

So he had… and Duddits had seen him. Only last night, or had Duddits seen him on that day, nineteen years ago? Did Duddits’s gift also involve a kind of time travel?

This wasn’t the time to ask such questions, and Owen was almost glad.

“I said I wouldn’t pack his lunchbox, but of course I did. In the end, I did.”

Roberta looked at it-at Duddits holding it, shifting it from hand to hand as he struggled into the enormous parka, which had also been a gift from the Boston Red Sox. His face was unbelievably pale against the bright blue and even brighter yellow of the lunchbox. “I knew he was going. And that I wasn’t.” Her eyes searched Henry’s face. “Please may I not go, Henry?”

“If you do, you could die in front of him,” Henry said-hating the cruelty of it, also hating how well his life’s work had prepared him to push the right buttons. “Would you want him to see that, Roberta?”

“No, of course not.” And, as an afterthought, hurting him all the way to the center of his heart: “Damn you.”

She went to Duddits, pushed Owen aside, and quickly ran up her son’s zip per. Then she took him by the shoulders, pulled him down, and fixed him with her eyes. Tiny, fierce little bird of a woman. Tall, pale son, floating inside his parka. Roberta had stopped crying.

“You be good, Duddie.”

“I eee ood, Umma.”

“You mind Henry.”

“I-ill, Umma. I ine Ennie.”

“Stay bundled up.”

“I-ill.”

Still obedient, but a little impatient now, wanting to be off, and how all this took Henry back: trips to get ice cream, trips to play minigolf (Duddits had been weirdly good at the game, only Pete had been able to beat him with any consistency), trips to the movies; always you mind Henry or you mind Jonesy or you mind your friends; always you be good, Duddie and I ee oood, Umma.

She looked him up and down. “I love you, Douglas. You have always been a good son to me, and I love you so very much. Give me a kiss, now.”

He kissed her; her hand stole out and caressed his beard-sandy cheek. Henry could hardly bear to look, but he did look, was as helpless as any fly caught in any spiderweb. Every dreamcatcher was also a trap.

Duddits gave her another perfunctory kiss, but his brilliant green eyes shifted between Henry and the door. Duddits was anxious to be off. Because he knew the people after Henry and his friend were close? Because it was an adventure, like all the adventures the five of them had had in the old days? Both? Yes, probably both. Roberta let him go, her hands leaving her son for the last time.