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.