“No, no, no,” Jonesy panted, hanging onto the knob with all of his strength. It was on the verge of slipping away from him. There was sweat on his face and on his Palms, too, he could feel it.
In front of his bulging, frightened eyes, a constellation of bumps appeared in the wood. Those were where its teeth were planted and working deeper all the time. Soon the points would burst through (if he didn’t lose his grip on the doorknob first, that was) and he’d actually have to look at the fangs that had torn his friend’s nose off his face.
That brought it home to him: Beaver was dead. His old friend.
“You killed him!” Jonesy cried at the thing on the other side of the door. His voice quivered with sorrow and terror. “You killed the Beav!”
His cheeks were hot, the tears which now began to course down them even hotter. Beaver in his black leather jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddits’s Mom had said on the day they met her), Beaver next door to shitfaced at the Senior Prom and dancing like a Cossack, arms folded across his chest and his feet kicking, Beaver at Jonesy and Carla’s wedding reception, hugging Jonesy and whispering fiercely in his ear, “You got to be happy, man. You got to be happy for all of us.” And that had been the first he knew that Beaver wasn’t-Henry and Peter, of course, about them there had never been a question, but the Beav? And now Beaver was dead, Beaver was lying half in and half out of the tub, lying noseless on top of Mr Richard Fucking I-Stand-at-the-Door-and-Knock McCarthy.
“You killed him, you fuck!” he shouted at the bulges in the door-there had been six of them and now there were nine, hell, a dozen.
As if surprised by his rage, the widdershins pressure on the doorknob eased again. Jonesy looked around wildly for anything that might help him, saw nothing, then looked down. The roll of friction tape was there. He might be able to bend and snatch it up, but then what? He would need both hands to pull lengths of tape off it, both hands and his teeth to rip them, and even supposing the thing gave him time, what was the good of it, when he could barely hold the doorknob still against its pressure?
And now the knob began to turn again. Jonesy held it on his side, but he was getting tired now, the adrenaline in his muscles starting to decay and turn to lead, his palms more slippery than ever, and that smell the ethery smell, was clearer now and somehow purer, untainted by the wastes and gases of McCarthy’s body, and how could it be so strong on this side of the door? How could it unless-
In the half-second or so before the rod connecting the doorknobs on the inside and outside of the bathroom door snapped, Jonesy became aware that it was darker now. just a little. As if someone had crept up behind him, was standing between him and the light, him and the back door-The rod snapped. The knob in Jonesy’s hand pulled free and the bathroom door immediately swung in a little, pulled by the weight of the eelish thing clinging to it. Jonesy shrieked and dropped the knob. It hit the roll of tape and bounced askew.
He turned to run and there stood a gray man.
He-it-was a stranger, but in a way no stranger at all. Jonesy had seen representations of him on a hundred “Weird mysteries” TV shows, on the front pages of a thousand tabloid newspapers (the kind that shouted their serio-comic horrors at you as you stood prisoner in the supermarket checkout lanes), in movies like ET and Close Encounters and Fire in the Sky; Mr Gray who was an X-Files staple.
All the images had gotten the eyes night, at least, those huge black eyes that were just like the eyes of the thing that had chewed its way out of McCarthy’s ass, and the mouth was close-a vestigial slit, no more than that-but its gray skin hung in loose folds and swags, like the skin of an elephant dying of old age. From the wrinkles there ran listless yellow-white streams of some pussy substance; the same stuff ran like tears from the comers of its expressionless eyes. Clots and smears of it puddled across the floor of the big room, across the Navajo rug beneath the dreamcatcher, back toward the kitchen door through which it had entered. How long had Mr Gray been there? Had he been outside, watching Jonesy run from the snowmobile shed to the back door with the useless roll of friction tape in his hand?
He didn’t know. He only knew that Mr Gray was dying, and Jonesy had to get past him because the thing in the bathroom had just dropped onto the floor with a heavy thud. It would be coming for him.
Marcy, Mr Gray said.
He spoke with perfect clarity, although the vestige of a mouth never moved. Jonesy heard the word in the middle of his head, in the same precise place where he had always heard Duddits’s crying.
“What do you want?” The thing in the bathroom slithered across his feet, but Jonesy barely noticed it. Barely noticed it curl between the bare, toeless feet of the gray man.
Please stop, Mr Gray said inside Jonesy’s head. It was the click. More; it was the line. Sometimes you saw the line; sometimes you heard it, as he had heard the run of Defuniak’s guilty thoughts that time. I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy?
Death looking for me that day, Jonesy thought. Missed me in the street, missed me in the hospital-if only by a room or two-been looking ever since. Finally found me.
And then the thing’s head exploded, tore wide open, releasing a red-orange cloud of ether-smelling particles. Jonesy breathed them in.
Chapter Eight
ROBERTA
1
With her hair now all gray, a widow at fifty-eight (but still a birdie-woman who favored flowered print dresses, those things hadn’t changed), Duddits’s mother sat in front of the television in the ground-floor apartment in West Derry Acres which she and her son now shared. She had sold the house on Maple Lane after Alfie died. She could have afforded to keep it-Alfie had left plenty of money, the life insurance had paid out plenty more, and there was her share of the imported auto-parts company he’d started in 1975 on top of that-but it was too big and there were too many memories above and below the living room where she and Duddits spent most of their time. Above was the bedroom where she and Alfie had slept and talked, made plans and made love. Below was the rec room where Duddits and his friends had spent so many afternoons and evenings. In Roberta’s view they had been friends sent from heaven, angels with kind hearts and dirty mouths who had actually expected her to believe that when Duddits started saying fut, he was trying to say Fudd, which, they explained earnestly, was the name of Pete’s new puppy-Elmer Fudd, just Fudd for short. And of course she had pretended to believe this.
Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times. And then, of course, Duddits had gotten sick. Two years now he’d been sick, and none of his old friends knew because they didn’t come around anymore and she hadn’t had the heart to pick up the phone and call Beaver, who would have called the others.
Now she sat in front of the TV, where the local-news folks had finally given up just breaking into her afternoon stories and had gone on the air full-time. Roberta listened, afraid of what might be happening up north but fascinated, too. The scariest part was that no one seemed to know exactly what was happening or just what the story was or how big it was. There were missing hunters, maybe as many as a dozen, in a remote area of Maine a hundred and fifty miles north of Derry. That part was clear enough. Roberta wasn’t positive, but she was quite sure that the reporters were talking about Jefferson Tract, where the boys used to go hunting, coming back with bloody stories that both fascinated Duddits and frightened him.
Were those hunters just cut off by an Alberta Clipper storm that had passed through, dropping six or eight inches of snow on the area? Maybe. No one could say for sure, but one party of four that had been hunting in the Kineo area really did seem to be missing. Their pictures were flashed on the screen, their names recited solemnly: Otis, Roper, McCarthy, Shue. The last was a woman.
Missing hunters weren’t big enough to warrant interrupting the afternoon soaps, but there was other stuff, too. People had glimpsed strange, varicolored lights in the sky. Two hunters from Millinocket who had been in the Kineo area two days previous claimed to have seen a cigar-shaped object hovering over a powerline-cut in the woods. There had been no rotors on the craft, they said, and no visible means of propulsion. It simply hung there about twenty feet above the powerlines, emitting a deep hum that buzzed in your bones. And in your teeth, it seemed. Both of the hunters claimed to have lost teeth, although when they opened their mouths to display the gaps, Roberta had thought the rest of their teeth looked ready to fall out, as well. The hunters had been in an old Chevy pickup, and when they tried to drive closer for a better look, their engine had died. One of the men had a battery-powered watch that had run backward for about three hours following the event and had then quit for good (the other’s watch, the old-fashioned windup kind, had been fine). According to the reporter, a number of other hunters and area residents had been seeing unidentified flying objects-some cigar-shaped, some of the more traditional saucer shape-for the last week or so. The military slang for such an outbreak of sightings, the reporter said, was a “flap”.