Until today. It had been Jonesy’s body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside-Henry rather thought he was-but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.
Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn’t want to think, didn’t want to care.
At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-word sign-CLARENDON-he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He couldn’t remember, wasn’t sure it mattered.
Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.
The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or maybe fungus. And something else…
Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently-he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice’s a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking, We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other’s assholes, and it all comes to about the same. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father’s chin had come, He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be, and if it were done, than “twere well it were done quickly.
What he smelled now wasn’t wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he couldn’t place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong innards was here, too.
Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last time, feeling the weight of all the years-the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid of pot, a food-fight in “96 (or maybe it had been “97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and childhood’s brilliance.
As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildev,7ystuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.
Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning. If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks, was there?
He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.
2
The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day, Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to… to the what?
To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no woodpeckers pecking, no squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone, had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.
He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed’s interior. Pete would have done better-Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the smallest jar of screws-but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete’s special skill. He’d been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.
Henry inhaled and exhaled rapidly several times, hyperventilating his lungs clean, then pressed his gloved hand tight over his mouth and nose and stepped in. He stood still for a moment, waiting for his eyes to adjust to the dim. He didn’t want to be surprised by anything if he could help it.
When he could see well again, Henry stepped across the empty place where the snowmobile had been. There was nothing on the floor now but an overlaid pattern of oil stains, but there were more patches of that reddish-gold crud growing on the green tarp which had covered the Cat and was now cast aside in the comer.
The worktable was a mess-a jar of nails and one of screws overturned so that what had been kept carefully separate was now mixed together, an old pipe-holder that had belonged to Lamar Clarendon knocked to the floor and broken, all the drawers built into the table’s thickness yanked open and left that way. One of them, Beaver or Jonesy, had gone through this place like a whirlwind, looking for something.
It was Jonesy.
Yeah. Henry might never know what it was, but it had been Jonesy, he knew that, and it had clearly been almighty important to him or to both of them. Henry wondered if Jonesy had found it. He would probably never know that, either. Meanwhile, what he wanted was clearly visible in the far comer of the room, hung on a nail above a pile of paint-cans and sprayguns.
Still holding his hand over his mouth and nose, breath held, Henry crossed the interior of the shed. There were at least four of the little nose-and-mouth painters” masks hanging from elastics which had lost most of their snap. He took them all and turned in time to see something move behind the door. He kept himself from gasping, but his heartbeat jumped, and all at once the double lungful of air that had gotten him this far seemed too hot and heavy. Nothing there, either, it had just been his imagination. Then he saw that yeah, there was something. Light came in through the open door; a little more came in through the single dirty window over the table, and Henry had literally jumped at his own shadow.
He left the shed in four big steps, the painters” masks swinging from his right hand. He held onto his lungfill of decayed air until he’d made four more steps along the packed track of the snowmobile, then let it out in an explosive rush. He bent over, hands planted on his thighs above his knees, small black dots flocking before his eyes and then dissolving.
From the east came a distant crackle of gunfire. Not rifles; it was too loud and fast for that. Those were automatic weapons. In Henry’s mind there came a vision as clear as the memory of milk running down his father’s chin or Barry Newman fleeing his office with rockets on his heels. He saw the deer and the coons and the chucks and the feral dogs and the rabbits being cut down in their dozens and their hundreds as they tried to escape what was now pretty clearly a plague zone; he could see the snow turning red with their innocent (but possibly contaminated) blood. This vision hurt him in a way he had not expected, piercing through to a place that wasn’t dead but only dozing. It was the place that had resonated so strongly to Duddits’s weeping, setting up a harmonic tone that made you feel as if your head were going to explode.