But what were the images? What were they exactly? They were hazy, impossible to see except in vague outline, because there was always that puzzling blue filter between, the blue filter that was sometimes cut by those yellow markings like tiger stripes.
The only clear image in these dream-replays came near the end: the screams of the dying, the smell of the dead. And a single tiger padding through miles of twisted metal, fused glass, and scorched earth. This tiger was always laughing, and it seemed to be carrying something in its mouth – something blue and yellow and dripping blood.
There had been times in the fall when he thought that dream would send him mad.
Ridiculous dream; the possibility it seemed to point to was impossible, after all. Best to drive it totally out of his mind.
But because he couldn’t, he researched Gregory Still-son and tried to tell himself it was only a harmless hobby and not a dangerous obsession.
Stillson had been born in Tulsa. His father had been an oil-field roughneck who drifted from job to job, working more often than some of his colleagues because of his tremendous size. His mother might once have been pretty, although there was only a hint of that in the two pictures that Johnny had been able to unearth. If she had been, the times and the man she had been married to had dimmed her prettiness quickly. The pictures showed little more than another dustbowl face, a southeast United States depression woman who was wearing a faded print dress and holding a baby – Greg – in her scrawny arms, and squinting into the sun.
His father had been a domineering man who didn’t think much of his son. As a child, Greg had been pallid and sickly. There was no evidence that his father had abused the boy either mentally or physically, but there was the suggestion that at the very least, Greg Stillson had lived in a disapproving shadow for the first nine years of his life. The one picture Johnny had of the father and son t6gether was a happy one, however; it showed them together in the oil fields, the father’s arm slung around the son’s neck in a careless gesture of comradeship. But it gave Johnny a little chill all the same. Harry’ Stilison was dressed in working clothes, twill pants and a double-breasted khaki shirt, and his hard hat was cocked jauntily back on his head.
Greg had begun school in Tulsa, then had been switched to Oklahoma City when he was ten. The previous summer his father had been killed in an oil-derrick flameout. Mary Lou Stillson had gone to Okie City with her boy because it was where her mother lived, and where the war work was. It was 1942, and good times had come around again.
Greg’s grades had been good until high school, and then he began to get into a series of scrapes. Truancy, fighting, hustling snooker downtown, maybe hustling stolen goods uptown, although that had never been proved. In 1949, when he had been a high-school junior, he had pulled a two-day suspension for putting a cherry’-bomb fire-cracker in a locker-room toilet.
In all of these confrontations with authority, Mary Lou Stillson took her son’s part. The good times – at least for the likes of the Stillsons – had ended with the war work in 1945, and Mrs. Stillson seemed to think of it as a case of her and her boy against the rest of the world. Her mother had died, leaving her the small frame house and nothing else. She hustled drinks in a roughneck bar for a while, then waited table in an all-light beanery.
And when her boy got in trouble, she went to bat for him, never checking (apparently) to see if his hands were dirty or clean.
The pale sickly boy that his father had nicknamed Runt was gone by 1949. As Greg Stillson’s adolescence progressed, his father’s physical legacy came out. The boy shot up six inches and put on seventy pounds between thirteen and seventeen. He did not play organized school sports but somehow managed to acquire a Charles Atlas bodybuilding gym and then a set of weights. The Runt became a bad guy to mess with.