SHAFT 12

1

Mr Gray drove the Subaru nearly three miles up East Street - muddy, rutted, and now covered with three inches of fresh snow - before crashing into a fault caused by a plugged culvert. The Subaru had fought its way gamely through several mires north of the Goodnough Dike, and had bottomed out in one place hard enough to tear off the muffler and most of the exhaust pipe, but this latest break in the road was too much. The car went forward nose-first into the crack and lodged on the pipe, unmuffled engine blatting stridently. Jonesy's body was thrown forward and the seatbelt locked. His diaphragm clenched and he vomited helplessly onto the dashboard: nothing solid now, only bilious strings of saliva. For a moment the color ran out of the world and the rackety roar of the engine faded. He fought viciously for consciousness, afraid that if he passed out for even a moment, Jonesy might somehow be able to take control again.

The dog whined. Its eyes were still closed but its rear legs twitched spasmodically and its ears flicked. Its belly was distended, the skin rippling. Its moment was near.

A little at a time, color and reality began to return. Mr Gray took several deep breaths, coaxing this sick and unhappy body back to something resembling calm. How far was there still to go? He didn't think it could be far now, but if the little car was really stuck, he would have to walk and the dog couldn't. The dog must remain asleep, and it was already perilously close to waking again.

He caressed the sleep-centers of its rudimentary brain. He wiped at his slimy mouth as he did it. Part of his mind was aware of Jonesy, still in there, blind to the outside world but awaiting any chance to leap forward and sabotage his mission; and, incredibly, another part of his mind craved more food - craved bacon, the very stuff which had poisoned it.

Sleep, little friend. Speaking to the dog; speaking also to the byrum. And both listened. Lad ceased whining. His paws stopped twitching. The ripples running across the dog's belly slowed . . . slowed . . . stopped. This calm wouldn't last long, but for now all was well. As well as it could be.

Surrender, Dorothy.

'Shut up!' Mr Gray said. 'Kiss my bender!' He put the Subaru in reverse and floored the accelerator. The motor howled, scaring birds up from the trees, but it was no good. The front wheels were caught firmly, and the back wheels were up, spinning in the air.

'Fuck!' Mr Gray cried, and slanu-ned Jonesy's fist down on the steering wheel. 'Jesus-Christ-bananas! Fuck me Freddy!'

He felt behind him for his pursuers and got nothing clear, only a sense of approach. Two groups of them, and the one that was closer had Duddits. Mr Gray feared Duddits, sensed that he was the one most responsible for how absurdly, infuriatingly difficult this job had become. If he could stay ahead of Duddits, all would end well. It would help to know how close Duddits was, but they were blocking him - Duddits, Jonesy, and the one called Henry. The three of them together made a force Mr Gray had never encountered before, and he was afraid.

'But I'm still enough ahead,' he told Jonesy, getting out. He slipped, uttered a Beaver-curse, then slammed the door shut. It was snowing again, great white flakes that filled the air like confetti and splashed against Jonesy's cheeks. Mr Gray slogged around the back of the car, boots sliding and smooching in the mud. He paused for a moment to examine the corrugated silver back of the pipe rising from the bottom of the ditch which had trapped his car (he had also fallen victim in some degree to his host's mostly useless but infernally sticky curiosity), then went on around to the passenger door. 'I'm going to beat your asshole friends quite handily.'

No answer to this goad, but he sensed Jonesy just as he sensed the others, Jonesy silent but still the bone in his throat.

Never mind him. Fuck him. The dog was the problem. The byrum was poised to come out. How to transport the dog?

Back into Jonesy's storage vault. For a moment there was nothing . . . and then an image from 'Sunday School', where Jonesy had gone as a child to learn about 'God' and 'God's only begotten son', who appeared to be a byrum, creator of a byrus culture which Jonesy's mind identified simultaneously as 'Christianity' and 'bullshit'. The image was very clear, from a book called 'the Holy Bible'. It showed 'God's only begotten son' carrying a lamb - wearing it, almost. The lamb's front legs hung over one side of 'begotten son's' chest, its rear legs over the other.

It would do.

Mr Gray pulled out the sleeping dog and draped it around his neck. It was heavy already - Jonesy's muscles were stupidly, infuriatingly weak - and it would be much worse by the time he got where he was going . . . but he would get there.

He set off up East Street through the thickening snow, wearing the sleeping border collie like a fur stole.

2

The new snow was extremely slippery, and once they were on Route 32, Freddy was forced to drop his speed back to forty. Kurtz felt like howling with frustration. Worse, Perlmutter was slipping away from him, into something like a semi-coma. And this at a time, goddam him, when he had suddenly been able to read the one Owen and his new friends were after, the one they called Mr Gray.

'He's too busy to hide,' Pearly said. He spoke dreamily, like someone on the edge of sleep. 'He's afraid. I don't know about Underhill, boss, but Jonesy . . . Henry . . . Duddits . . . he's afraid of them. And he's right to be afraid. They killed Richie.'

'Who's Richie, buck?' Kurtz didn't give much of a squirt, but he wanted Perlmutter to stay awake. He sensed they were coming to a place where he wouldn't need Perlmutter anymore, but for now he still did.

'Don't . . . know . . .' The last word became a snore. The Humvee skidded almost sideways. Freddy cursed, fought the wheel, and managed to regain control just before the Hummer hit the ditch. Kurtz took no notice. He leaned over the seat and slapped Perlmutter on the side of the face, hard. As he did so, they passed the store with the sign reading BEST BAIT, WHY WAIT? in the window.

'Owwww! Pearly' s eyes fluttered open. The whites were now yellowish. Kurtz cared about this no more than he cared about Richie. 'Dooon't, boss . .

'Where are they now?'

'The water,' Pearly said. His voice was weak, that of a petulant invalid. The belly under his coat was a distended, occasionally twitching mountain. Ma Joad in her ninth month, God bless and keep us, Kurtz thought. 'The waaaa . . .'

His eyes closed again. Kurtz drew his hand back to slap.

'Let him sleep,' Freddy said.

Kurtz looked at him, eyebrows raised.

'It's got to be the Reservoir he means. And if it is, we don't need him anymore.' He pointed through the windshield at the tracks of the few cars that had been out this afternoon ahead of them on Route 32. They were black and stark against the fall of fresh white snow. 'There won't be anyone up there today but us, boss. Just us.'

'Praise God.' Kurtz sat back, picked his nine-millimeter up off the seat, looked at it, and put it back in its holster. 'Tell me something, Freddy.'

'I will if I can.'

'When this is over, how does Mexico sound to you?'

'Good. As long as we don't drink the water.'

Kurtz burst out laughing and patted Freddy on the shoulder. Beside Freddy, Archie Perlmutter slipped deeper into coma. Inside his lower intestine, in that rich dump of discarded food and worn-out dead cells, something for the first time opened its black eyes.

3

Two stone posts marked the entrance to the vast acreage surround?ing the Quabbin Reservoir. Beyond them, the road closed down to what was essentially a single lane, and Henry had a sense of having come full circle. It wasn't Massachusetts, but Maine, and although the sign said Quabbin Access, it was really the Deep Cut Road all over again, He actually found himself looking up at the leaden sky, half-expecting to see the dancing lights. What he saw instead was a bald eagle, soaring almost close enough to touch. It landed on the lower branch of a pine tree and watched them go by.

Duddits raised his head from where it had lain against the cool glass and said, 'Isser Ay walkin now.'

Henry's heart leaped. 'Owen, did you hear?'

'I heard,' Owen said, and pressed the Humvee a little harder. The wet snow beneath them was as treacherous as ice, and with the state roads behind them, there was now only a single set of tracks leading north toward the Reservoir.

We'll be leaving our own set, Henry thought. If Kurtz gets this far, he won't need telepathy.

Duddits groaned, clutched his middle, and shivered all over. 'Ennie, I sick. Duddits sick.'

Henry brushed Duddits's hairless brow, not liking the heat of the skin. What came next? Seizures, probably. A big one might take Duds off in a hurry, given his weakened condition, and God knew that might be a mercy. The best thing. Still, it hurt to think of it. Henry Devlin, the potential suicide. And instead of him, the darkness had swallowed his friends, one by one.

'You hang in there, Duds. Almost done now.' But he had an idea the toughest part might still be ahead.

Duddits's eyes opened again. 'Isser Ay - ot tuck.'

'What?' Owen asked. 'I didn't get that one.'

'He says Mr Gray got stuck,' Henry said, still brushing Duddit's brow. Wishing there was hair to brush, and remembering when there had been. Duddits's fine blond hair. His crying had hurt them, had chopped into their heads like a dull blade, but how happy his laughter had made them - you heard Duddits Cavell laugh and for a little while you believed the old lies again: that life was good, that the lives of boys and men, girls and women, had some purpose. That there was light as well as darkness.

'Why doesn't he just throw the goddam dog into the Reservoir?' Owen asked. His voice cracked with weariness. 'Why does he feel he has to go all the way to this Shaft 12? Is it just because the Russian woman did?'

'I don't think the Reservoir is sure enough for him,' Henry said. 'The Standpipe would have been good, but the aqueduct is even better. It's an intestine sixty-five miles long. And Shaft 12 is the throat. Duddits, can we catch him?'

Duddits looked at him from his exhausted eyes, then shook his head. Owen pounded his own thigh in frustration. Duddits wet his lips. Spoke two words in a hoarse near-whisper. Owen heard them but couldn't make them out.

'What? What did he say?'

"'Only Jonesy."'

'What does that mean? Only Jonesy what?'

'Only Jonesy can stop him, I guess.'

The Hummer skidded again and Henry grabbed hold of the seat. A cold hand closed over his, Duddits was looking at him with desperate intensity. He tried to speak and began coughing instead, gruesome wet hacking sounds. Some of the blood that came out of his mouth was markedly lighter, frothy and almost pink. Henry thought it was lung-blood. And even while the coughs shook him, Duddits's grip on Henry's hand didn't loosen.

'Think it to me,' Henry said. 'Can you think it to me, Duds?' For a moment there was nothing but Duddits's cold hand closed over his, Duddits's eyes locked on his. Then Duddits and the khaki interior of the Humvee, with its faded scent of surreptitiously smoked cigarettes, was gone. In its place Henry sees a pay telephone - the old-fashioned kind with different-sized holes on top, one for quarters, one for dimes, one for nickels. The rumble of men's voices and a clack-clacking sound, hauntingly familiar. After a moment he realizes it's the sound of checkers on a checkerboard. He's looking at the pay phone in Gosselin's, the one from which they called Duddits after the death of Richie Grenadeau. Jonesy made the actual call, because he was the only one with a phone he could bill it to. The others gathered around, all of them still with their jackets on because it was so cold in the store, even living in the big woods with trees all around him, Old Man Gosselin wouldn't throw an extra log in the stove, what a fuckin pisser. There are two signs over the phone. One reads PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS.

The other one -

There was a crunching bang. Duddits was thrown against the back of Henry's seat and Henry was thrown into the dashboard. Their hands parted. Owen had skidded off the road and into the ditch. Ahead of them, the Subaru's tracks, fading now under fresh cover, ran off into the thickening snow.

'Henry! You all right?'

'Yeah. Duds? Okay?'

Duddits nodded, but the cheek he had struck was turning black with amazing speed. Your Leukemia at Work for You.

Owen dropped the Humvee's transmission into low range and began to creep up the ditch. The Humvee was canted at a severe angle - maybe thirty degrees - but it rolled pretty well once Owen got it moving.

'Fasten your seatbelt. First fasten his, though.'

'He was trying to tell me s - '

'I don't give a damn what he was trying to tell you. This time we were all right, next time we could roll three-sixty. Fasten his belt, then your own.'

Henry did as he was told, thinking about the other sign over the pay phone. What had it said? Something about Jonesy. Only Jonesy could stop Mr Gray now, that was the Gospel According to Duddits.

What had that other sign said?

4

Owen was forced to drop his speed to twenty. It made him crazy to creep like this, but the wet snow was falling furiously now and visibility was back to nearly zero.

Just before the Subaru's tracks disappeared entirely they came to the car itself, nose-down in a water-carved ditch running across the road, passenger door open, rear wheels in the air.

Owen stepped on the emergency brake, drew his Glock, opened his door. 'Stay here, Henry,' he said, and got out. He ran to the Subaru, bent low.

Henry unlatched his seatbelt and turned to Duddits, who was now sprawled against the back seat, gasping for breath, held in a sitting position only by the seatbelt. One cheek was a waxy yellow; the other had been engulfed by spreading blood under the skin. His nose was bleeding again, the wads of cotton sticking out of the nostrils soaked and dripping.

'Duds, I'm so sorry,' Henry said. 'This is a fuckarow.'

Duddits nodded, then raised his arms. He could only hold them up for a few seconds, but to Henry his meaning seemed obvious enough. Henry opened his door and got out just as Owen came running back, his Glock now stuffed in his belt. The air was so thick with snow, the individual flakes so huge, that breathing had become difficult.

'I thought I told you to stay where you were,' Owen said.

'I only want to get in the back with him.'

'Why?'

Henry spoke clearly enough, although his voice trembled slightly. 'Because he's dying,' he said. 'He's dying, but I think he has one more thing to tell me first.'

5

Owen looked in the rearview mirror, saw Henry with his arms around Duddits, saw they were both wearing their seatbelts, and fastened his own.

'Hold him good,' he said. 'There's going to be a hell of a jounce.

He reversed a hundred feet, put the Hummer in low, and drove forward, aiming for the spot between the abandoned Subaru and the righthand ditch. The crack in the road looked a little narrower on that side.

There was indeed a hell of a jounce. Owen's seatbelt locked and he saw Duddits's body leap in Henry's arms. Duddits's bald head bounced against Henry's chest. Then they were over the crack and once more rolling up East Street. Owen could just make out the last phantom shapes of shoeprints on the now-white ribbon of the road. Mr Gray was on foot and they were still rolling. If they could catch up before the bastard cut into the woods -

But they didn't.

6

With a final tremendous effort, Duddits raised his head. Now, Henry saw with dismay and horror, Duddits's eyes were also filling with blood.

Clack. Clack-clack. The dry chuckles of old men as someone accomplishes the fabled triple jump. The phone began to swim into his field of vision again. And the signs over it.

'No, Duddits,' Henry whispered. 'Don't try. Save your strength.'

But for what? For what if not for this?

The sign on the right: PLEASE LIMIT ALL CALLS TO 5 MINS, Smells of tobacco, smells of woodsmoke, the old brine of pickles. His friend's arms around him.

And the sign on the left: CALL JONESY NOW.

'Duddits . . .' His voice floating in the darkness. Darkness, his old friend. 'Duddits, I don't know how.'

Duddits's voice came to him a final time, very tired but calm: Quick, Henry - I can only hold on a little longer - you need to talk to him.

Henry picks the telephone's receiver out of its cradle. Thinks absurdly (but isn't the whole situation absurd?) that he doesn't have any change not so much as a crying dime. Holds the phone to his ear.

Roberta Cavell's voice comes, impersonal and businesslike: 'Massachusetts General Hospital, how may I direct your call?'

7

Mr Gray flailed Jonesy's body along the path which ran up the east side of the Reservoir from the point where East Street ended, slipping, falling, grabbing branches, getting up again. Jonesy's knees were lacerated, the pants tom open and soaked with blood. His lungs were burning, his heart beating like a steam-hammer. Yet the only thing that concerned him was Jonesy's hip, the one he'd broken in the accident. It was a hot and throbbing ball, shooting pain all the way down the thigh to the knee, and up to the middle of his back along the road of his spine. The weight of the dog made things worse. It was still asleep, but the thing inside was wide awake, held in place only by Mr Gray's will. Once, as he was rising to his feet, the hip locked up entirely and Mr Gray had to beat it repeatedly with Jonesy's gloved fist to make it let go again. How much farther? How much farther through the cursed, stifling, blinding, neverending snow? And what was Jonesy up to? Anything? Mr Gray didn't dare let go of the byrum's restless hunger - it had nothing even approaching a mind - ?long enough to go to the door of the locked room and listen.

A phantom shape appeared ahead in the snow. Mr Gray paused, gasping and peering at it, and then fought his way forward again, holding the dog's limp paws and dragging Jonesy's right foot.

Here was a sign nailed to the trunk of a tree: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE. Fifty feet beyond it, stone steps rose up from the path. Six of them . . . no, eight. At the top was a stone building on a stone foundation that jutted out into the snowy gray nothing where the Reservoir lay - Jonesy's ears could hear water lapping against stone even over the rushing, labored beat of his heart.

He had come to the place.

Clutching the dog and using the last of Jonesy's depleted strength, Mr Gray began to totter up the snow-covered steps.

8

As they passed between the stone posts marking the entrance to the Reservoir, Kurtz said: 'Pull over, Freddy. Side of the road.'

Freddy did as he was asked without question.

'You got your auto, laddie?'

Freddy lifted it. The good old M-16, tried and true. Kurtz nodded.

'Sidearm?'

'.44 Magnum, boss.'

And Kurtz with the nine, which he liked for close work. He wanted this to be close work. He wanted to see the color of Owen Underhill's brains.

'Freddy?'

'Yes, boss.'

'I just wanted you to know that this is my final mission, and I couldn't have hoped for a finer companion.' He reached out and gave Freddy's shoulder a squeeze. Beside Freddy, Perlmutter snored with his Ma Joad face tipped up toward the roof Five minutes or so before reaching the stone pillars he had passed several long, spectacularly odoriferous farts. After that, Pearly's distended gut had gone down again. Probably for the last time, Kurtz thought.

Freddy's eyes, meanwhile, had grown gratifyingly bright. Kurtz was delighted. He had not entirely lost his touch even now, it seemed.

'All right, buck,' Kurtz said. 'Full speed ahead and damn the torpedoes. Right?'

'Right, sir.' Kurtz guessed sir was okay again now. They could pretty well put the protocols of the mission behind them. They were Quantrill's boys, now; two final jayhawkers riding the western Massachusetts range.

With an unmistakable little grimace of distaste, Freddy jerked a thumb at Perlmutter. 'Want me to try waking him up, sir? He may be too far gone, but - '

'Why bother?' Kurtz asked. Still gripping Freddy's shoulder, he pointed ahead, where the access road disappeared into a wall of white: the snow. The goddam snow that had chased them all his way, a grim fucking reaper dressed in white instead of black. The tracks of the Subaru were now entirely gone, but those of the Humvee Owen had stolen were still visible. If they moved along briskly, praise God, following these tracks would be a walk in the park. 'I don't think we need him anymore, which I personally find a great relief Go, Freddy. Go.'

The Humvee flirted her tail and then steadied. Kurtz drew his nine and held it against his leg. Coming for you, Owen. Coming for you, buck. And you better get your speech ready for God, because you're going to be making it just about an hour from now.

9

The office which he had furnished so beautifully - furnished out of his mind and his memories - was now falling apart.

Jonesy limped restlessly back and forth, looking around the room, lips pressed so tightly together they were white, forehead beaded with sweat even though it had gotten damned cold in here,

This was The Fall of the Office of Jonesy instead of the House of Usher. The furnace was howling and clanking beneath him, making the floor shake. White stuff - frost crystals, maybe - puffed in through the vent and left a powdery triangular shape on the wall. Where it touched it went to work on the wood paneling, simultaneously rotting it and warping it. The pictures fell one by one, tumbling to the floor like suicides. The Eames chair - the one he'd always wanted, the very one - split in two as if it had been hacked by an invisible axe. The mahogany panels on the walls began to split and peel free like dead skin. The drawers juddered out of their places in the desk and clattered one by one to the floor. The shutters Mr Gray had installed to block his view of the outside world were vibrating and shaking, producing a steady metallic squalling that set Jonesy's teeth on edge.

Crying out to Mr Gray, demanding to know what was going on, would be useless . . . and besides, Jonesy had all the information he needed. He had slowed Mr Gray down, but Mr Gray had first risen to the challenge and then above it. Viva Mr Gray, who had either reached his goal or almost reached it. As the paneling fell off the walls, he could see the dirty Sheetrock beneath: the walls of the Tracker Brothers office as four boys had seen it in 1978, lined up with their foreheads to the glass, their new chum standing behind them as bidden, waiting for them to be done with whatever it was they were doing, waiting for them to take him home. Now another wood panel tore loose, coming off the wall with a sound like tearing paper, and beneath it was a bulletin board with a single photo, a Polaroid, tacked to it. Not a beauty queen, not Tina Jean Schlossinger, but just some woman with her skirt hiked to the bottom of her panties, pretty stupid. The nice rug on the floor suddenly shrivelled like skin, revealing dirty Tracker Brothers tile beneath, and those white tadpoles, scumbags left by couples who came in here to screw beneath the disinterested gaze of the Polaroid woman who was no one, really, just an artifact of a hollow past.

He paced, lurching on his bad hip, which hadn't hurt this badly since just after the accident, and he understood all of this, oh yes indeed, you had better believe it. His hip was full of splinters and ground glass; his shoulders and neck ached with a fierce tiredness. Mr Gray was beating his body to death as he made his final charge and there was nothing Jonesy could do about it.

The dreamcatcher was still okay. Swaying back and forth in great looping arcs, but still okay. Jonesy fixed his eyes on it. He had thought himself ready to die, but he didn't want to go like this, not in this stinking office. Outside of it, they had once done something good, something almost noble. To die in here, beneath the dusty, indifferent gaze of the woman pinned to the bulletin board . . . that didn't seem fair. Never mind the rest of the world; he, Gary Jones of Brookline, Massachusetts, once of Derry, Maine, lately of the Jefferson Tract, deserved better.

'Please, I deserve better than this!' he cried to the swaying cobweb shape in the air, and on the disintegrating desk behind him, the telephone rang.

Jonesy wheeled around, groaning at the fiery, complicated pain in his hip. The phone on which he'd called Henry earlier had been his office phone, the blue Trimline. The one on the cracked surface of the desk now was black and clunky, with a dial instead of buttons and a sticker on it reading MAY THE FORCE BE WITH YOU. It was the phone he'd had in his childhood room, the one his parents had given him for his birthday. 949-7784, the number to which he had charged the call to Duddits all those years ago.

He sprang for it, ignoring his hip, praying the line wouldn't disintegrate and disconnect before he could answer.

'Hello? Hello!' Swaying back and forth on the shaking, vibrating floor. The whole office now going up and down like a ship on a heavy sea.

Of all the voices he might have expected, Roberta's was the last. 'Yes, Doctor, hold on for your call.'

There was a click so loud it hurt his head, then silence. Jonesy groaned and was about to put the phone down when there was another click.

'Jonesy?' It was Henry. Faint, but undoubtedly Henry.

'Where are you?' Jonesy shouted. 'Christ, Henry, the place is falling apart! I'm falling apart!'

'I'm in Gosselin's,' Henry said, 'only I'm not. Wherever you are, you're not. We're in the hospital where they took you after you got hit . . .' A crackle on the line, a buzz, and then Henry came back, sounding closer and stronger. Sounding like a lifeline in all this disintegration. not there, either!'

'What?'

'We're in the dreamcatcher, Jonesy! We're in the dreamcatcher and we always were! Ever since '78! Duddits is the dreamcatcher, but he's dying! He's holding on, but I don't know how long . . . ' Another click followed by another buzz, bitter and electric.

'Henry! Henry!'

' . . . come out!' Faint again now. Henry sounded desperate. 'You have to come out, Jonesy! Meet me! Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There's still time! We can take this son of a bitch! Do you hear me? We can - '

There was another click and the phone went dead. The body of his childhood phone cracked, split open, and vomited out a senseless tangle of wires. All of them were red-orange; all of them were contaminated with the byrus.

Jonesy dropped the phone and looked up at the swaying dreamcatcher, that ephemeral cobweb. He remembered a line they'd been fond of as kids, pulled out of some comedian's routine: Wherever you are, there you are. That had been right up there with Same shit, different day, had perhaps even taken over first place as they grew older and began to consider themselves sophisticated. Wherever you are, there you are. Only according to Henry's call just now, that wasn't true. Wherever they thought they were, they weren't.

They were in the dreamcatcher.

He noted that the one swaying in the air above the ruins of his desk had four central spokes radiating out from the center. Many connecting threads were held together by those spokes, but what held the spokes together was the center - the core where they merged.

Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There's still time!

Jonesy turned and sprinted for the door.

10

Mr Gray was also at a door - the one into the shaft house. It was locked. Considering what had happened with the Russian woman, this didn't surprise him much. Locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen was Jonesy's phrase for it. If he'd had one of the kim, this would have been easy. As it was, he wasn't too perturbed. One of the interesting side effects of having emotions, he had discovered, was that they caused you to think ahead, plan ahead, so that you wouldn't trigger an all-out emotional attack if things went wrong.

It might be one reason these creatures had survived as long as they had.

Jonesy's suggestion that he give in to all this - go native had been his phrase for it, one that struck Mr Gray as both mysterious and exotic - wouldn't quite leave his mind, but Mr Gray pushed it aside. He would accomplish his mission here, satisfy the imperative. After that, who knew? Bacon sandwiches, perhaps. And what Jonesy's mind identified as a 'cocktail'. This was a cool and refreshing drink, slightly intoxicating -

A gust of wind rolled off the Reservoir, slapping wet snow into his face, momentarily blinding him. It was like the snap of a. wet towel, returning him to the here and now, where he had a job to finish.

He sidled to the left on the rectangular granite stoop, slipped, then dropped to his knees, ignoring the howl from Jonesy's hip. He hadn't come all this way - black light-years and white miles - either to fall back down the steps and break his neck or to tumble into the Quabbin and die of hypothermia in that chilly water.

The stoop had been placed atop a mound of crushed stone. Leaning over the left side of the stoop, he brushed snow away and began feeling for a loose chunk. There were windows flanking the locked door, narrow but not too narrow.

Sound was tamped down and flattened by the heavy fall of wet snow, but he could hear the sound of an approaching motor. There had been another, as well, but that one had already stopped, probably at the end of East Street. They were coming, but they were too late. It was a mile along the path, which was densely overgrown and slippery underfoot. By the time they got here the dog would be down the shaft, drowning and delivering the byrum into the aqueduct at the same time.

He found a loose rock and pulled it free, working carefully so as not to dislodge the pulsing body of the dog around his shoulders. He backed away from the edge on his knees, then tried to get to his feet. At first he couldn't. The ball of Jonesy's hip had swelled tight again. He finally lurched upright, although the pain was incredible, seeming to go all the way up to his teeth and his temples.

He stood for a moment, holding Jonesy's bad right leg a little off the ground like a horse with a stone in its hoof, bracing himself against the locked shaft-house door. When the pain had abated somewhat, he used the rock to beat the glass out of the window to the left of the door. He cut Jonesy's hand in several places, once deeply, and several cracked panes in the upper half of the window hung over the lower half like a cut-rate guillotine, but he paid no attention to these things. Nor did he sense that Jonesy had finally left his bolt-hole,

Mr Gray squirmed in through the window, landed on the cold concrete floor, and looked around.

He was in a rectangular room about thirty feet long. At the far end, a window which no doubt would have given a spectacular view of the Reservoir on a clear day showed only white, as if a sheet had been tacked over it. To one side of it was what looked like a gigantic steel pail, its sides speckled with red - not byrus, but an oxide Jonesy identified as 'rust'. Mr Gray didn't know for sure but guessed that men could be lowered down the shaft in the bucket, should some emergency require it.

The iron cover, four feet across, was in place, seated dead center in the middle of the floor. He could see the square notch on one side of it and looked around. A few tools leaned against the wall. One of them, in a scatter of glass from the broken window, was a crowbar. Quite possibly the same one the Russian woman had used as she prepared for her suicide.

Way I heard it, Mr Gray thought, the folks in Boston'll be drinking that last byrum in their morning coffee right around Valentine's Day.

He seized the crowbar, limped painfully to the center of the room with his breath puffing cold and white before him, then seated the spatulate end of the tool in the slot of the cover.

The fit was perfect.

11

Henry racks the telephone, takes in a deep breath, holds it . . . and then runs for the door which is marked both OFFICE and PRIVATE.

'Hey!' old Reenie Gosselin squawks from her place at the cash-register. 'Come back here, kid! You can't go in there!'

Henry doesn't stop, doesn't even slow, but as he goes through the door he realizes that yeah, he is a kid, at least a foot shy of his final height, and although he's wearing specs, they're nowhere near as heavy as they will be later on. He's a kid, but under all that flopping hair (which will have thinned a bit by the time he hits his thirties) there is an adult's brain. I'm two, two, two mints in one, he thinks, and as he bursts into Old Man Gosselin's office he is cackling madly - laughing like they did in the old days, when the strands of the dreamcatcher were all close to the center and Duddits was running their pegs. I almost busted a gut, they used to say; I almost busted a gut, what a fuckin pisser.

Into the office he goes, but it's not Old Man Gosselin's office where a man named Owen Underhill once played a man whose name was not Abraham Kurtz a tape of the grayboys talking in famous voices; it is a corridor, a hospital corridor, and Henry is not in the least surprised. It's Mass General. He's made it.

The place is dank, colder than any hospital corridor should be, and the walls are splotched with byrus. Somewhere a voice is groaning I don't want you, I don't want a shot, I want Jonesy. Jonesy knew Duddits, Jonesy died, died in the ambulance, Jonesy's the only one who will do. Stay away, kiss my bender, I want Jonesy.

But he will not stay away. He is crafty old Mr Death and he will not stay away. He has business here.

He walks unseen down the corridor, where it's cold enough for him to see his breath puffing out in front of him, a boy in an orange coat he will soon outgrow. He wishes he had his rifle, the one Pete's Dad loaned him, but that rifle is gone, left behind, buried in the years along with Jonesy's phone with the Star Wars sticker on it (how they had all envied that phone), and Beaver's jacket of many zippers, and Pete's sweater with the NASA logo on the breast. Buried in the years. Some dreams die and fall free, that is another of the world's bitter truths. How many bitter truths there are.

He walks past a pair of laughing, talking nurses - one of them is Josie Rinkenhauer, all grown up, and the other is the woman in the Polaroid photograph they saw that day through the Tracker Brothers office window. They don't see him because he's not here for them; he is in the dreamcatcher now, run?ning back along his strand, running toward the center. I am the eggman, he thinks. Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.

Henry went on up the corridor toward the sound of Mr Gray's voice.

12

Kurtz heard it clearly enough through the shattered window: the broken stutter of automatic-rifle fire. It provoked an old sense of unease and impatience in him: anger that the shooting had started without him, and fear that it would be over before he got there, nothing left but the wounded yelling medic-medic-medic.

'Push it harder, Freddy.' Directly in front of Kurtz, Perlmutter was snoring ever deeper into his coma.

'Pretty greasy underfoot, boss.'

'Push it anyway. I've got a feeling we're almost - '

He saw a pink stain on the clean white curtain of the snow, as diffuse as blood from a facial cut seeping up through shaving cream, and then the ditched Subaru was right in front of them, nose down and tail up. In the following moments Kurtz took back every unkind thought he'd had about Freddy's driving. His second in command simply twisted the steering wheel to the right and punched the gas when the Humvee started to skid. The big vehicle took hold and leaped at the break in the road. It hit with a tremendous jouncing crash. Kurtz flew upward, hitting the ceiling hard enough to produce a shower of stars in his field of vision. Perlmutter's arms flailed like those of a corpse; his head snapped backward and then forward. The Humvee passed close enough to the Subaru to tear the doorhandle off the car's passenger side. Then it was bucketing onward, now chasing a single pair of relatively fresh tire tracks.

Breathing down your neck now, Owen, Kurtz thought. Right down your everloving neck, God rot your blue eyes.

The only thing that worried him was that single burst of fire. What was that about? Whatever it was, it wasn't repeat?ed.

Then, up ahead, another of those blotches in the snow. This one was olive-green. This one was the other Hummer. They were gone, probably gone, but -

'Lock and load,' Kurtz said to Freddy. His voice was just a trifle shrill. 'It's time for someone to pay the piper.'

13

By the time Owen got to the place where East Street ended (or turned into the northeast-meandering Fitzpatrick Road, depending on your interpretation), he could hear Kurtz behind him and guessed that Kurtz could probably hear him, as well - the Humvees weren't as loud as Harleys, but they were a long way from quiet.

Jonesy's footprints were entirely gone now, but Owen could see the path which led down from the road and along the shore of the Reservoir.

He killed the engine. 'Henry, it looks like we're walking from h - '

Owen stopped. He had been concentrating too hard on his driving to look behind him or even check the rearview mirror, and he was unprepared for what he now saw. Unprepared and appalled.

Henry and Duddits were wrapped in what Owen first believed was a terminal embrace, their stubbly cheeks pressed together, their eyes closed, their faces and coats smeared with blood. He could see neither of them breathing and thought they had actually died together - Duddits of his leukemia, Henry perhaps of a heart attack brought on by exhaustion and the constant unrelieved stress of the last thirty hours or so - and then he saw the minute twitch of the eyelids. Both sets.

Embracing. Splattered with blood. But not dead. Sleeping.

Dreaming.

Owen started to call Henry's name again and then reconsidered. Henry had refused to leave the compound back in Jefferson Tract without freeing the detainees, and although they'd gotten away with that once, it had only been through the sheerest luck . . . or providence, if you believed that was any more than a TV show. Nevertheless, they bad gotten Kurtz on their tail, Kurtz had hung on like a booger, and now he was a lot closer than he would have been had Owen and Henry simply crept away into the storm.

Well, I wouldn't change that, Owen thought, opening the driver's door and getting out. From somewhere north, away in the white blank of the storm, came the scream of an eagle bitching about the weather. From behind, south, came the approaching racket of Kurtz, that annoying madman. It was impossible to tell how close because of the fucking snow. Coming down this fast and hard, it was like a sound-baffle. He could be two miles back; he could be a lot closer. Freddy would be with him, fucking Freddy, the perfect soldier, Dolph Lundgren from hell.

Owen went around to the back of the car, slipping and sliding in the snow, cursing it, and popped the Humvee's back gate, expecting automatic weapons, hoping for a portable rocket-launcher. No rocket-launcher, no grenades, either, but there were four MP5 auto-fire rifles, and a carton containing long banana-clips, the ones that held a hundred and twenty rounds.

He had played it Henry's way back at the compound, and Owen guessed that they had saved at least some lives, but he would not play it Henry's way this time - if he hadn't paid enough for the Rapeloews' goddam serving platter, he would simply have to live with the debt. Not for long, either, if Kurtz had his way.

Henry was either sleeping, unconscious, or joined to his dying childhood friend in some weird mind-meld. Let it be, then. Awake and by his side, Henry might balk at what needed to be done, especially if Henry was right in believing his other friend was still alive, hiding out in the mind the alien now controlled. Owen would not balk . . . and with the telepathy gone, he wouldn't hear Jonesy pleading for his life if he was still in there. The Glock was a good weapon, but not sure enough.

The MP5 would rip the body of Gary Jones apart.

Owen grabbed one, plus three extra clips which he stuffed into his coat pockets. Kurtz close now - close, close, close. He looked back at East Street, almost expecting to see the second Humvee materializing like a green-brown ghost, but as yet there was nothing. Praise Jesus, as Kurtz would say.

The Hummer's windows were already glazing over with snow, but he could see the dim shapes of the two men in the rear seat as he passed back along the body of the vehicle, trotting now. Still locked in each other's arms. 'Goodbye, boys,' he said. 'Sleep well.' And with any luck they would still be sleeping when Kurtz and Freddy arrived, putting an end to their lives before moving on after their main quarry.

Owen stopped suddenly, skidding in the snow and grabbing the Humvee's long hood to keep from falling. Duddits was clearly a lost cause, but he might be able to save Henry Devlin. It was just possible.

No! part of his mind screamed as he started back for the rear door. No, there's no time!

But Owen decided to gamble that there was - to gamble the whole world. Maybe to pay a little more on what he owed for the Rapeloews' plate; maybe for what he had done yesterday (those naked gray figures standing around their downed ship with their arms held up, as if in surrender); probably just for Henry, who had told him they would be heroes and who had tried splendidly to fulfill that promise.

No sympathy for the devil, he thought, wrenching open the rear door. No sir, zero sympathy for that motherfucker.

Duddits was closer. Owen seized him by the collar of his big blue duffel coat and yanked. Duddits toppled sideways onto the seat. His hat fell off, revealing his shining bald skull. Henry, with his arms still around Duddits's shoulders, came with him, landing on top. His eyes didn't open but he groaned softly. Owen leaned forward and whispered fiercely into Henry's ear.

, Don't sit up. For the love of God, Henry, don't you sit up!'

Owen withdrew, slammed the door, backed off three steps, placed the butt of the rifle against his hip, and fired a burst. The Humvee's windows turned to milk, then fell in. Casings clinked around Owen's feet. He stepped forward again and looked through the shattered window into the rear seat. Henry and Duddits still lay there, now covered with crumbles of Saf-T-Glas as well as Duddits's blood, and to Owen they looked like the two deadest people he had ever seen. Owen hoped Kurtz would be in too much of a hurry for a close examination. In any case, he had done the best he could.

He heard a hard metallic jouncing sound and grinned. That placed Kurtz, by God - they'd reached the washout where the Subaru had finished up. He wished mightily that Kurtz and Freddy had rear-ended the fucking thing, but the sound had not, unfortunately, been that loud. Still, it placed them. A mile back, a mile back at least. Not as bad as he'd thought.

'Plenty of time,' he muttered, and that might be true of Kurtz, but what about the other end? Where was Mr Gray now?

Holding the MP5 by the strap, Owen started down the path that led to Shaft 12.

14

Mr Gray had discovered another unlovely human emotion: panic. He had come all this way - light-years through space, miles through the snow - to be balked by Jonesy's muscles, which were weak and out of shape, and the iron shaft cover, which was much heavier than he had expected. He yanked down on the crowbar until Jonesy's back-muscles screamed in agonized protest . . . and was finally rewarded by a brief wink of darkness from beneath the edge of the rusty iron. And a grinding sound as it moved a bit - perhaps no more than an inch or two - on the concrete. Then Jonesy's lower back muscles locked up and Mr Gray staggered away from the shaft, crying out through clenched teeth (thanks to his immunity, Jonesy still had a full set of them) and pressing his hands to the base of Jonesy's spine, as if to keep it from exploding.

Lad let out a series of yipping whines. Mr Gray looked at him and saw that things had now reached the critical juncture. Although he was still asleep, Lad's abdomen was now so grotesquely swelled that one of his legs stuck stiffly up in the air. The skin of his lower belly had stretched to the point of splitting, and the veins there pulsed with clocklike rapidity. A trickle of bright blood spilled out from beneath his tall.

Mr Gray looked balefully at the crowbar jutting from the slot in the iron cover. In Jonesy's imagination, the Russian woman had been a slim beauty with dark hair and dark tragic eyes. In reality, Mr Gray thought, she must have been broad-shouldered and muscular. How else could she have -

There was a blast of gunfire, alarmingly close. Mr Gray gasped and looked around. Thanks to Jonesy, the human corrosion of doubt was also part of his makeup now, and for the first time he realized that he might be balked - yes, even here, so close to his goal that he could hear it, the sound of rushing water starting on its sixty-mile underground journey. And all that stood between the byrum and this whole world was a circular iron plate weighing a hundred and twenty pounds.

Screaming a thin and desperate litany of Beaver-curses, Mr Gray rushed forward, Jonesy's failing body jerking back and forth on the defective pivot-point of its right hip. One of them was coming, the one called Owen, and Mr Gray dared not believe he could make this Owen turn his weapon on himself Given time, given the element of surprise, maybe. Now he had neither. And this man who was coming had been trained to kill; it was his career.

Mr Gray leaped into the air. There was a snap, quite audible, as Jonesy's overstressed hip broke free of the swollen socket which had held it. Mr Gray landed on the crowbar with Jonesy's full weight. The edge lifted again, and this time the cover slid almost a foot across the concrete. The black crescent through which the Russian woman had slipped appeared again. Not much of a crescent, really no more than a delicate capital C drawn with a calligrapher's pen but enough for the dog.

Jonesy's leg would no longer support Jonesy's weight (and where was Jonesy, anyway? Still not a murmur from his troublesome host), but that was all right. Crawling would do now.

Mr Gray worked his way in such fashion across the cold cement floor to where the sleeping border collie lay, seized Lad by his collar, and began to drag him back to Shaft 12.

15

The Hall of Memories - that vast repository of boxes - is also on the verge of shaking itself apart. The floor shudders as if in the grip of an endless slow earthquake. Overhead, the fluorescents flicker on and off, giving the place a stuttery, hallucinatory look. In places tall stacks of cartons have fallen over, blocking some of the corridors.

Jonesy runs as best he can, He moves from corridor to corridor, threading his way through this maze purely on instinct. He tells himself repeatedly to ignore the goddam hip, he is nothing but mind now, anyway, but he might as well be an amputee trying to convince his missing limb to stop throbbing.

He runs past boxes marked AUSTRO-HUNGARIAN WAR and DEPARTMENTAL POLITICS and CHILDREN'S STORIES and CONTENTS OF UPSTAIRS CLOSET. He hurdles a pile of tumbled boxes marked CARLA, Comes down on his bad leg, and screams at the pain. He clutches more boxes (these marked GETTYSBURG) in order to keep from falling, and at last sees the far side of the storage room. Thank God; it seems to him that he has run miles.

The door is marked ICU and QUIET PLEASE and NO VISITORS W/O PASS. And that is right; this is where they took him; this is where he had awakened and heard crafty old Mr Death pretending to call for Marcy.

Jonesy bangs through the door and into another world, one he recognizes: the blue-over-white ICU corridor where he took his first painful, tentative steps four days after his surgery. He stumbles a dozen feet down the tiled corridor, sees the splotches of byrus growing on the walls, hears the Muzak, which is decidedly un-hospital-like; although it's turned low, it appears to be the Rolling Stones singing 'Sympathy for the Devil'.

He has no more than identified this song when his hip sud?denly goes nuclear. Jonesy utters a surprised scream and falls to the black-and-red ICU tiles, clutching at himself This is how it was Just after he was hit: an explosion of red agony. He rolls over and over, looking up at the glowing light-panels, at the circular speakers from which the music ('Anastasia screamed in vain') is coming, music from another world, when the pain is this bad everything is in another world, pain makes a shadow of substance and a mockery even of love, that is something he learned in March and must learn again now. He rolls and he rolls, hands clutching at his swollen hip, eyes bulging, mouth pulled back in a vast rictus, and he knows what has happened, all right: Mr Gray. That son of a bitch Mr Gray has re-broken his hip.

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.

Freddy felt a momentary coldness down his spine, as if Kurtz had the nine leveled there. Right there. But that was ridiculous, wasn't it? Owen, yes, but Owen was different. Owen had crossed the line.

Freddy hurried to the Hummer, bent low, carbine held at chest level. He didn't like having Kurtz behind him, that was undeniable. No, he didn't like that at all.

17

As the two boys advance on the overgrown bed, Mr Gray begins to push the CALL button repeatedly, but nothing happens. I think the works must be choked with byrus, Jonesy thinks. Too bad, Mr Gray - too bad for you. He glances up at the TV and sees that his film self has gotten the dog to the edge of the shaft. Maybe they're too late after all; maybe not. There's no way to tell. The wheel is still spinning.

Hello, Mr Gray, I've so much wanted to meet you, Henry says. As he speaks, he removes the byrus-splotched pillow from beneath Mr Gray's narrow, earless head. Mr Gray tries to wriggle toward the other side of the bed, but Jonesy holds him in place, grasping the alien's child-thin arms. The skin in his hands is neither hot nor cold. It doesn't feel like skin at all, not really. It feels like -

?Like nothing, he thinks. Like a dream.

Mr Gray? Henry asks. 7his is how we say welcome to Planet Earth. And he puts the pillow over Mr Gray's face.

Beneath Jonesy's hands, Mr Gray be ins to struggle and thrash.

Somewhere a monitor begins to beep frantically, as if this creature actually has a heart, and that it has now stopped beating.

Jonesy looks down at the dying monster and wishes only for this to be over.

18

Mr Gray got the dog to the side of the shaft he had partially uncovered. Coming up through the narrow black semicircle was the steady hollow rush of running water and a waft of dank, cold air.

If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well it were done quickly - that from a box marked SHAKESPEARE. The dog's rear legs were bicycling rapidly, and Mr Gray could hear the wet sound of tearing flesh as the byrum thrust with one end and chewed with the other, forcing itself out. Beneath the dog's tail, the chattering had started, a sound like an angry monkey. He had to get it into the shaft before it could emerge; it did not absolutely have to be born the water, but its odds of survival would be much higher if it was.

Mr Gray tried to shove the dog's head into the gap between the cover and the concrete and couldn't get it through. The neck bent and the dog's senselessly grinning snout twisted upward. Although still sleeping (or perhaps it was now unconscious) it began to utter a series of low, choked barks.

And it wouldn't go through the gap.

'Fuck me Freddy!' Mr Gray screamed. He was barely aware of the snarling ache in Jonesy's hip now, certainly not aware that Jonesy's face was strained and pale, the hazel eyes wet with tears of effort and frustration. He was aware - terribly aware - that something was going on. Going on behind my back, Jonesy would have said. And who else could it be? Who else but Jonesy, his reluctant host?

'Fuck YOU!' he screamed at the damned, hateful, stubborn, just-a-little-too-big dog. 'You're going down, do you hear me? DO YOU - '

The words stopped in his throat. All at once he couldn't yell anymore, although he dearly wanted to; how he loved to yell, and pound his fists on things (even a dying pregnant dog)! All at once he couldn't breathe, let alone yell. What was Jonesy doing to him?

He expected no answer, but one came - a stranger's voice, full of cold rage: This is how we say welcome to Planet Earth.

19

The flailing, three-fingered hands of the gray thing in the hospital bed come up and actually push the pillow aside for a moment. The black eyes starting from the otherwise featureless face are frantic with fear and rage. It gasps for breath. Considering that it doesn't really exist at all - not even in Jonesy's brain, at least as a physical artifact - it is fighting furiously for its life. Henry cannot sympathize, but he understands. It wants what Jonesy wants, what Duddits wants . . . what even Henry himself wants, for in spite of all his black thoughts, has his heart not gone on beating? Has his liver not gone on washing his blood? Has his body not gone on fighting its unseen wars against everything from the common cold to cancer to the byrus itself? The body is either stupid or infinitely wise, but in either case it is spared the terrible witchery of thought; it only knows how to stand its ground and fight until it can fight no more. If Mr Gray was ever any different, he is different no longer. He wants to live.

But I don't think you will, Henry says in a voice that is calm, almost soothing. I don't think so, my friend. And once more puts the pillow over Mr Gray's face.

20

Mr Gray's airway opened. He got one breath of the cold shaft-house air . . . two . . . and then the airway closed up again. They were smothering him, stifling him, killing him.

No!! Kiss my bender! Kiss my fucking bender! YOU CAN'T DO THIS!

He yanked the dog back and turned it sideways; it was almost like watching a man already late for his plane trying to make one last bulky article fit into his suitcase.

It'li go through this way, he thought.

Yes. It would. Even if he had to collapse the dog's bulging middle with Jonesy's hands and allow the byrum to squirt free. One way or another, the damned thing would go through.

Face swelling, eyes bulging, breath stopped, a single fat vein swelling in the middle of Jonesy's forehead, Mr Gray shoved Lad deeper into the crack and then began to thump the dog's chest with Jonesy's fists.

Go through, damn you, go through.

GO THROUGH!

21

Freddy Johnson pointed his carbine inside the abandoned Hummer while Kurtz, stationed shrewdly behind him (in that way it was like the attack on the grayboy ship all over again), waited to see what would develop.

'Two guys, boss. Looks like Owen decided to put out the trash before moving on.'

'Dead?'

'They look pretty dead to me. Got to be Devlin and the other one, the one they stopped for.'

Kurtz joined Freddy, took a brief glance in through the shattered window, and nodded. They looked pretty dead to him, too, a pair of white moles lying entwined in the back seat, covered with blood and shattered glass. He raised his nine-millimeter to make sure of them ?one each in the head couldn't hurt - then lowered it again. Owen might not have heard their engine. The snow was amazingly heavy and wet, an acoustical blanket, and that was very possible. But he would hear gunshots. He turned toward the path instead.

'Lead the way, buck, and mind the footing - looks slippery. And we may still have the element of surprise. I think we should bear that in mind, don't you?'

Freddy nodded.

Kurtz smiled. It turned his face into a skull's face. 'With any luck, buck, Owen Underhill will be in hell before he even knows he's dead.'

22

The TV remote, a rectangle of black plastic covered with byrus, is lying on Mr Gray's bedtable. Jonesy grabs it. In a voice that sounds eerily like Beaver's, he says 'Fuck this shit' and slams it down as hard as he can on the table's edge, like a man cracking the shell of a hardboiled egg. The controller shatters, spilling its batteries and leaving a jagged plastic wand in Jonesy's hand. He reaches below the pillow Henry is holding over the thrashing thing's face. He hesitates for just a moment, remembering his first meeting with Mr Gray ?his only meeting. The bathroom knob coming free in his hand as the rod snapped. The sense of darkness which was the creature's shadow falling over him. It had been real enough then, real as roses, real as raindrops. Jonesy had turned and seen him. . . it . . . whatever Mr Gray had been before he was Mr Gray. . . standing there in the big central room. The stuff of a hundred movies and 'unexplained mysteries' documentaries, only old. Old and sick. Ready even then for this hospital bed in the Intensive Care Unit. Marcy, it had said, plucking the word straight out of Jonesy's brain. Pulling it like a cork. Making the hole through which it could enter. Then it had exploded like a noisemaker on New Year's Eve, spraying byrus instead of confetti, and . . .

. . . and I imagined the rest. That was it, wasn't it? Just another case of intergalactic schizophrenia. Basically, that was it.

Jonesy! Henry shouts. If you're goina do it, then do it!

Here it comes, Mr Gray, Jonesy thinks. Get ready for it. Because payback's -

23

Mr Gray had gotten Lad's body halfway into the gap when Jonesy's voice filled his head.

Here it comes, Mr Gray. Get ready for it. Because payback's a bitch.

There was a ripping pain across the middle of Jonesy's throat.

Mr Gray raised Jonesy's hands, making a series of gagging grunts that would not quite attain the status of screams. He didn't feel the beard-stubbled, unbroken skin of Jonesy's throat but his own ragged flesh. What he felt most strongly was shocked disbelief: it was the last of Jonesy's emotions upon which he drew. 7his could not be happening. They always came in the ships of the old ones, those artifacts; they always raised their hands in surrender; they always won. This could not be happening.

And yet somehow it was.

The byrum's consciousness did not so much fade as disintegrate. Dying, the entity once known as Mr Gray reverted to its former state. As he became it (and just before it could become nothing), Mr Gray gave the dog's body a final vicious shove. It sank into the gap yet still not quite far enough to go through.

The byrum's last Jonesy-tinged thought was I should have taken him up on it. I should have gone na -

24

Jonesy slashes the jagged end of the TV controller across Mr Gray's naked wattled neck. Its throat peels open like a mouth and a cloud of reddish-orange matter puffs out, staining the air the color of blood before falling back to the counterpane in a shower of dust and fluff.

Mr Gray s body twitches once, galvanically, beneath Jonesy's and Henry's hands. Then it shrivels like the dream it always was and becomes something familiar. For a moment Jonesy can't make the connection and then it comes. Mr Gray's remains look like one of the condoms they saw on the floor of the deserted office in the Tracker Brothers depot.

He's -

- dead! is how Jonesy means to finish, but then a terrible bolt of pain tears through him. Not his hip this time but his head. And his throat. All at once his throat is wearing a necklace of fire. And the whole room is transparent, damned if it isn't. He's looking through the wall and into the shaft house, where the dog stuck in the crack is giving birth to a vile red creature that looks like a weasel crossed with a huge, blood-soaked worm. He knows well enough what it is: one of the byrum.

Streaked with blood and shit and the remains of its own membranous placenta, its brainless black eyes staring (they're his eyes, Jonesy thinks, Mr Gray's eyes), it is being born in front of him, stretching its body out, trying to pull free, wanting to drop into the darkness and fall toward the sound of running water. Jonesy looks at Henry.

Henry looks back.

For just a moment their young and startled eyes meet . . . and then they are disappearing, as well.

Duddits, Henry says. His voice comes from far away. Duddits is going. Jonesy . . .

Goodbye. Perhaps Henry means to say goodbye. Before he can, they're both gone.

25

There was a moment of vertigo when Jonesy was exactly nowhere, a sense of utter disconnection. He thought it must be death, that he had killed himself as well as Mr Gray - cut his own throat, as the saying went.

What brought him back was pain. Not in his throat, that was gone and he could breathe again - he could hear the air going in and out of him in great dry gasps. No, this pain was an old acquaintance. It was in his hip. It caught him and swung him back into the world around its swollen, howling axis, winding him up like a tether-ball on a post. There was concrete under his knees, his hands were full of fur, and he heard an inhuman chattering sound. At least this part is real, he thought. This part is outside the dreamcatcher.

That godawful chattering sound.

Jonesy saw the weasel-thing now dangling into the dark, held to the upper world only by its tail, which wasn't yet free of the dog. Jonesy lunged forward and clamped his hands around its slippery, shivering middle just as it did pull free.

He rocked backward, his bad hip throbbing, holding the writh?ing, yammering thing above his head like a carny performer with a boa constrictor. It whipped back and forth, teeth gnashing at the air, bending back on itself, trying to get at Jonesy's wrist and snagging the right sleeve of his parka instead, tearing it open and releasing near-weightless tangles of white down filling.

Jonesy pivoted on his howling hip and saw a man framed in the broken window through which Mr Gray had wriggled. The newcomer, his face long with surprise, was dressed in a camouflage parka and holding a rifle.

Jonesy flung the wriggling weasel as hard as he could, which wasn't very hard. It flew perhaps ten feet, landed on the leaf-littered floor with a wet thump, and immediately began slithering back toward the shaft. The dog's body plugged part of it, but not enough. There was plenty of room.

'Shoot it!' Jonesy screamed at the man with the rifle. 'For God's sake shoot it before it can get into the water!'

But the man in the window did nothing. The world's last hope only stood there with his mouth hanging open.

26

Owen simply couldn't believe what he was seeing. Some sort of red thing, a freakish weasel with no legs. To hear about such things was one matter; to actually see one was another. It squirmed toward the hole in the middle of the floor. A dog with its stiffening paws held up as if in surrender was wedged there.

The man - it had to be Typhoid Jonesy - was screaming at him to shoot the thing, but Owen's arms simply wouldn't come up. They seemed to be coated in lead. The thing was going to get away; after all that had happened, what he had hoped to prevent was going to happen right in front of him. It was like being in hell.

He watched it wriggle forward, making a godawful monkey?-sound that he seemed to hear in the center of his head; he watched Jonesy lunging with desperate awkwardness, hoping to catch it or at least head it off. It wasn't going to work. The dog was in the way.

Owen again commanded his arms to raise the gun and point it, but nothing happened. The MP5 might as well have been in another universe. He was going to let it get away. He was going to stand here like a post and let it get away. God help him.

God help them all.

27

Henry sat up in the back seat of the Humvee, dazed. There was stuff in his hair. He brushed at it, still feeling caught in the dream of the hospital (except that was no dream, he thought, and then a sharp prick of pain restored him to something like reality. It was glass. His hair was filled with glass. More of it, Saf-T-Glas crumbles of it, covered the seat. And Duddits.

'Dud?'

Useless, of course. Duddits was dead. Must be dead. He had expended the last of his failing energy to bring Jonesy and Henry together in that hospital room.

But Duddits groaned. His eyes opened, and looking into them brought Henry all the way back to this snowy dead-end road. Duddits's eyes were red and bloody zeroes, the eyes of a sibyl.

'Ooby!' Duddits cried. His hands rose and made a weak aiming gesture, as if he held a rifle. 'Ooby-Doo! Ot-sum urk-ooo do now!' From somewhere up ahead in the woods, two rifle shots came in answer. A pause, then a third one.

'Dud?' Henry whispered. 'Duddits?'

Duddits saw him. Even through his bloody eyes, Duddits saw him. Henry more than felt this; for a moment he actually saw himself through Duddits's eyes. It was like looking into a magic mirror. He saw the Henry who had been: a kid looking out at the world through horn-rimmed glasses that were too big for his face and always sliding down to the end of his nose. He felt Duddits's love for him, a simple and uncomplicated emotion untinctured by doubt or selfishness or even gratitude, Henry took Duddits in his arms, and when he felt the lightness of his old friend's body, Henry began to cry.

'You were the lucky one, buddy,' he said, and wished Beaver were here. Beaver could have done what Henry could not; Beav could have sung Duddits to sleep. 'You were always the lucky one, that's what I think.'

'Ennie,' Duddits said, and touched Henry's cheek with one hand. He was smiling, and his final words were perfectly clear. 'I love you, Ennie.'

28

Two shots rang out up ahead - carbine whipcracks. Not far up ahead, either. Kurtz stopped. Freddy was about twenty feet ahead of him, standing by a sign Kurtz could just make Out: ABSOLUTELY NO FISHING FROM SHAFT HOUSE.

A third shot, then silence.

'Boss?' Freddy murmured. 'Some kind of building up ahead.' 'Can you see anyone?'

Freddy shook his head.

Kurtz joined him, amused even at this point at the slight jump Freddy gave when Kurtz put his hand on Freddy's shoulder. And he was right to jump. If Abe Kurtz survived the next fifteen or twenty minutes, he intended to go forward alone into whatever brave new world there might be. No one to slow him down; no witnesses to this final guerrilla action. And while he might suspect, Freddy couldn't know for sure. Too bad the telepathy was gone. Too bad for Freddy.

'Sounds like Owen found someone else to kill.' Kurtz spoke low into Freddy's ear, which still sported a few curls of the Ripley, now white and dead.

'Do we go get him?'

'Goodness, no,' Kurtz replied. 'Perish the thought. I believe the time has come - regrettably, it comes in almost every life - when we must step off the path, buck. Mingle with the trees. See who stays and who comes back. If anyone does. We'll give it ten minutes, shall we? I think ten minutes should be more than enough.'

29

The words which filled Owen Underhill's mind were nonsensical but unmistakable: Scooby! Scooby-Doo! Got some work to do now!

The carbine came up. He wasn't the one who did it, but when the force lifting the rifle left him, Owen was able to take over smoothly. He flicked the auto's selector-switch to single-shot fire, sighted, and squeezed the trigger twice. The first round missed, hitting the concrete in front of the weasel and ricocheting. Chips of concrete flew. The thing pulled back, turned, saw him, and bared its mouthful of needle teeth.

'That's right, beautiful,' Owen said. 'Smile for the camera.'

His second shot went right through the weasel's humorless grin. It tumbled backward, struck the wall of the shaft house, then fell to the concrete. Yet even with its rudiment of a head blown off, its instincts remained. It began to crawl slowly forward again. Owen aimed, and as he centered the sight, he thought of the Rapeloews, Dick and Irene. Nice people. Good neighbors. If you needed a cup of sugar or a pint of milk (or a shoulder to cry on, for that matter), you could always go next door and get fixed up. 7hey said it was a stroke! Mr Rapeloew had called, only Owen had thought he was saying stork. Kids got everything wrong.

So this was for the Rapeloews. And for the kid who had kept getting it wrong.

Owen fired a third time. This slug caught the byrum amidships and tore it in two. The ragged pieces twitched . . . twitched . . . lay still.

With that done, Owen swung his carbine in a short arc. This time he settled the sight on the middle of Gary Jones's forehead.

Jonesy looked unblinkingly back at him. Owen was tired almost to death, that was what it felt like - but this guy looked far past even that point. Jonesy raised his empty hands.

'You have no reason to believe this,' he said, 'but Mr Gray is dead. I cut his throat while Henry held a pillow over his face - it was right out of The Godfather.'

'Really,' Owen said. There was no inflection in his voice whatsoever. 'And where, exactly, did you perform this execu?tion?'

'In a Massachusetts General Hospital of the mind,' Jonesy said. He then uttered the most joyless laugh Owen had ever heard in his life. 'One where deer roam the halls and the only TV program is an old movie called Sympathy for the Devil.'

Owen jerked a little at that.

'Shoot me if you have to, soldier. I saved the world - with a little ninth-inning relief help from you, I freely admit. You might as well pay me for the service in the traditional manner. Also, the bastard broke my hip again. A little going-away present from the little man who wasn't there. The pain is . . . ' Jonesy bared his teeth. 'It's very large.'

Owen held the gun where it was a moment longer, then lowered it. 'You can live with it,' he said.

Jonesy fell backward on the points of his elbows, groaned, turned his weight as well as he could on to his unhurt side. 'Duddits is dead. He was worth both of us put together - more - and he's dead.' He covered his eyes for a moment, then dropped his arm. 'Man, what a fuckarow this is. That's what Beaver would have called it, a total fuckarow. That is opposed to a fuckaree, you understand, which in Beaver-ese means a particularly fine time, possibly but not necessarily of a sexual nature.'

Owen had no idea what the man was talking about; likely he was delirious. 'Duddits may be dead, but Henry's not. There are some people after us, Jonesy. Bad people. Do you hear them? Know where they are?'

Lying on the cold, leaf-littered floor, Jonesy shook his head. 'I'm back to the standard five senses, I'm afraid. ESP's all gone. The Greeks may come bearing gifts, but they're Indian givers.' He laughed.' Jesus, I could lose my job for a crack like that. Sure you don't want to just shoot me?'

Owen paid no more attention to this than he had to the semantical differences between fuckarow and fuckaree. Kurtz was coming, that was the problem he had to deal with now. He hadn't heard him arrive, but he might not have done. The snow was falling heavily enough to damp all but loud sounds. Gunshots, for instance.

'I have to go back to the road,' he said. 'You hang in there.'

'What choice?' Jonesy asked, and closed his eyes. 'Man, I wish I could go back to my nice warm office. I never thought I'd say that, but there it is.'

Owen turned and went back down the steps, slipping and sliding but managing to keep his feet. He scanned the woods to either side of the path, but not closely. If Kurtz and Freddy were laid up, waiting someplace between here and the Hummer, he doubted be would see them in time to do anything. He might see tracks, but by then he'd be so close to them they'd likely be the last things he saw. He had to hope he was still ahead, that was all. Had to trust to plain old baldass luck, and why not? He'd been in plenty of tight places, and baldass luck had always pulled him through. Maybe it would do so ag -

The first bullet took him in the belly, knocking him backward and blowing the back of his coat out in a bee-shape. He pumped his feet, trying to stay upright, also trying to hang onto the MP5. There was no pain, just a feeling of having been sucker-punched by a large boxing glove on the fist of a mean opponent. The second round shaved the side of his head, producing a bum-and-sting like rubbing alcohol poured into an open wound. The third shot hit him high up on the right side of the chest and that was Katie bar the door; he lost both his feet and the carbine.

What had Jonesy said? Something about having saved the world and getting paid off in the traditional manner. And this wasn't so bad, really; it had taken Jesus six hours, they'd put a joke sign over His head, and come cocktail hour they'd given Him a stiff vinegar-and-water.

He lay half on and half off the snow-covered path, vaguely aware that something was screaming and it wasn't him. It sounded like an enormous pissed-off blue jay.

That's an eagle, Owen thought.

He managed to get a breath, and although the exhale was more blood than air, he was able to get up on his elbows. He saw two figures emerge from the tangle of birches and pines, bent low, very much in combat-advance mode. One was squat and broad-shouldered, the other slim and gray-haired and positively perky. Johnson and Kurtz. The bulldog and the greyhound. His luck had run out after all. In the end, luck always did.

Kurtz knelt beside him, eyes sparkling. In one hand he held a triangle of newspaper. It was battered and slightly curved from its long trip in Kurtz's rear pocket, but still recognizable. It was a cocked hat. A fool's hat. 'Tough luck, buck,' Kurtz said.

Owen nodded. It was. Very tough luck. 'I see you found time to make me a little something.'

'I did. Did you achieve your prime objective, at least?' Kurtz lifted his chin in the direction of the shaft house.

'Got him,' Owen managed, His mouth was full of blood. He spat it out, tried to pull in another breath, and heard the good part of it wheeze out of some new hole instead.

'Well, then,' Kurtz said benevolently, 'all's well that ends well, wouldn't you say?' He put the newspaper hat tenderly on Owen's head. Blood soaked it immediately, spreading upward, turning the UFO story red.

There was another scream from somewhere out over the Reservoir, perhaps from one of the islands that were actually hills poking up from a purposely drowned landscape.

'That's an eagle,' Kurtz said, and patted Owen's shoulder. 'Count yourself lucky, laddie. God sent you a warbird to sing you to - '

Kurtz's head exploded in a spray of blood and brains and bone.

Owen saw one final expression in the man's blue, white-lashed eyes: amazed disbelief. For a moment Kurtz remained on his knees, then toppled forward on what remained of his face. Behind him, Freddy Johnson stood with his carbine still raised and smoke drifting from the muzzle.

Freddy, Owen tried to say. No sound came out, but Freddy must have read his lips. He nodded.

'Didn't want to, but the bastard was going to do it to me. Didn't have to read his mind to know that. Not after all these years.'

Finish it, Owen tried to say. Freddy nodded again. Perhaps there was a vestige of that goddam telepathy left inside Freddy, after all.

Owen was fading. Tired and fading. Goodnight, sweet ladies, goodnight, David, goodnight, Chet. Goodnight, sweet prince. He lay back on the snow and it was like falling back into a bed stuffed with the softest down. From somewhere, faint and far, he heard the eagle scream again. They had invaded its territory, disturbed its snowy autumn peace, but soon they would be gone. The eagle would have the reservoir to itself again.

We were heroes, Owen thought. Damned if we weren't. Fuck your hat, Kurtz, we were h -

He never heard the final shot.

30

There had been more firing; now there was silence. Henry sat in the back seat of the Humvee beside his dead friend, trying to decide what to do next. The chances that they had all killed each other seemed slim. The chances that the good guys - correction, the good guy ?had taken out the bad ones seemed slimmer still.

His first impulse following this conclusion was to vacate the Hummer posthaste and hide in the woods. Then he looked at the snow (If I ever see snow again, he thought, it'll be too soon) and rejected the idea. If Kurtz or whoever was with him came back in the next half hour, Henry's tracks would still be there. They would follow his trail, and at the end of it they'd shoot him like a rabid dog. Or a weasel.

Get a gun, then. Shoot them before they can shoot you.

A better idea. He was no Wyatt Earp, but he could shoot straight. Shooting men was a lot different from shooting deer, you didn't have to be a headshrinker to know that, but he believed, given a clear line of fire, he could shoot these guys with very little hesitation.

He was reaching for the doorhandle when he heard a surprised curse, a thump, yet another gunshot. This one was very close. Henry thought someone had lost his footing and gone down in the snow, discharging his weapon when he landed on his ass. Perhaps the son of a bitch had just shot himself? Was that too much to hope for? Wouldn't that just -

But no. No joy. Henry heard a low grunt as the person who'd fallen got up and came on again. There was only one option, and Henry took it. He lay back down on the seat, put Duddits's arms around him again (as best he could), and played dead. He didn't think there was much chance this hugger-mugger would work, The bad guys had passed by on their way in - obviously, as he was still alive - but on their way in they must have been in a pants-ripping hurry. Now they would be a lot less likely to be fooled by a few bullet holes, some broken glass, and the blood of poor old Duddits's final hemorrhages.

Henry heard soft, crunching footsteps in the snow. Only one set, by the sound. Probably the infamous Kurtz. Last man standing. Darkness approaching. Death in the afternoon. No longer his old friend - now he was only playing dead - but approaching, just the same.

Henry closed his eyes . . . waited . . .

The footsteps passed the Humvee without slowing.

31

Freddy Johnson's strategic goal was, for the time being, both extremely practical and extremely short-term: he wanted to get the goddam Hummer turned around without getting stuck. If he managed that, he wanted to get past the break in East Street (where the Subaru Owen had been chasing had come to grief) without getting ditched himself If he made it back to the access road, he might widen his horizons a trifle. The idea of the Mass Pike surfaced briefly in his mind as he swung open the door of the boss's Hummer and slid behind the wheel. There was a lot of western America down 1-90. A lot of places to hide.

The stench of stale farts and chilly ethyl alcohol struck him like a slap as he swung the door closed. Pearly! Goddam Pearly! In the excitement, he had forgotten all about that little motherfucker.

Freddy turned, raising the carbine but Pearly was still out cold. No need to use another bullet. He could just tip Perlmutter out into the snow. If he was lucky, Pearly would freeze to death without ever waking up. Him, and his little sideki -

Pearly wasn't sleeping, though. Nor out cold. Nor in a coma, not even that. Pearly was dead. And he was . . . shrunken, somehow. Almost mummified. His cheeks were drawn in, hollow, wrinkled. The sockets of his eyes were deep divots, as if behind the thin veils of his closed lids the eyeballs had fallen into what was now a hollow bucket. And he was tilted strangely against the passenger door, one leg raised, almost crossed over the other. It was as if he had died trying to perform the ever-popular one-cheek-sneak. His fatigue pants were now dark, the muted colors turned to mud, and the seat under him was wet. The fingers of the stain spreading toward Freddy were red.

'What the f - '

From the back seat there arose an ear-splitting yammering; it was like listening to a powerful stereo turned rapidly up to full volume. Freddy caught movement from the comer of his right eye. A creature beyond belief appeared in the rearview mirror. It tore off Freddy's ear and then struck at his cheek, punched through into his mouth, and latched onto his jaw at the inner gumline. And then Archie Perlmutter's shit-weasel tore off the side of Freddy's face as a hungry man might tear a drumstick off a chicken.

Freddy shrieked and discharged his weapon into the passenger door of the Hummer. He got an arm up and tried to shove the thing off, his fingers slipped on its slick, newborn skin. The weasel withdrew, tossed its head back, and swallowed what it had tom off like a parrot with a piece of raw steak. Freddy flailed for the driver's-side doorhandle and found it, but before he could yank it up the thing struck again, this time burying its mouth in the muscular flesh where Freddy's neck and shoulder merged. There was a vast jet of blood as his jugular opened; it spurted up to the Humvee's roof, then began to drip back like red rain.

Freddy's feet jittered, bopping the Humvee's wide brake in a rapid tapdance. The creature in the back seat drew back again, seemed to consider, then slithered snakelike over Freddy's shoulder. It dropped into his lap.

Freddy screamed once as the weasel tore off his plumbing . . . and then he screamed no more.

32

Henry sat twisted around in the back seat of the other Humvee, watching as the figure in the vehicle parked behind him jerked back and forth behind the wheel. Henry was glad of the thickly falling snow, equally glad of the blood that sprayed up, striking the windshield of the other Humvee, partially obscuring the view.

He could see all too well as it was.

At last the figure behind the wheel stopped moving and fell sideways. A bulky shadow rose over it, seeming to hulk in triumph. Henry knew what it was; he'd seen one on Jonesy's bed, back at Hole in the Wall. One thing he could see was that there was a broken window in the Humvee which had been chasing them. He doubted if the thing had much in the way of intelligence, but how much would it need to register fresh air?

They don't like the cold. It kills them.

Yes, indeed it did. But Henry had no intention of leaving it at that, and not just because the Reservoir was so close he could hear the water lapping on the rocks. Something had run up an extremely high debt, and only he was left to present the bill. Payback's a bitch, as Jonesy had so often observed, and payback time had arrived.

He leaned over the seat. No weapons there. He leaned over further and thumbed open the glove compartment. Nothing in there but a litter of invoices, gasoline receipts, and a tattered paperback titled How to Be Your Own Best Friend.

Henry opened the door, got out into the snow . . . and his feet immediately flew out from under him. He went on his butt with a thump and scraped his back on the Hummer's high splashboard. Fuck me Freddy. He got up, slipped again, grabbed the top of the open door, and managed to stay afoot this time. He shuffled his feet around to the back of the vehicle he'd come in, never taking his eyes from its twin, parked behind. He could still see the thing inside, thrashing and shuffling, dining on the driver.

'Stay where you are, beautiful,' Henry said, and began to laugh. The laughter sounded crazy as bell, but that didn't stop him. 'Lay a few eggs. I am the eggman, after all. Your friendly neighborhood eggman. Or how about a copy of How to Be Your Own Best Friend? I got one.'

Laughing so hard now he could barely speak. Sliding in the wet and treacherous snow like a kid let out of school and on his way to the nearest sledding hill. Holding onto the flank of the Hummer as best he could, except there was really nothing to hold onto once you were south of the doors. Watching the thing shift and move . . . and then he couldn't see it anymore. Oh-oh. Where the hell had it gotten to? In one of Jonesy's dopey movies, this is where the scary music would start, Henry thought. Attack of the Killer Shit- Weasels. That got him laughing again.

He was around to the back of the vehicle now. There was a button you could push to unlatch the rear window . . . unless, of course, it was locked. Probably wasn't, though. Hadn't Owen gotten into the back this way? Henry couldn't remember. Couldn't for the life of him. He was clearly not being his own best friend.

Still cackling, fresh tears gushing out of his eyes, he thumbed the button and the back window popped open. Henry yanked it wider and looked in. Guns, thank God. Army carbines like the kind that Owen had taken on his last patrol. Henry grabbed one and examined it. Safety, check. Fire-selection switch, check. Clip marked U.S. ARMY 5.56 CAL 120 RNDS, check.

'So simple even a byrum can do it,' Henry said, and laughed some more. He bent over, holding his stomach and slipping around in the slop, trying not to fall again. His legs ached, his back ached, his heart ached most of all . . . and still he laughed. He was the eggman, he was the eggman, he was the laughing hyena.

He walked around to the driver's side of Kurtz's Humvee, gun raised (safety in what he devoutly hoped was the OFF position), spooky music playing in his head, but still laughing. There was the gasoline hatch; no mistaking that. But where was Gamera, The Terror from Beyond Space?

As if it had heard his thought - and, Henry realized, that was perfectly likely - the weasel smashed headfirst against the rear window. The one that was, thankfully, unbroken. Its head was smeared with blood, hair, and bits of flesh. Its dreadful sea-grape eyes stared into Henry's. Did it know it had a way out, an escape hatch? Perhaps. And perhaps it understood that using it would likely mean a quick death.

It bared its teeth.

Henry Devlin, who had once won the American Psychiatric Association's Compassionate Caring Award for a New York Times op-ed piece called 'The End of Hate', bared his own in return. It felt good. Then he gave it the finger. For Beaver. And for Pete. That felt good, too.

When he raised the carbine, the weasel - stupid, perhaps, but not utterly stupid - dove out of sight. That was cool; Henry had never had the slightest intention of trying to shoot it through the window. He did like the idea of it down there on the floor, though. Close to the gas as you want to get, darling, he thought. He thumbed the carbine's selector-switch to full auto and fired a long burst into the gas tank.

The sound of the gun was deafening. A huge ragged hole appeared where the gasoline port had been, but for a moment there was nothing else. So much for the Hollywood version of how shit like this works, Henry thought, and then heard a hoarse whisper of sound, rising to a throaty hiss. He took two steps backward and his feet shot out from under him again. This time falling quite likely saved his eyesight and perhaps his life. The back of Kurtz's Humvee exploded only a second later, fire lashing out from underneath in big yellow petals. The rear tires jumped out of the snow. Glass sprayed through the snowy air, all of it going over Henry's head. Then the heat began to bake him and he crawled away rapidly, dragging the carbine by its strap and laughing wildly. There was a second explosion and the air was filled with whirling hooks of shrapnel.

Henry got to his feet like a man climbing a ladder, using the lower branches of a handy tree as rungs. He stood, panting and laughing, legs aching, back aching, neck with an odd sprung feeling. The entire back half of Kurtz's Humvee was engulfed in flames. He could hear the thing inside, chattering furiously as it burned.

He made a wide circle to the passenger side of the blazing Humvee and aimed the carbine at the broken window. He stood there for a moment, frowning, then realized why this seemed so stupid. All the windows in the Humvee were broken now; all the glass but the windshield. He began to laugh again. What a dork he was! What a total dork!

Through the hell of flames in the Humvee's cabin, he could still see the weasel lurching back and forth like a drunk. How many rounds did he have left in the clip if the fucking thing did come out? Fifty? Twenty? Five? However many rounds there were, it would have to be enough. He wouldn't risk retreating to Owen's Humvee for another clip.

But the thing never came out.

Henry stood guard for five minutes, then stretched it to ten. The snow fell and the Humvee burned, pouring black smoke into the white sky. Henry stood there thinking of the Derry Days Parade, Gary U.S. Bonds singing 'New Orleans', and here comes a tall man on stilts, here comes the legendary cowboy, and how excited Duddits had been, jumping right up and down. Thinking of Pete, standing outside DJHS, hands cupped, pretending to smoke, waiting for the rest of them. Pete, whose plan had been to captain NASA's first manned Mars expedition. Thinking of Beaver and his Fonzie jacket, Beav and his toothpicks, Beav singing to Duddits, Baby's boat's a silver dream. Beav hugging Jonesy at Jonesy's wedding and saying Jonesy had to be happy, he had to be happy for all of them.

Jonesy.

When Henry was absolutely sure the weasel was dead - incin?erated - he started up the path to see if Jonesy was still alive. He didn't hold out much hope of that . . . but he discovered he hadn't given up hope, either.

33

Only pain pinned Jonesy to the world, and at first he thought the haggard, sooty-cheeked man kneeling beside him had to be a dream, or a final figment of his imagination. Because the man appeared to be Henry.

'Jonesy? Hey, Jonesy, are you there?' Henry snapped his fingers in front of Jonesy's eyes. 'Earth to Jonesy.'

'Henry, is it you? Is it really?'

'It's me,' Henry said. He glanced at the dog still partly stuck into the crack at the top of Shaft 12, then back at Jonesy. He brushed Jonesy's sweat-soaked hair off his forehead with infinite tenderness.

'Man, it took you . . .' Jonesy began, and then the world wavered. He closed his eyes, concentrated hard, then opened them again. ' . . . took you long enough to get back from the store. Did you remember the bread' '

'Yeah, but I lost the hot dogs.'

'What a fuckin pisser.' Jonesy took a long and wavering breath.

'I'll go myself, next time.'

'Kiss my bender, pal,' Henry said, and Jonesy slipped into darkness smiling.