Different Seasons(147)

“Don’t let it get me!” Vern gibbered. “I swear I’ll be a good boy, I won’t do nothin bad, I’ll put the ring up before I take a piss, I’ll ... I’ll . . .” With some astonishment I realized that I was listening to a prayer—or at least the Vern Tessio equivalent of a prayer.

I sat bolt upright, scared. “Chris?”

“Shut up, Vern,” Chris said. He was the one crouching and listening. “It’s nothing.”

“Oh, yes it is,” Teddy said ominously. “It’s something.”

“What is?” I asked. I was still sleepy and disoriented, unstrung from my place in space and time. It scared me that I had come in late on whatever had developed—too late to defend myself properly, maybe.

Then, as if to answer my question, a long and hollow scream rose languidly from the woods—it was the sort of scream you might expect from a woman dying in extreme agony and extreme fear.

“Oh-dear-to-Jesus!” Vern whimpered, his voice high and filled with tears. He re-applied the bearhug that had awakened me, making it hard for me to breathe and adding to my own terror. I threw him loose with an effort but he scrambled right back beside me like a puppy which can’t think of anyplace else to go.

“It’s that Brower kid,” Teddy whispered hoarsely. “His ghost’s out walkin in the woods.”

“Oh God!” Vern screamed, apparently not crazy about that idea at all. “I promise I won’t hawk no more dirty books out of Dahlie’s Market! I promise I won’t give my carrots to the dog no more! I ... I ... I ...” He floundered there, wanting to bribe God with everything but unable to think of anything really good in the extremity of his fear. “I won’t smoke no moreunfiltered cigarettes! I won’t say no bad swears! I won’t put my Bazooka in the offerin plate! I won’t—”

“Shut up, Vern,” Chris said, and beneath his usual authoritative toughness I could hear the hollow boom of awe. I wondered if his arms and back and belly were as stiff with gooseflesh as my own were, and if the hair on the nape of his neck was trying to stand up in hackles, as mine was.

Vern’s voice dropped to a whisper as he continued to expand the reforms he planned to institute if God would only let him live through this night.

“It’s a bird, isn’t it?” I asked Chris.

“No. At least, I don’t think so. I think it’s a wildcat. My dad says they scream bloody murder when they’re getting ready to mate. Sounds like a woman, doesn’t it?”

“Yeah,” I said. My voice hitched in the middle of the word and two ice-cubes broke off in the gap.

“But no woman could scream that loud,” Chris said ... and then added helplessly: “Could she, Gordie?”

“It’s his ghost,” Teddy whispered again. His eyeglasses reflected the moonlight in weak, somehow dreamy smears.

“I’m gonna go look for it.”

I don’t think he was serious, but we took no chances. When he started to get up, Chris and I hauled him back down. Perhaps we were too rough with him, but our muscles had been turned to cables with fear.

“Let me up, f**kheads!” Teddy hissed, struggling. “If I say I wanna go look for it, then I’m gonna go look for it! I wanna see it! I wanna see the ghost! I wanna see if—”

The wild, sobbing cry rose into the night again, cutting the air like a knife with a crystal blade, freezing us with our hands on Teddy—if he’d been a flag, we would have looked like that picture of the Marines claiming Iwo Jima. The scream climbed with a crazy ease through octave after octave, finally reaching a glassy, freezing edge. It hung there for a moment and then whirled back down again, disappearing into an impossible bass register that buzzed like a monstrous honeybee. This was followed by a burst of what sounded like mad laughter ... and then there was silence again.

“Jesus H Baldheaded Christ,” Teddy whispered, and he talked no more of going into the woods to see what was making that screaming noise. All four of us huddled up together and I thought of running. I doubt if I was the only one. If we had been tenting in Vern’s field—where our folks thought we were—we probably would have run. But Castle Rock was too far, and the thought of trying to run across that trestle in the dark made my blood freeze. Running deeper into Harlow and closer to the corpse of Ray Brower was equally unthinkable. We were stuck. If there was a ha’ant out there in the woods— what my dad called a Goosalum—and it wanted us, it would probably get us.

Chris proposed we keep a guard and everyone was agreeable to that. We flipped for watches and Vem got the first one. I got the last. Vern sat up cross-legged by the husk of the campfire while the rest of us lay down again. We huddled together like sheep.

I was positive that sleep would be impossible, but I did sleep—a light, uneasy sleep that skimmed through unconsciousness like a sub with its periscope up. My half-sleeping dreams were populated with wild cries that might have been real or might have only been products of my imagination. I saw—or thought I saw—something white and shapeless steal through the trees like a grotesquely ambulatory bedsheet.

At last I slipped into something I knew was a dream. Chris and I were swimming at White’s Beach, a gravel-pit in Brunswick that had been turned into a miniature lake when the gravel-diggers struck water. It was where Teddy had seen the kid hit his head and almost drown.