Dreamcatcher(213)

Henry smiled. 'Doing very well. I had my doubts at the funeral . . .'

Jonesy nodded. At Duddits's funeral they had flanked her, and that had been a good thing, because Roberta had hardly been able to stand on her own.

'. . . but now she's coming on strong. Talking about opening a craft shop. I think it's a good idea. Of course she misses him. After Alfie died, Duds was her life.'

'He was ours, too,' Jonesy said.

'Yes. I suppose he was.'

'I feel so bad about the way we left him on his own all those years. I mean, he had leukemia and we didn't even f**king know.'

'Sure we knew,' Henry said.

Jonesy looked at him, eyebrows raised.

'Hey, Henry!' Carla called. 'How do you want your burger?'

'Cooked!' he yelled back.

'I will make it so, sire. Would you be a love and get the baby? That hot dog's rapidly turning into a dirt-dog. Take it away from him and give him to his Dad.'

Henry went down the steps, fished Noel out from under the table, and carried him back toward the porch.

'Ennie!' Noel cried brightly. He was now eighteen months old.

Henry stopped, feeling a chill spread up his back. It was as if he had been hailed by a ghost.

'Eee foo, Ennie! Eee foo!' Noel hopped Henry briskly on the nose with his dirt-dog to underline the thrust of his thesis.

'I'll wait for my burger, thanks,' he said, and resumed walking.

'No eee my foo?'

'Ennie eee his own foo, honeybunch. But maybe I ought to have that nasty thing. You can have another one as soon as they're ready.' He tweezed the dirt-dog out of Noel's little hand, then plumped him down in Jonesy's lap and resumed his seat. By the time Jonesy had finished swabbing mustard and ketchup out of his son's belly-button, the kid was almost asleep.

'What did you mean, "Sure we knew"?' Jonesy asked.

'Ah, Jonesy, come on. Maybe we left him, or tried, but do you think Duddits ever left us? After all that happened, do you really believe that?'

Very slowly, Jonesy shook his head.

'Some of it was growing up  -  growing apart  -  but some of it was the Richie Grenadeau thing. That worked on us the way the business of the Rapeloews' serving platter worked on Owen Underhill.' Jonesy didn't need to ask what this meant; in Wyoming, they'd had all the time they needed to catch up on each other's story.

'There's an old poem about a man trying to outrun God,' Henry said. "'The Hound of Heaven", it's called. Duddits wasn't God  -  ?God forbid  -  but he was our hound. We ran as fast and as far as we could, but - '

'We could never run off the dreamcatcher, could we?' Jonesy said. 'None of us could do that. And then they came. The byrum. Stupid spores in spaceships built by some other race. Is that what they were? All they were?'

'I don't think we'll ever know. Only one question got answered last fall. For centuries we've looked up at the stars and asked ourselves if we're alone in the universe. Well, now we know we're not. Big whoop, huh? Gerritsen . . . do you remember Gerritsen?'

Jonesy nodded. Of course he remembered Terry Gerritsen. Navy psychologist, in charge of the Wyoming debriefing team, always joking about how typical it was that Uncle Sammy would post him to a place where the nearest water was Lars Kilborn's cow-wallow. Gerritsen and Henry had become close  -  if not quite friends, only because the situation didn't quite allow it. Jonesy and Henry had been well-treated in Wyoming, but they hadn't been guests. Still, Henry Devlin and Terry Gerritsen were professional colleagues, and such things made a difference.

'Gerritsen started by assuming two questions had been answered: that we're not alone in the universe and that we're not the only intelligent beings in the universe. I labored hard to convince him that the second postulate was based on faulty logic, a house built on sand. I don't think I entirely succeeded in getting through, but I may have planted a seed of doubt, at least. Whatever else the byrum may be, they're not shipbuilders, and the race that built the ships may be gone. May in fact be byrum themselves by now.'

'Mr Gray wasn't stupid.'

'Not once he got inside your head, that much I agree with. Mr Gray was you, Jonesy. He stole your emotions, your memories, your taste for bacon - '

'I don't eat it anymore.'  

'I'm not surprised. He also stole your basic personality. That included the subconscious kinks. Whatever there is in you that liked the Mario Bava horror movies and the Sergio Leone westerns, whatever it is that got off on the fear and the violence . . . man, Mr Gray loved that shit. And why wouldn't he? Those things are primitive survival tools. As the last of his kind in a hostile environment, he grabbed every damned tool he could lay his hands on.'

'Bullshit.' Jonesy's dislike of this idea was plain on his face.

'It's not. At Hole in the Wall, you saw what you expected to see, which was an X-Files-slash-Close Encounters of the Third Kind alien. You inhaled the byrus. . . I have no doubt there was at least that much physical contact. . . but you were completely immune to it. As, we now know, at least fifty per cent of the human race seems to be. What you caught was an intention . . . a kind of blind imperative. Fuck, there's no word for it, because there's no word for them. But I think it got in because you believed it was there.'