Dreamcatcher(26)

Henry glanced down and saw he was doing thirty-five, which was, in fact, a little fast for these conditions. He slowed down. 'Better?'

Pete nodded. 'Don't get me wrong, you're a great driver, but man, it's snowing. Also, we got the supplies.' He jerked his thumb back over his shoulder at the two bags and two boxes in the back seat. 'In addition to hot dogs, we got the last three boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese. Beaver can't live without that stuff, you know.'

'I know,' Henry said. 'I like it, too. Remember those stories about devil-worship in Washington State, the ones that made the press in the mid-nineties? They were traced back to several old people living with their children  -  grandchildren, in one case  -  in two small towns south of Seattle. The mass reports of sexual abuse in daycare centers apparently began with teenage girls working as part-time aides crying wolf at the same time in Delaware and California. Possibly coincidence, or possibly the time was simply ripe for such stories to gain credence and these girls caught a wave out of the air.'

How smoothly the words rolled out of his mouth, almost as if they mattered. Henry talked, the man beside him listened with dumb admiration, and no one (certainly not Pete) could have surmised that he was thinking of the shotgun, the rope, the exhaust pipe, the pills. His head was full of tape-loops, that was all. And his tongue was the cassette player.

'In Salem,' Henry went on, 'the old men and the young girls combined their hysteria, and voilá, you have the Salem Witch Trials.'

'I saw that movie with Jonesy,' Pete said. 'Vincent Price was in it. Scared the shit out of me.'

'I'm sure,' Henry said, and laughed. For one wild moment he'd thought Pete was talking about The Crucible. 'And when are hysterical ideas most likely to gain credence? Once the crops are in and the bad weather closes down, of course  -  then there's time for telling stories and making mischief In Wenatchee, Washington, it's devil-worship and child sacrifices in the woods. In Salem it was witches. And in the Jefferson Tract, home of the one and only Gosselin's Market, it's strange lights in the sky, missing hunters, and troop maneuvers. Not to mention weird red stuff growing on the trees.'

'I don't know about the helicopters and the soldiers, but enough people have seen those lights so they're having a special town meeting. Old Man Gosselin told me so while you were getting the canned stuff. Also, those folks over Kineo way are really missing. That ain't hysteria.'

'Four quick points,' Henry said. 'First, you can't have a town meeting in the Jefferson Tract because there's no town  -  even Kineo's just an unincorporated township with a name. Second, the meeting will be held around Old Man Gosselin's Franklin stove and half those attending will be shot on peppermint schnapps or coffee brandy.'

Pete snickered.

'Third, what else have they got to do? And fourth  -  this concerns the hunters  -  they probably either got tired of it and went home, or they all got drunk and decided to get rich at the rez casino up in Carrabassett.'

'You think, huh?' Pete looked crestfallen, and Henry felt a great wave of affection for him. He reached over and patted Pete's knee.

'Never fear,' he said. 'The world is full of strange things.' If the world had really been full of strange things, Henry doubted he would have been so eager to leave it, but if there was one thing a psychiatrist knew how to do (other than write prescriptions for Prozac and Paxil and Amblen, that was), it was tell lies.

'Four hunters all disappearing at the same time seems pretty strange to me, all right.'

'Not a bit,' Henry said, and laughed. 'One would be odd. Two would be strange. Four? They went off together, depend on it.'

'How far are we from Hole in the Wall, Henry?' Which, when translated, meant Do I have time for another beer?

Henry had zeroed the Scout's tripmeter at Gosselin's, an old habit that went back to his days working for the State of Massachusetts, where the deal had been twelve cents a mile and all the psychotic geriatrics you could write up. The mileage between the store and the Hole was easy enough to remember: 22.2. The odometer currently read 12.7, which meant -

'Look out!' Pete shouted, and Henry snapped his gaze hack to the windshield.

The Scout had just topped the steep rise of a tree-covered ridge. The snow here was thicker than ever, but Henry was running with the high beams on and clearly saw the person sitting in the road about a hundred feet ahead  -  a person wearing a duffel coat, an orange vest that blew backward like Superman's cape in the strengthening wind, and one of those Russian fur hats. Orange ribbons had been attached to the hat and they also blew back in the wind, reminding Henry of the streamers you sometimes saw strung over used-car lots. The guy was sitting in the middle of the road like an Indian that wants to smoke-um peace pipe, and he did not move when the headlights struck him. For one moment Henry saw the sitting figure's eyes, wide open but still, so still and bright and blank, and he thought: That's how my eyes would look if I didn't guard them so closely.

There was no time to stop, not with the snow. Henry twisted the wheel to the right and felt the thump as the Scout came out of the ruts again. He caught another glimpse of the white, still face and had time to think, Why, goddam! It's a woman.

Once out of the ruts the Scout began to skid again at once. This time Henry turned against it, deliberately snowplowing the wheels to deepen the skid, knowing without even thinking about it (there was no time to think) that it was the road-sitter's only chance. And he didn't rate it much of one, at that.