Dreamcatcher(34)

Jonesy got up and went to the door. He opened his mouth to say something, then closed it again. The backyard was filled with enough animals to stock a petting zoo. Deer, mostly, a couple of dozen assorted does and bucks. But moving with them were raccoons, waddling woodchucks, and a contingent of squirrels that seemed to move effortlessly along the top of the snow. From around the side of the shed where the Arctic Cat and assorted tools and engine parts were stored, came three large canines Jonesy at first mistook for wolves. Then he saw the old discolored length of clothesline hanging around the neck of one of them and realized they were dogs, probably gone feral. They were all moving east, up the slope from The Gulch. Jonesy saw a pair of good - sized wildcats moving between two little groups of deer and actually rubbed his eyes, as if to clear them of a mirage. The cats were still there. So were the deer, the woodchucks, the coons and squirrels. They moved steadily, barely giving the men in the doorway a glance, but without the panic of creatures running before a fire. Nor was there any smell of fire. The animals were simply moving cast, vacating the area.

'Holy Christ, Beav,' Jonesy said in a low, awed voice.

Beaver had been looking up. Now he gave the animals a quick, cursory glance and lifted his gaze to the sky again. 'Yeah. Now look up there.'

Jonesy looked up and saw a dozen glaring lights  -  some red, some blue-white  -  dancing around up there. They lit the clouds, and he suddenly understood that they were what McCarthy had seen when he was lost. They ran back and forth, dodging each other or sometimes briefly merging, making a glow so bright he couldn't look at it without squinting. 'What are they?' he asked.

'I don't know,' Beaver said, not looking away. On his pale face, the stubble stood out with almost eerie clarity. 'But the animals don't like it. That's what they're trying to get away from.'

2

They watched for ten, perhaps fifteen minutes, and Jonesy became aware of a low humming, like the sound of an electrical transformer. Jonesy asked Beaver if he heard it, and the Beav simply nodded, not taking his eyes off the dancing lights in the sky, which to Jonesy looked to be the size of manhole covers. He had an idea that it was the sound the animals wanted to escape, not the lights, but said nothing. Speech all at once seemed hard; he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.

At last the lights began to dim, and although Jonesy hadn't seen any of them wink out, there seemed to be fewer of them. Fewer animals, too, and that nagging hum was fading.

Beaver started, like a man awakening from a deep sleep. 'Camera,' he said. 'I want to get some pictures before they're gone.' 'I don't think you'll be able to - '

'I got to try!' Beaver almost shouted. Then, in a lower tone of voice: 'I got to try. At least I can get some of the deers and such before they . . .' He was turning away, heading back across the kitchen, probably trying to remember what heap of dirty clothes he'd left his old battered camera under, when he stopped suddenly. In a flat and decidedly unbeaverish voice, he said, 'Oh, Jonesy. I think we got a problem.'

Jonesy took a final look at the remaining lights, still fading (smaller, too), then turned around. Beaver was standing beside the sink, looking across the counter and the big central room.

'What? What now?' That nagging, shrewish voice with the little tremor in it . . . was that really his?

Beaver pointed. The door to the bathroom where they'd put Rick McCarthy  -  Jonesy's room  -  stood open. The door to the bathroom, which they had left open so McCarthy could not possibly miss his way if nature called, was now closed.

Beaver turned his somber, beard - speckled face to Jonesy's. 'Do you smell it?'

Jonesy did, in spite of the cold fresh air coming in through the door. Ether or ethyl alcohol, yes, there was still that, but now it was mixed with other stuff. Feces for sure. Something that could have been blood. And something else, something like mine-gas trapped a million years and finally let free. Not the kind of fart-smells kids giggled over on camping trips, in other words. This was something richer and far more awful. You could only compare it to farts because there was nothing else even close. At bottom, Jonesy thought, it was the smell of something contaminated and dying badly.

'And look there.'

Beaver pointed at the hardwood floor. There was blood on it, a trail of bright droplets running from the open door to the closed one. As if McCarthy had dashed with a nosebleed.

Only Jonesy didn't think it was his nose that had been bleed?ing.

3

Of all the things in his life he hadn't wanted to do  -  calling his brother Mike to tell him Ma had died of a heart attack, telling Carla she had to do something about the booze and all the prescriptions or he was going to leave her, telling Big Lou, his cabin counselor at Camp Agawam, that he had wet his bed  -  crossing the big central room at Hole in the Wall to that closed bathroom door was the hardest. It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.

In bad dreams you never got to where you're going, but they made it to the other side of the room and so Jonesy supposed it wasn't a dream after all. They stood looking down at the splatters of blood. They weren't very big, the largest the size of a dime.

'He must have lost another tooth,' Jonesy said, still whispering. 'That's probably it.'