Dreamcatcher(51)

'You like this show, man?' Beaver says, taking the lunchbox. He speaks quietly. Henry watches with some interest, curious to see if the retarded boy will cry for his lunchbox. He doesn't.

'Ey Ooby-Doos!' the retarded kid says. His hair is golden, curly. Henry still can't tell what age he is.

'I know they're Scooby-Doos,' the Beav says patiently, 'but they never change their clothes. Pete's right about that. I mean, f**k me Freddy, right?'

'Ite!' He holds out his hands for the lunchbox and Beaver gives it back. The retarded boy hugs it, then smiles at them. It is a beautiful smile, Henry thinks, smiling himself. It makes him think of how you are cold when you have been swimming in the ocean for awhile, but when you come out, you wrap a towel around your bony shoulders and goosepimply back and you're warm again.

Jonesy is also smiling. 'Duddits,' he says, 'which one is the dog?'

The retarded boy looks at him, still smiling, but puzzled now, too.

'The dog,' Henry says. 'Which one's the dog?'

Now the boy looks at Henry, his puzzlement deepening.

'Which one's Scooby, Duddits?' Beaver asks, and Duddits's face clears. He points.

'Ooby! Ooby-Ooby-Doo! Eee a dog!'

They all burst out laughing, Duddits is laughing too, and then Pete whistles. They start moving and have gone about a quarter of the way up the driveway when Jonesy says, 'Wait! Wait!'

He runs to one of the dirty office windows and peers in, cupping his hands to the sides of his face to cut the glare, and Henry suddenly remembers why they came. Tina Jean What's-Her-Face's pu**y. All that seems about a thousand years ago.

After about ten seconds, Jonesy calls, 'Henry! Beav! Come here! Leave the kid there!'

Beaver runs to Jonesy's side. Henry turns to the retarded boy and says, 'Stand right there, Duddits. Right there with your lunchbox, okay?'

Duddits looks up at him, green eyes shining, lunchbox held to his chest. After a moment he nods, and Henry runs to join his friends at the window. They have to squeeze together, and Beaver grumbles that someone is steppin on his f**kin feet, but they manage. After a minute or so, puzzled by their failure to show up on the sidewalk, Pete joins them, poking his face in between Henry's and Jonesy's shoulders. Here are four boys at a dirty office window, three with their hands cupped to the sides of their faces to cut the glare, and a fifth boy standing behind them in the weedy driveway, holding his lunchbox against his narrow chest and looking up at the white sky, where the sun is trying to break through. Beyond the dirty glass (where they will leave clean crescents to mark the places where their foreheads rested) is an empty room. Scattered across the dusty floor are a number of deflated white tadpoles that Henry recognizes as jizzbags. On one wall, the one directly across from the window, is a bulletin board. Tacked to it is a map of northern New England and a Polaroid photograph of a woman holding her skirt up. You can't see her pu**y, though, just some white panties. And she's no high-school girl. She's old. She must be at least thirty.

'Holy God,' Pete says at last, giving Jonesy a disgusted look. 'We came all the way down here for that?'

For a moment Jonesy looks defensive, then grins and jerks his thumb back over his shoulder. 'No,' he says. 'We came for him.'

6

Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time. Some new thing had been hovering just below the threshold of his consciousness, held down by the vivid memory of meeting Duddits. Now it had burst forward with a frightened yell, insisting on recognition.

He skidded to a stop in the middle of the road, flailing his arms to keep from falling down in the snow again, and then simply stood there panting, eyes wide. What now? He was only two and a half miles from Hole in the Wall, almost there, so what the Christ now?

There's a cloud, he thought. Some kind of cloud, that's what. I can't tell what it is but I can't tell it  -  I never felt anything so clearly in my life. My adult life, anyway. I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There's a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

'That's stupid,' he muttered, knowing it wasn't.

He could hear the approaching wasp-whine of an engine. It was coming from the direction of Hole in the Wall and coming fast, a snowmobile engine, almost certainly the Arctic Cat stored at camp . . . but it was also the redblack cloud with the movie going on inside it, some terrible black energy rushing toward him.

For a moment Henry was frozen with a hundred childish horrors, things under beds and things in coffins, squirming bugs beneath overturned rocks and the furry jelly that was the remains of a long-dead baked rat the time Dad had moved the stove out from the wall to check the plug. And horrors that weren't childish at all: his father, lost in his own bedroom and bawling with fear; Barry Newman, running from Henry's office with that vast look of terror on his face, terror because he had been asked to look at something he wouldn't, perhaps couldn't, acknowledge; sitting awake at four in the morning with a glass of Scotch, all the world a dead socket, his own mind a dead socket and oh baby it was a thousand years till dawn and all lullabys had been cancelled. Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more. Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death. It was Mr Gray.