Dreamcatcher(80)

PART TWO GRAYBOYS CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE EGGMAN'S JOURNEY

1

Suicide, Henry had discovered, had a voice. It wanted to explain itself The problem was that it didn't speak much English; mostly it lapsed into its own fractured pidgin. But it didn't matter; just the talking seemed to be enough. Once Henry allowed suicide its voice, his life had improved enormously. He even had nights when he slept again (not a lot of them, but enough), and he had never had a really bad day.

Until today.

It had been Jonesy's body on the Arctic Cat, but the thing now inside his old friend was full of alien images and alien purpose. Jonesy might also still be inside  -  Henry rather thought he was  -  but if so, he was now too deep, too small and powerless, to be of any use. Soon Jonesy would be gone completely, and that would likely be a mercy.

Henry had been afraid the thing now running Jonesy would sense him, but it went by without slowing. Toward Pete. And then what? Then where? Henry didn't want to think, didn't want to care.

At last he started back to camp again, not because there was anything left at Hole in the Wall but because there was no place else to go. As he reached the gate with its one-word sign  -  CLARENDON  -  ?he spat another tooth into his gloved hand, looked at it, then tossed it away. The snow was over, but the sky was still dark and he thought the wind was picking up again. Had the radio said something about a storm with a one-two punch? He couldn't remember, wasn't sure it mattered.

Somewhere to the west of him, a huge explosion hammered the day. Henry looked dully in that direction, but could see nothing. Something had either crashed or exploded, and at least some of the nagging voices in his head had stopped. He had no idea if those things were related or not, no idea if he should care. He stepped through the open gate, walking on the packed snow marked with the tread of the departing Arctic Cat, and approached Hole in the Wall.

The generator brayed steadily, and above the granite slab that served as their welcome mat, the door stood open. Henry paused outside for a moment, examining the slab. At first he thought there was blood on it, but blood, either fresh or dried, did not have that unique red-gold sheen. No, he was looking at some sort of organic growth. Moss or maybe fungus. And something else . . .

Henry tipped his head back, flared his nostrils, and sniffed gently  -  he had a memory, both clear and absurd, of being in Maurice's a month ago with his ex-wife, smelling the wine the sommelier had just poured, seeing Rhonda there across the table and thinking, We sniff the wine, dogs sniff each other's ass**les, and it all comes to about the same. Then, in a flash, the memory of the milk running down his father's chin had come, He had smiled at Rhonda, she had smiled back, and he had thought what a relief the end would be, and if it were done, than 'twere well it were done quickly.

What he smelled now wasn't wine but a marshy, sulfurous odor. For a moment he couldn't place it, then it came: the woman who had wrecked them. The smell of her wrong innards was here, too.

Henry stepped onto the granite slab, aware that he had come to this place for the last time, feeling the weight of all the years  -  the laughs, the talks, the beers, the occasional lid of pot, a food-fight in '96 (or maybe it had been '97), the gunshots, that bitter mixed smell of powder and blood that meant deer season, the smell of death and friendship and childhood's brilliance.

As he stood there, he sniffed again. Much stronger, and now more chemical than organic, perhaps because there was so much of it. He looked inside. There was more of that fuzzy, mildev,7ystuff on the floor, but you could see the hardwood. On the Navajo rug, however, it had already grown so thick that it was hard to make out the pattern. No doubt whatever it was did better in the heat, but still, the rate of growth was scary.

Henry started to step in, then thought better of it. He backed two or three paces away from the doorway instead and only stood there in the snow, very aware of his bleeding nose and the holes in his gums where there had been teeth when he woke up this morning. If that mossy stuff was producing some sort of airborne virus, like Ebola or Hanta, he was probably cooked already, and anything he did would amount to no more than locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen. But there was no sense taking unnecessary risks, was there?

He turned and walked around Hole in the Wall to the Gulch side, still walking in the packed tread of the departed Arctic Cat to keep from sinking into the new snow.

2

The door to the shed was open, too. And Henry could see Jonesy, yes, clear as day, Jonesy pausing in the doorway before going in to get the snowmobile, Jonesy holding to the side of the doorway with a casual hand, Jonesy listening to . . . to the what?

To the nothing. No crows cawing, no jays scolding, no wood?peckers pecking, no squirrels scuttering. There was only the wind and an occasional padded plop as a clot of snow slid off a pine or spruce and hit the new snow beneath. The local wildlife was gone, had moved on like goofy animals in a Gary Larson cartoon.

He stood where he was for a moment, calling up his memory of the shed's interior. Pete would have done better  -  Pete would have stood here with his eyes closed and his forefinger ticking back and forth, then told you where everything was, right down to the smallest jar of screws  -  but in this case Henry thought he could do without Pete's special skill. He'd been out here just yesterday, looking for something to help him open a kitchen cabinet door that was swelled shut. He had seen then what he wanted now.