Dreamcatcher(82)

Inside Hole in the Wall, the fungus (or mildew, or whatever it was) had gone forward appreciably even during the short time Henry had been in the shed. The Navajo rug was now covered side to side, with not even the slightest pattern showing through. There were patches on the couch, the counter between the kitchen and the dining area, and on the seats of two of the three stools which stood on the living-room side of the counter. A crooked capillary of red-gold fuzz ran up one leg of the dining-room table, as if following the line of a spill, and Henry was reminded of how ants will congregate on even the thinnest track of spilled sugar. Perhaps the most distressing thing of all was the red-gold fuzz of cobweb hanging high over the Navajo rug. Henry looked at it fixedly for several seconds before realizing what it really was: Lamar Clarendon's dreamcatcher. Henry didn't think he would ever know exactly what had happened here, but of one thing he was sure: the dreamcatcher had snared a real nightmare this time.

You aren't really going any farther in here, are you? Now that you've seen how fast it grows? Jonesy looked all right when he went by, but he wasn't all right, and you know it. You felt it. So . . . you aren't really going on, are you?

'I think so,' Henry said. The doubled thickness of masks bobbed on his face when he spoke. 'If it gets hold of me . . . why, I'll just have to kill myself'

Laughing like Stubb in Moby-Dick, Henry moved farther into the cabin.

4

With one exception, the fungus grew in thin mats and clumps. The exception was in front of the bathroom door, where there was an actual hill of fungus, all of it matted together and growing upward in the doorway, bearding both jambs to a height of at least four feet. This hill-like clump of growth seemed to be lying over some grayish, spongy growth medium. On the side facing the living room, the gray stuff split in two, making a V-shape that reminded Henry unpleasantly of splayed legs. As if someone had died in the doorway and the fungus had overgrown the corpse. Henry recalled an offprint from med school, some article quickly scanned in the search for something else. It had contained photographs, one of them a gruesome medical exarniner's shot he had never quite forgotten. It showed a murder victim dumped in the woods, the nude body discovered after approximately four days. There had been toadstools growing from the nape of the neck, the creases at the backs of the knees, and from the cleft of the bu**ocks.

Four days, all right. But this place had been clean this morning, only . . .

Henry glanced at his watch and saw that it had stopped at twenty till twelve. It was now Eastern Standard No Time At All.

He turned and peeked behind the door, suddenly convinced that something was lurking there.

Nah. Nothing but Jonesy's Garand, leaning against the wall.

Henry started to turn away, then turned back again. The Garand looked clear of the goo, and Henry picked it up. Loaded, safety on, one in the chamber. Good. Henry slung it over his shoulder and turned back toward the unpleasant red Jump growing outside the bathroom door. The smell of ether, mingled with something sulfurous and even more unpleasant, was strong in here. He walked slowly across the room toward the bathroom, forcing himself forward a step at a time, afraid (and increasingly certain) that the red hump with the leglike extrusions was all that remained of his friend Beaver. In a moment he would see the straggly remains of the Beav's long black hair or his Doc Martens, which Beaver called his 'lesbian solidarity statement'. The Beav had gotten the idea that Doc Martens were a secret sign by which lesbians recognized each other, and no one could talk him out of this. He was likewise convinced that people named Rothschild and Goldfarb ran the world, possibly from a bedrock-deep bunker in Colorado. Beaver, whose preferred expression of surprise was f**k me Freddy.

But there was absolutely no way of telling if the lump in the doorway had once been the Beav, or indeed if it had once been anyone at all. There was only that suggestive shape. Something glinted in the spongy mass of growth and Henry leaned a little closer, wondering even as he did it if microscopic bits of the fungus were already growing on the wet, unprotected surfaces of his eyes. The thing he spotted turned out to be the bathroom doorknob. Off to one side, sporting its own fuzz of growth, was a roll of friction tape. He remembered the mess scattered across the surface of the worktable out back, the yanked-open drawers. Had this been what Jonesy had been out there looking for? A goddam roll of tape? Something in his head  -  maybe the click, maybe not  -  said it was. But why? In God's name, why?

In the last five months or so, as the suicidal thoughts came more frequently and visited for longer and longer periods of time, chatting in their pidgin language, Henry's curiosity had pretty much deserted him. Now it was raging, as if it had awakened hungry. He had nothing to feed it. Had Jonesy wanted to tape the door shut? Yeah? Against what? Surely he and the Beav must have known it wouldn't work against the fungus, which would just send its fingers creeping under the door.

Henry looked into the bathroom and made a low grunting sound. Whatever obscene craziness had gone on, it had started and ended in there  -  he had no doubt of it. The room was a red cave, the blue tiles almost completely hidden under drifts of the stuff. It had grown up the base of the sink and the toilet, as well. The seat's lid was back against the tank, and although he couldn't be positive  -  there was too much overgrowth to be positive  -  he thought that the ring itself had been broken inward. The shower curtain was now a solid red-gold instead of filmy blue; most of it had been tom off the rings (which had grown their own vegetable beards) and lay in the tub.