Lisey's Story(120)

It's the bad-gunky, she thinks, cold all the way to the bone. Its thoughts are the bad- gunky and nothing else.

The idea is awful but also right. A sound escapes her, something between a squeal and a moan. It's just a little sound, but she sees or senses that the thing's endless express-train progress has suddenly slowed, that it may have heard her.

Scott knows, too. The arm around her, just below her br**sts, tightens a bit more. Once again his lips move against the cup of her ear. "If we're going home, we have to go right now," he murmurs. He's totally with her again, totally here. She doesn't know if it's because he's no longer looking at the pool or because he's terrified. Maybe it's both. "Do you understand?"

Lisey nods. Her own fear is so great it's incapacitating, and any sense of exhilaration at having him back is gone. Has he lived with this all his life? If so, how has he lived with it? But even now, in the extremity of her terror, she supposes she knows. Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

"Concentrate, Lisey. Do it now. Bust your brains."

She closes her eyes and sees the guest room of their house on Sugar Top Hill. Sees Scott sitting in the rocker. Sees herself sitting on the chilly floor beside him, holding his hand. He is gripping her hand as hard as she is gripping his. Behind them, the frost-filled panes of the window are filled with fantastic shifting light. The TV is on and The Last Picture Show is once more playing. The boys are in Sam the Lion's black-and-white poolroom and Hank Williams is on the juke singing "Jambalaya."

For a moment she feels Boo'ya Moon shimmer, but then the music in her mind - music that was for a moment so clear and happy - fades. Lisey opens her eyes. She's desperate to see home, but the big gray rock and the path leading away through the sweetheart trees are both still there. Those strange stars still blaze down, only now the laughers are silent and the harsh whispering of the bushes has stilled and even Chuckie G.'s bell has quit its fitful tinkling because the long boy has stopped to listen and the whole world seems to hold its breath and listen with it. It's over there, not fifty feet away on their left; Lisey can now actually smell it. It smells like old farts in turnpike rest area bathrooms, or the poison whiff of bourbon and cigarette smoke you sometimes get when you turn the key and walk into a cheap motel room, or Good Ma's pissy diapers when she was old and raving senile; it's stopped behind the nearest rank of sweetheart trees, has paused in its tunnelish run through the woods, and dear God they aren't going, they aren't going back, they are for some reason stuck here.

Scott's whisper is now so low he hardly seems to be speaking at all. If not for the faint sensation of his lips moving against the sensitive skin of her ear, she could almost believe this was telepathy. "It's the african, Lisey - sometimes things will go one way but not the other. Usually things that can double. I don't know why, but that's it. I feel it like an anchor. Drop the african."

Lisey opens her arms and lets it fall. The sound it makes is only the softest sigh (like the arguments against insanity falling into some ultimate basement), but the long boy hears it. She feels a shift in the rowing direction of its unknowable thoughts; feels the hideous pressure of its insane regard. One of the trees snaps with an explosive rending noise as the thing over there begins to turn, and she closes her eyes again and sees the guest room as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, sees it with desperate intensity, and through a perfect magnifying lens of terror.

"Now," Scott murmurs, and the most amazing thing happens. She feels the air turn inside out. Suddenly Hank Williams is singing "Jambalaya." He's singing 14

He was singing because the TV was on. She could now remember this as clearly as anything in her life, and she wondered how she ever could have forgotten it. Time to get off Memory Lane, Lisey - time to go home.

Everybody out of the pool, as the saying was. Lisey had gotten what she'd come here for, had gotten it while caught up in that last terrible memory of the long boy. Her breast still hurt, but the fierce throbbing was down to a dull ache. She had felt worse as a teenager, after spending a long hot day in a bra that was too small for her. From where she knelt chin-deep in the water she could see that the moon, now smaller and almost pure silver, had risen above all but the highest of the trees in the graveyard. And now a new fear rose to trouble her: what if the long boy came back? What if it heard her thinking about it and came back? This was supposed to be a safe place and Lisey thought it probably was - from the laughers and the other nasty things that might live in the Fairy Forest, at least - but she had an idea that the long boy might not be bound by any rules that held the other things away from here. She had an idea the long boy was...different. The title of some old horror story first occurred to her, then clanged in her mind like an iron bell: "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad." This was followed by the title of the only Scott Landon book she had ever hated: Empty Devils.

But before she could start back to the sand, before she could even get to her feet again, Lisey was struck by yet another memory, this one far more recent. It was of waking in bed with her sister Amanda just before dawn and finding that past and present had gotten all tangled together. Worse still, Lisey had come to believe that she wasn't in bed with her sister at all, but with her dead husband. And in a way, that had been true. Because although the thing in bed with her had been wearing Manda's nightgown and had spoken in Manda's voice, it had used the interior language of their marriage and phrases only Scott could have known.