Lisey's Story(148)

She had seen a packet of unopened Kleenex in the top lefthand drawer of the desk. She took it out, opened it, removed a couple, and began to blot her eyes with them. In the other room, she heard Timothy Bottoms shout, "He was sweepin, you sonsabitches!" and knew that time had taken another of those ungainly crow-hops forward. There was only one more scene in the movie. Sonny goes back to the coach's wife. His middle-aged lover. Then the credits roll.

On the desk, the telephone gave a brief ting. Lisey knew what it meant as surely as she had known what Scott meant when he made that weak twirling gesture at the end of his life, the one that meant everything the same.

The phone was dead, the lines either cut or torn out. Dooley was here. The Black Prince of the Incunks had come for her.

Chapter 24

Part XV. Lisey and The Long Boy

(Pafko at the Wall)

1

"Amanda, come here!"

"In a minute, Lisey, the movie's almost - "

"Amanda, right now!"

She picked up the telephone, confirmed the nothing inside it, put it back down. She knew everything. It seemed to have been there all along, like the sweet taste in her mouth. The lights would be next, and if Amanda didn't come before he doused them -

But there she was, standing between the entertainment alcove and the long main room, looking suddenly afraid and old. On the VHS tape the coach's wife would soon be throwing the coffee pot at the wall, angry because her hands were too unsteady to pour. Lisey wasn't surprised to see her own hands were trembling. She picked up the .22. Amanda saw her do it and looked more frightened than ever. Like a lady who would have preferred to be in Philadelphia, all things considered. Or catatonic. Too late, Manda, Lisey thought.

"Lisey, is he here?"

"Yes."

In the distance thunder rumbled, seeming to agree.

"Lisey, how do you kn - "

"Because he's cut the phone."

"The cell - "

"Still in the car. The lights will go next." She reached the end of the big redwood desk  -  Dumbo's Big Jumbo indeed, she thought, you could almost put a jet fighter down on the smucking thing - and now it was a straight shot to where her sister was standing, maybe eight steps across the rug with the maroon smears of her own blood on it. When she reached Amanda the lights were still on, and Lisey had a moment's doubt. Wasn't it possible, after all, that a tree-branch knocked loose by the afternoon storms had finally fallen, taking down a telephone line?

Sure, but that's not what's happening.

She tried to give Amanda the gun. Amanda didn't want to take it. It thumped to the carpet and Lisey tensed for the explosion, which would be followed by either Amanda's scream of pain or her own as one of them took a bullet in the ankle. The gun didn't go off, just stared into the distance with its single idiot eye. As Lisey bent down to get it, she heard a thud from below, as if someone had walked into something down there and knocked it over. A cardboard box filled with mostly blank pages, say - one of a stack. When Lisey looked up at her sister again, Amanda's hands were pressed, left over right, on the scant shelf of her bosom. Her face had gone pale; her eyes were dark pools of dismay.

"I can't hold that gun," she whispered. "My hands...see?" She turned them palms out, displaying the cuts.

"Take the smucking thing," Lisey said. "You won't have to shoot him."

This time Amanda closed her fingers reluctantly around the Pathfinder's rubber grip.

"Do you promise?"

"No," Lisey said. "But almost."

She peered toward the stairs leading down to the barn. It was darker at that end of the study, far more ominous, especially now that Amanda had the gun. Untrustworthy Amanda, who might do anything. Including, maybe fifty percent of the time, what you asked of her.

"What's your plan?" Amanda whispered. In the other room, Ole Hank was singing again, and Lisey knew The Last Picture Show's final credits were rolling. Lisey put a finger across her lips in a Shhh gesture ( now you must be still) and backed away from Amanda. One step, two steps, three steps, four. Now she was in the middle of the room, equidistant from Dumbo's Big Jumbo and the alcove doorway where Amanda held the .22 awkwardly with the barrel pointed at the bloodstained rug. Thunder rumbled. Country music played. From below: silence.

"I don't think he's down there," Amanda whispered.

Lisey took another backward step toward the big red maple desk. She still felt entirely keyed up, was almost vibrating with tension, but the rational part of her had to admit that Amanda might be right. The telephone was out, but up here on the View you could count on losing your service at least twice a month, especially during or just after storms. That thump she'd heard when she bent to pick up the gun... had she heard a thump? Or had it just been her imagination?

"I don't think anyone's down th - " Amanda began, and that was when the lights went out.

2

For a few seconds - endless ones - Lisey could see nothing, and damned herself for not bringing the flashlight from the car. It would have been so easy. It was all she could do to stay where she was, and she had to keep Amanda where she was.

"Manda, don't move! Stand still until I tell you!"

"Where is he, Lisey?" Amanda was starting to cry. "Where is he?"

"Why, right here, Missy," Jim Dooley said easily from the pitch blackness where the stairs were. "And I can see you both with these goggles I got on. You look a smidge green, but I can see you fine."