Lisey's Story(150)

He would have knocked her to the floor and landed on top of her - Lisey had no doubt this was his intention - if not for the desk. She let his weight carry her back, smelling the sweat in his hair and on his skin. She also felt the curve of the goggles digging into her temple and heard a low, rapid clicking sound just below her left ear. That's his teeth, she thought. That's his teeth, trying for my neck. Her butt smacked against the long side of Dumbo's Big Jumbo. Amanda screamed again. There was a loud report and a brief brilliant flash of light.

"Leave her alone, motherf*cker!"

Big talk but she fired into the ceiling, Lisey thought, and tightened her locked hands behind Dooley's neck as he bent her backward like a dance-partner at the end of a particularly amorous tango. She could smell gun-smoke, her ears were ringing, and she could feel his cock, heavy and almost fully erect.

"Jim," she whispered, holding him. "I'll give you what you want. Let me give you what you want."

His grip loosened a little. She sensed his confusion. Then, with a feline yowl, Amanda landed on his back and Lisey was forced down again, now almost sprawling on the desk. Her spine gave a warning creak, but she could see the oval smudge of his face - enough to make out how afraid he looked. Was he afraid of me all along? she wondered. Now or never, little Lisey.

She sought his eyes behind the weird circles of glass, found them, locked in on them. Amanda was still yowling like a cat on a hot griddle, and Lisey could see her fists hammering Dooley's shoulders. Both fists. So she had fired that one shot into the ceiling, then dropped the gun. Ah well, maybe it was for the best.

"Jim." God, his weight was killing her. "Jim."

His head dipped, as if drawn by the lock of her eyes and the force of her will. For a moment Lisey didn't think she would be able to reach him, even so. Then, with a final desperate lunge -  Pafko at the wall, Scott would have said, quoting God knew who - she did. She breathed the meat and onions he'd eaten for his supper as she settled her mouth on his. She used her tongue to force his lips open, kissed harder, and so passed on her second sip of the pool. She felt the sweetness go. The world she knew wavered and then began to go with it. It happened fast. The walls turned transparent and that other world's mingled scents filled her nose: frangipani, bougainvillea, roses, night-blooming cereus.

"Geromino," she said into his mouth, and as if it had only been waiting for that word, the solid weight of the desk beneath her turned to rain. A moment later it was gone completely. She fell; Jim Dooley fell on top of her; Amanda, still screaming, fell on top of both.

Bool, Lisey thought. Bool, the end.

4

She landed on a thick mat of grass that she knew so well she might have been rolling around in it her whole life. She had time to register the sweetheart trees and then the breath was driven out of her in a large and noisy woof. Black spots danced before her in the sunset-colored air.

She might have passed out if Dooley hadn't rolled away. Amanda he shrugged off his back as if she had been no more than a troublesome kitten. Dooley surged to his feet, staring first down the hill carpeted with purple lupin and then turning the other way, toward the sweetheart trees that formed the outrider of what Paul and Scott Landon had called the Fairy Forest. Lisey was shocked by Dooley's aspect. He looked like some weird flesh-and-hair-covered skull. After a moment she realized it was his narrowness of face combined with evening shadows, and what had happened to his goggles. The lenses hadn't made the trip to Boo'ya Moon. His eyes stared out through the holes where they had been. His mouth hung open. Spit ran between the upper and lower lips in silver strings.

"You always...liked...Scott's books," Lisey said. She sounded like a winded runner, but her breath was returning and the black flecks in front of her eyes were disappearing.

"How do you like his world, Mr. Dooley?"

"Where..." His mouth moved, but he couldn't finish.

"Boo'ya Moon, on the edge of the Fairy Forest, near the grave of Scott's brother, Paul."

She knew that Dooley would be as dangerous to her (and to Amanda) over here as in Scott's study once such wits as he possessed came back to him, but she still allowed herself a moment to look over that long purple slope, and at the darkening sky. Once more the sun was going down in orange fire while the full moon rose opposite. She thought, as she had before, that the mixture of heat and cold silver might kill her with its feverish beauty.

Not that it was beauty she had to worry about. A sunburned hand fell on her shoulder.

"What are you doin-a me, Missus?" Dooley asked. His eyes bulged inside the empty goggles. "You tryin to hypno-lize me? Because it won't work."

"Not at all, Mr. Dooley," Lisey said. "You wanted what was Scott's, didn't you? And surely this is better than any unpublished story, or even cutting a woman with her own can opener, wouldn't you say? Look! A whole other world! A place made of imagination! Dreams spun into whole cloth! Of course it's dangerous in the forest - dangerous everywhere at night, and it's almost night now - but I'm confident that a brave and strapping lunatic such as yourself - "

She saw what he meant to do, saw her murder clearly in those weird socketed eyes, and cried out her sister's name...in alarm, yes, but also starting to laugh. In spite of everything. Laughing at him. Partly because he looked pretty silly with the glass gone out of his goggles, mostly because at this mortal moment the punchline of some ancient whore-house joke had popped into her mind: Hey, youse guys, your sign fell down! The fact that she couldn't remember the joke itself only made it funnier. Then her breath was gone and Lisey could no longer laugh. She could only rattle. 5