Lisey's Story(152)

Lisey saw brighter light ahead, not reddish-orange now but just a dying pink afterglow. It stole through a thinning of the trees. The path was a bit brighter, too. She could see its gentle upslope. Beyond that next rise, she remembered, it sank again, winding through even thicker forest until it reached the big rock and the pool beyond. Can't make it, she thought. The breath tearing in and out of her throat was hot and there was the beginning of a stitch in her side. He'll catch me before I'm halfway up that hill. It was Scott's voice that responded, laughing on top, surprisingly angry beneath. You didn't come all this way for that. Go on, babyluv - SOWISA.

SOWISA, yes. Strapping it on had never seemed more appropriate than right now. Lisey tore up the hill, hair plastered to her skull in sweaty strings, arms pumping. She breathed in huge snatches, exhaled in harsh bursts. She wished for the sweet taste in her mouth, but she'd given her last sip of the pool to the crazy smuck behind her and now what her mouth tasted of was copper and exhaustion. She could hear him closing in again, not yelling now, saving all his breath for the chase. The cramp in her side deepened. A high, sweet singing started up first in her right ear, then in both of them. The laughers cackled closer now, as if they wanted to be in at the kill. She could smell the change in the trees, how the aroma that had been sweet had grown sharp, like the smell of the ancient henna she and Darla had found in Granny D's bathroom after she died, a poison smell, and -

That's not the trees.

All the laughers had fallen silent. Now there was only the sound of Dooley ripping breath from the air as he pounded along behind her, trying to close those last few feet of distance. And what she thought of was Scott's arms sweeping around her, Scott pulling her against his body, Scott whispering Shhhh, Lisey. For your life and mine, now you must be still.

She thought: It's not lying across the path, like it was when he tried to get to the pool in

'04. This time it's in its run beside the path. Like it was when I came to him during the winter of the big wind from Yellowknife.

But just as she glimpsed the bell, still hanging from that rotting length of cord, the last light of the day shining on its curve, Jim Dooley put on a final burst of speed and Lisey actually did feel his fingers slipping across the back of her shirt, hunting for purchase there, anything, a bra-strap would do. She managed to hold back the scream that rose in her throat, but it was a near thing. She bolted onward, finding a little more speed of her own, speed that probably would have done her no good if Dooley hadn't tripped again, going down with a cry -  "You BITCH!"  - that Lisey thought he would live to regret. But perhaps not for long.

8

That shy tinkle came again, from what had once been ( Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle! ) the Bell Tree and was now the Bell-and-Spade Tree. And there it was, Scott's silver spade. When she had placed it here - following a powerful intuition she now understood - the laughers had been gibbering hysterically. Now the Fairy Forest was silent except for the sounds of her own tortured respiration and Dooley's gasping spew of curses. The long boy had been sleeping - dozing, at least - and Dooley's yelling had awakened it. Maybe this was how it was supposed to go, but that did not make it easy. It was horrible to feel the awakening whisper of not-quite-alien thoughts from her undermind. They were like restless hands feeling for loose boards or testing the closed cover of a well. She found herself considering too many terrible things that had at one time or another undermined her heart: a pair of bloody teeth she'd once found on the floor of a movietheater bathroom, two little kids crying in each other's arms outside a convenience store, the smell of her husband as he lay on his deathbed, looking at her with his burning eyes, Granny D lying dying in the chickenyard with her foot going jerk-jerk-jerk. Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine's gone and the hour is none. All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.

And now -

In the always perfect, never-ending moment of now

9

Gasping, whining, her heart nothing but bloodthunder in her ears, Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair. Dooley's coming. She hears him. He's quit cursing but she hears the approach of his respiration. It's going to be close, closer than with Blondie, even though this madman doesn't have a gun, because if Dooley manages to grab hold of her before she's able to turn -

But he doesn't. Not quite. Lisey pivots like a hitter going after a fat pitch, swinging the silver spade just as hard as she can. The bowl catches a last bloom of pink light, a fading corsage, and its speeding upper edge ticks the hanging bell on its way by. The bell says a final word -  TING!  - and goes flying into the gloom, trailing its bit of rotting cord after it. Lisey sees the spade carry on forward and upward, and once more she thinks Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! Then the flat of the blade connects with Jim Dooley's onrushing face, making not a crunch - the sound she remembers from Nashville  - but a kind of muffled gonging. Dooley shrieks in surprise and agony. He is driven sideways, off the path and into the trees, flailing with his arms, trying to keep his balance. She has a moment to see that his nose is laid radically over to one side, just as Cole's was; time to see that his mouth is gushing blood from the bottom and both corners. Then there's movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is vast movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There's the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it's there. Scott's long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of now drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends.