Lisey's Story(158)
"I think it sounds beaucoup suspicious," Amanda said.
Clutterbuck laughed. "Yeah. But there's a retired carpenter in Delaware who's going to be very happy to get his car back, busted dome-light and all."
Lisey said, "Have you found out anything about Jim Dooley?"
"That would be John Doolin, Mrs. Landon. Born in Shooter's Knob, Tennessee. Moved to Nashville at age five with his family, then went to live with his aunt and uncle in Moundsville, West Virginia, when his parents and older sister were killed in a fire in the winter of 1974. Doolin was then age nine. The official cause of the deaths was down to defective Christmas tree lights, but I talked to a retired detective who worked that case. He said there was some suspicion the boy might have had something to do with it. No proof."
Lisey saw no reason to pay close attention to the rest, because whatever he called himself, her persecutor was never coming back from the place where she had taken him. Yet she did hear Clutterbuck say that Doolin had spent a good many years in a Tennessee mental institution, and she continued to believe that he had met Gerd Allen Cole there, and caught Cole's obsession
( ding-dong for the freesias)
like a virus. Scott had had a queer saying, one Lisey had never fully understood until the business of McCool/Dooley/Doolin. Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.
"In any case, you want to keep your eyes peeled for the guy," Clutterbuck told the two women, "and if it looks like he's still around - "
"Or takes some time off and then decides to come back," Boeckman put in. Clutterbuck nodded. "Yep, that's a possibility, too. If he shows up again, I think we ought to have a meeting with your family, Mrs. Landon - put them all in the picture. Do you agree?"
"If he shows up, we'll certainly do that," Lisey said. She spoke seriously, almost solemnly, but on their way out of town, she and Amanda indulged in a bout of hysterical laughter at the idea of Jim Dooley ever showing up again.
3
An hour or two before dawn the next morning, shuffling into the bathroom with one eye open, thinking of nothing but peeing and going back to bed, Lisey thought she saw something moving in the bedroom behind her. That brought her awake in a hurry, and turning on her heels. There was nothing there. She took a hand-towel from the rod beside the sink and hung it over the medicine cabinet mirror in which she'd seen the movement, wedging the towel carefully until it would stay on its own. Then and only then did she finish her business.
She was sure Scott would have understood.
4
The summer slipped by, and one day Lisey noticed that SCHOOL SUPPLIES signs had appeared in the windows of several stores on Castle Rock's Main Street. And why not? It was suddenly half-past August. Scott's study was - except for the booksnake and the stained white carpet upon which it dozed - waiting for the next thing. (If there was a next thing; Lisey had begun to consider the possibility of putting the house up for sale.) Canty and Rich threw their annual Midsummer Night's Dream party on August fourteenth. Lisey set out to get righteously smashed on Rich Lawlor's Long Island Iced Tea, a thing she hadn't done since Scott had died. She asked Rich for a double to get started, then set it down untasted on one of the caterer's tables. She thought she had seen something moving either on the surface of the glass, as if reflected there, or deep within the amber depths, as if swimming there. It was utter shite, of course, but she found her urge to get absolutely stinko was gone. In truth, she wasn't sure she dared to get drunk (or even high). Wasn't sure she dared let her defenses down in such a way. Because if she had attracted the long boy's attention, if it was watching her from time to time...or even just thinking about her...well...
Part of her was sure that was crap.
Part of her was positive it wasn't.
As August waned and the hottest weather of the summer rolled into New England, testing tempers and the northeast power-grid, something even more distressing began happening to Lisey...except, like the things she sometimes thought she might be glimpsing in certain reflective surfaces, she wasn't entirely sure it was happening at all. Sometimes she'd flounder up from sleep in the mornings an hour or maybe two before her usual time, gasping and covered with sweat even with the air-conditioning on, feeling as she had when coming out of nightmares as a child: that she hadn't really escaped the grip of whatever had been after her, that it was still under the bed and would curl its cold distorted hand around her ankle or reach right up through her pillow and grab her by the neck. During these panicky wakings she would run her hands over the sheets and then up to the head of her bed before opening her eyes, wanting to be sure, absolutely sure, that she wasn't...well, somewhere else. Because once you stretch those tendons, she sometimes thought, opening her eyes and looking at her familiar bedroom with great and inexpressible relief, it's ever so much easier to do it next time. And she had stretched a certain set of tendons, hadn't she? Yes. First by yanking Amanda, then by yanking Dooley. She had stretched them but good.
It seemed to her that after she'd awakened half a dozen times and discovered she was right where she belonged, in the bedroom that had once been hers and Scott's and was now hers alone, matters should have improved, but they didn't. They got worse instead. She felt like a loose tooth in a sick socket. And then, on the first day of the big heatwave - a heatwave to match the cold-snap of ten years before, and the ironic balance of this, coincidental though it might have been, was not lost on her - what she feared finally happened.