Lisey's Story(166)

For a long time there's no answer. I lie there listening to the sleet, thinking He's dead, he is, my Daddy's dead, I'm here alone, and then he bellows out of the dark, from down below: "Yes, all right! Shut up, you little shit! Shut up unless you want the thing in the wall to hear you and come out and eat us both alive! Or do you want it to get in you like it got into Paul?"

I don't say nothing to that, just lay there shaking.

"Answer me!" he bawls. "Answer, nummie, or I'll come up there and make you sorry!"

But I can't, I'm too scared to answer, my tongue is nothing but this tiny huck of dried-up beef jerky lying on the bottom of my mouth. I don't cry, either. I'm even too scared to do that. I just lie there and wait for him to come upstairs and hurt me. Or dead-dog kill me.

Then, after what seems like a very long time - at least an hour, although it couldn't have been more than a minute or two - I hear him mutter something that might have been My f**kin head's bleedin or It won't ever stop sleetin. Whatever it is, it's going away from the stairs and toward the living room, and I know he'll climb on the sofa and go to sleep there. In the morning he'll either wake up or he won't, but either way he's done with me for tonight. But I'm still scared. I'm scared because there is a thing. I don't think it's in the wall, but there is a thing. It got Paul, and it's probably going to get my Daddy and then there's me. I've thought about that a lot, Lisey,

13

From her place under the tree - actually sitting with her back against the tree's trunk -

Lisey looked up, almost as startled as she would have been if Scott's ghost had hailed her by name. In a way she supposed that was just what had happened, and really, why should she be surprised? Of course he was talking to her, her and no one else. This was her story, Lisey's story, and even though she was a slow reader, she had already worked her way through a third of the handwritten notebook pages. She thought she'd finish long before dark. That was good. Boo'ya Moon was a sweet place, but only in the daylight. She looked back down at his last manuscript and was again amazed that he had lived through his childhood. She noted that Scott had lapsed into the past tense only when addressing her, here in her present. She smiled at that and resumed reading, thinking if she had one wish it would be to fly to that lonely kid on her highly hypothetical floursack magic carpet and comfort him, if only by whispering in his ear that in time the nightmare would end. Or at least that part of it.

14

I've thought about that a lot, Lisey, and I've come to two conclusions. First, that whatever got Paul was real, and that it was a kind of possessing being that might have had some perfectly mundane basis, maybe even viral or bacteriological. Second, it was not the long boy. Because that thing isn't like anything we can understand. It's its own thing, and better not thought of at all. Ever. In any case, our hero, little Scott Landon, finally goes back to sleep, and in that farmhouse out in the Pennsylvania countryside, things go on as they had been for yet a few days longer, with Daddy lying on the couch like a ripe and smelly cheese and Scott cooking the meals and washing the dishes (only he says "warshing the dishees") and the sleet ticking off the windows and the country sounds of WWVA filling the house - Donna Fargo, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty,

"Country" Charlie Pride, and - of course - Ole Hank. Then one afternoon around three o'clock a brown Chevrolet sedan with U.S. GYPSUM printed on the sides comes up the long driveway, sending out fans of slush on either side. Andrew Landon spends most of his time on the living room couch now, sleeps on it at night and has been lying on it all day, and Scott would never have guessed the old man could still move as fast as he does when he hears that car, which is clearly not the postman's old Ford truck or the meter-reader's van. Daddy is up in a flash and at the window that looks out on the left side of the front porch. He's bending over with the dirty white curtain twitched a little to one side. His hair is standing up in the back and Scott, who is standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand and a dishtowel over his shoulder, can see the big puffy purple place on the side of Daddy's face where he fell down the stairs that time, and he can see how one leg of Daddy's Dickies is hoicked up almost to the knee. He can hear Dick Curless on the radio singing "Tombstone Every Mile" and he can see the murder in Daddy's eyes and in the way his lips are pulled down so his lower teeth show. Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death's door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea, and Daddy takes the. 30-06 out of the closet, the very one he used to end Paul's life. Or the life of the thing inside of him. Shoes clomp up the porch steps. There are three steps, and the middle one squeaks as it has forever, world without end, amen.

"Daddy, no," I say in a low, pleading voice as Andrew "Sparky" Landon goes toward the closed door in his new and oddly graceful scissors walk, the rifle held up to high port in front of him. I'm still holding the plate but now my fingers feel numb and I think, I'm going to drop it. Mothersmuck'll fall to the floor and break, and that man out there, the last sounds he's ever going to hear in his life are a breaking plate and Dick Curless on the radio singing about the Hainesville Woods in this stinking forgotten farmhouse. "Daddy, no," I say again, pleading with all my heart and trying to put that plea into my eyes.