Lisey's Story(173)

She walked back to the sweetheart tree with the moss-shaggy trunk, the one that looked weirdly like a palm tree, carrying the remains of the yellow afghan and the damp and mushy manuscript box. She put them down, then picked up the marker with PAUL printed on the horizontal arm. It was splintered and bloody and all askew, but not really broken. Lisey was able to straighten the horizontal arm and slip the marker back into its former place. When she did, she spied something lying nearby, something almost hidden in the high grass. She knew what it was even before she picked it up: the hypodermic that had never been used, now rustier than ever, its cap still on. Playin with fire there, Scoot, his father had said when Scott had suggested that maybe they could drug Paul...and his father had been right.

Damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it! Scott had said to Lisey when he had taken her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers. That'd be a joke on me, all right - after all those years! - but the cap's still on!

It was still on now. And the nighty-night stuff was still inside, as if all the years between hadn't existed.

Lisey kissed the dull glass of the hypodermic's barrel - why she could not have said - and put it into the box with Scott's last story. Then, bundling the wasted remains of Good Ma's wedding afghan in her arms, Lisey went to the path. She glanced briefly at the board lying in the high grass to one side of it, the words on it more faded and ghost-like than ever but still discernible, still reading TO THE POOL, and then passed under the trees. At first she stalked rather than walked, her gait made awkward by her fear that a certain something might be lurking nearby, that its strange and terrible mind would sense her. Then, little by little, she relaxed. The long boy was somewhere else. It crossed her mind that it might not even be in Boo'ya Moon at all. If it was, it had gone deep into the forest. Lisey Landon was only a small part of its business in any case, and if what she was about to do worked, she would become a smaller part of it still, because her latest intrusions in this exotic but frightening world had been involuntary, and were about to cease. With Dooley out of her life, she couldn't think why she would ever need to come back on purpose.

Some things are like an anchor Lisey do you remember?

Lisey walked faster, and when she came to where the silver spade lay on the path, its bowl still dark with Jim Dooley's blood, she stepped over it with no more than a single absent look.

By then she was nearly running.

25

When she came back to the empty study, the top of the barn was hotter than ever but Lisey was cool enough, because for the second time she had come back soaked to the skin. This time wrapped around her middle like some strange wide belt was the remains of the yellow afghan, also sopping wet.

Use the african, Scott had written, and had told her she knew how to get it back - not to Boo'ya Moon but to this world. And of course she did. She'd waded into the pool with it wrapped around her, then waded out again. And then, standing on the firm white sand of that beach for what was almost certainly the last time, facing not toward the sad and silent spectators on the benches but away from them, looking at the waters above which the eternally full moon would eventually rise, she had closed her eyes and had simply - what? Wished herself back? No, it was more active than that, less wistful...but not without sadness, for all that.

"I hollered myself home," she told the long and empty room - empty now of his desks and word-processors, his books and his music, empty of his life. "That's what it was. Wasn't it, Scott?"

But there was no answer. It seemed he had finally finished having his say. And maybe that was good. Maybe that was for the best.

Now, while the african was still wet from the pool, she could go back to Boo'ya Moon with it wrapped around her, if she wanted; wrapped in such damp magic she might be able to go even further, to other worlds beyond Boo'ya Moon...for she had no doubt such worlds existed, and that the folks who rested on the benches eventually tired of sitting and rose from their seats and found some of them. Wrapped in the soaking african she might even be able to fly, as she had in her dreams. But she wouldn't. Scott had dreamed awake, sometimes brilliantly - but that had been his talent and his job. For Lisey Landon, one world was more than enough, although she suspected she might always harbor a bone-lonely place in her heart for that other one, where she had seen the sun setting in its house of thunder while the moon rose in its house of silver silence.

But hey, what the smuck. She had a place to hang her hat and a good car to drive; she had rags for the bod and shoes for the feet. She also had four sisters, one of whom was going to need plenty of help and understanding in order to get through the years ahead. It would be best to let the african dry, to let its beautiful, lethal weight of dreams and magic evaporate, to let it become an anchor again. She would eventually scissor it into pieces and always keep one with her, a bit of anti-magic, a thing to keep her feet on the earth, a ward against wandering.

In the meantime, she wanted to dry her hair and get out of her wet clothes.

Lisey walked to the stairs, dripping dark drops on some of the places where she'd bled. The wrap of the african slipped down to her hips and became skirtlike, exotic, even a little sexy.

She turned and looked back over her shoulder at the long empty room, which seemed to dream in the dusty shafts of late August sunlight. She was golden in that light herself and looked young again, although she didn't know it.

"I guess I'm done up here," she said, feeling suddenly hesitant. "I'll be going. Bye."