Lisey's Story(53)

"Stations of the bool - like stations of the cross, I guess."

He says this and then he laughs. It's a nervous laugh, an I'm-looking-over-my-shoulder laugh. A child's laugh at a dirty joke.

"Yeah, exactly like that," Lisey murmured, and shivered in spite of the late afternoon heat. The way those old memories kept bubbling to the surface in the present tense was disturbing. It was as if the past had never died; as if on some level of time's great tower, everything was still happening.

That's a bad way to think, thinking that way will get you in the bad-gunky.

"I don't doubt it," Lisey said, and gave her own nervous laugh. She headed for her car with Amanda's key-ring - surprisingly heavy, heavier than her own, although Lisey's house was far bigger - hung over the forefinger of her right hand. She had a feeling she was already in the bad-gunky. Amanda in the nutbarn was just the beginning. There was also "Zack McCool" and that detestable Incunk, Professor Woodbody. The events of the day had driven the latter two out of her mind, but that didn't mean they'd ceased to exist. She felt too tired and dispirited to take on Woodbody this evening, too tired and dispirited even to track him to his lair...but she thought she'd better do it just the same, if only because her phone-pal "Zack" had sounded as though he could really be dangerous. She got into her car, put big sissa Manda-Bunny's keys into the glove compartment, and backed down the driveway. As she did, the lowering sun cast a bright net of reflections off something behind her and up onto the roof. Startled, Lisey pressed the brake, looked over her shoulder - and saw the silver spade. COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY. Lisey reached back, touched the wooden handle, and felt her mind calm a bit. She looked in both directions along the blacktop, saw nothing coming, and turned toward home. Mrs. Jones was sitting on her front stoop, and raised her hand in a wave. Lisey raised hers in return. Then she reached between the BMW's bucket seats again, so she could grasp the shaft of the spade.

11

If she was honest with herself, she thought as she began her short ride home, then she had to admit she was more frightened by these returning memories - by the sense that they were happening again, happening now - than she was by what might or might not have happened in bed just before sunrise. That she could dismiss (well...almost) as the half-waking dream of an anxious mind. But she hadn't thought of Gerd Allen Cole for ever so long, and if asked for the name of Scott's father or where he had worked, she would have said she honestly didn't remember.

"U.S. Gypsum," she said. "Only Sparky called it U.S. Gyppum." And then, low and fierce, almost growling it: "Stop, now. That's enough. You stop."

But could she? That was the question. And it was an important question, because her late husband wasn't the only one who had squirreled away certain painful and frightening memories. She'd put up some sort of mental curtain between LISEY NOW and LISEY!

THE EARLY YEARS! , and she had always thought it was strong, but this evening she just didn't know. Certainly there were holes in it, and if you looked through them, you ran the risk of seeing things in the purple haze beyond that you maybe didn't want to see. It was better not to look, just as it was better not even to glance at yourself in a mirror after dark unless all the lights in the room were on, or eat

( nightfood)

an orange or a bowl of strawberries after sundown. Some memories were all right, but others were dangerous. It was best to live in the present. Because if you got hold of the wrong memory, you might -

"Might what? " Lisey asked herself in an angry, shaky voice, and then, immediately: "I don't want to know."

A PT Cruiser going the other way came out of the declining sun, and the guy behind the wheel tipped her a wave. Lisey tipped him one right back, although she couldn't think of anyone of her acquaintance who owned a PT Cruiser. It didn't matter, out here in Sticksville you always waved back; it was plain country courtesy. Her mind was elsewhere, in any case. The fact was, she did not have the luxury of refusing all her memories just because there were some things

( Scott in the rocker, nothing but eyes while the wind howls outside, a killer gale all the way down from Yellowknife)

she didn't feel capable of looking at. Not all of them were lost in the purple, either; some were just tucked away in her own mental booksnake, all too accessible. The business of the bools, for instance. Scott had given her the complete lowdown on bools once, hadn't he?

"Yes," she said, lowering her visor to block the declining sun. "In New Hampshire. A month before we got married. But I don't remember exactly where."

It's called The Antlers.

All right, okay, big deal. The Antlers. And Scott had called it their early honeymoon, or something like that -

Frontloaded honeymoon. He calls it their frontloaded honeymoon. Says "Come on, babyluv, pack it up and strap it on."

"And when babyluv asked where we were going - " she murmured.

-  and when Lisey asks where they're going he says "We'll know when we get there."

And they do. By then the sky is white and the radio says snow is coming, incredible as that might seem with the leaves still on the trees and only starting to turn...

They'd gone there to celebrate the paperback sale of Empty Devils, the horrible, scary book that put Scott Landon on the bestseller lists for the first time and made them rich. They were the only guests, it turned out. And there was a freak early autumn snowstorm. On Saturday they donned snowshoes and walked a trail into the woods and sat under ( the yum-yum tree)