Lisey's Story(91)

"Don't look anymore," he says, in the nagging, dragging tones of one who speaks in his sleep. "Come back to bed with me, little Lisey."

She's glad enough to go, glad enough to kill that somehow awful movie, to get him out of the rocker and the chilly back room. But as she leads him up the hall by the hand, he says something that makes her skin prickle. "The wind sounds like the tractor-chain and the tractor-chain sounds like my Daddy," he says. "What if he's not dead?"

"Scott, that's bullshit," she replies, but things like that don't sound like bullshit in the middle of the night, do they? Especially when the wind screams and the sky is so full of colors it seems to be screaming back.

When she wakes up the following night the wind is still howling and this time when she goes down to the guest room the TV isn't on but he's in there watching it anyway. He's in the rocking chair and bundled up in the african, Good Ma's yellow african, but he won't answer her, won't even look at her. Scott is there, but Scott is also gone. He's gone gomer.

5

Lisey rolled over on her back in Scott's study and looked up at the skylight directly overhead. Her breast throbbed. Without thinking about it, she pressed the yellow knitted square against it. At first the pain was even worse...but then there was a small measure of comfort. She looked into the skylight, panting. She could smell the sour brew of sweat, tears, and blood in which her skin was marinating. She moaned.

All the Landons are fast healers, we had to be. If it was true - and she had reason to believe it was - then she had never so much wanted to be a Landon as she did now. No more Lisa Debusher from Lisbon Falls, Mama and Daddy's afterthought, Li'l Tag-Along. You are who you are, Scott's voice responded patiently. You're Lisey Landon. My little Lisey. But it was hot and she hurt so much, now she was the one who wanted ice, and voice or no voice, Scott Landon had never seemed so smucking dead. SOWISA, babyluv, he insisted, but that voice was far.

Far.

Even the phone on Dumbo's Big Jumbo, from which she could theoretically summon help, seemed far. And what seemed close? A question. A simple one, actually. How could she have found her own sister like that and not have remembered finding her husband like that during the cold-wave of 1996?

I did remember, her mind whispered to her mind as she lay looking up at the skylight with the yellow knitted square turning red against her breast. I did. But to remember Scott in the rocker was to remember The Antlers; to remember The Antlers was to remember what happened when we went from under the yum-yum tree out into the snow; to remember that was to face the truth about his brother Paul; to face the true memory of Paul meant doubling back to that cold guest room with the northern lights filling the sky as the wind boomed down from Canada, from Manitoba, all the way from Yellowknife. Don't you see, Lisey? It was all connected, it always has been, and once you allowed yourself to make the first connection, to push over the first domino -

"I would have gone crazy, " she whimpered. "Like them. Like the Landons and the Landreaus and whoever else knows about this. No wonder they went nuts, to know there's a world right next door to this one...and the wall between is so thin..."

But not even that was the worst. The worst was the thing that had so haunted him, the mottled thing with the endless piebald side -

"No!" she shrieked at the empty study. She shrieked even though it hurt her all the way down. "Oh, no! Stop! Make it stop! Make these things STOP!"

But it was too late. And too true to deny any longer, no matter how great the risk of madness. There really was a place where food turned bad, sometimes outright poisonous, after dark and where that piebald thing, Scott's long boy ( I'll make how it sounds when it looks around) might be real.

"Oh, it's real, all right," Lisey whispered. "I saw it."

In the empty, haunted air of the dead man's study, she began to weep. Even now she didn't know for sure if this was true, and exactly when she had seen it if it was...but it felt true. The kind of hope-ending thing cancer patients glimpse in their bleary bedside waterglasses when all the medicine is taken and the morphine pump reads 0 and the hour is none and the pain is still in there, eating its steady way deeper into your wakeful bones. And alive. Alive, malevolent, and hungry. The kind of thing she was sure her husband had tried, and failed, to drink away. And laugh away. And write away. The thing she had almost seen in his empty eyes as he sat in the chilly guest room with the TV this time blank and silent. He sat in

6

He sits in the rocking chair, wrapped to his staring eyes in Good Ma's hellaciously cheery yellow african. He looks both at her and through her. He doesn't respond to her increasingly frantic repetitions of his name and she doesn't know what to do. Call someone, she thinks, that's what, and hurries back down the hall to their bedroom. Canty and Rich are in Florida and will be until the middle of February, but Darla and Matt are just down the road and it's Darla's number she intends to dial, she's far past worrying about waking them up in the middle of the night, she needs to talk to someone, she needs help.

She doesn't get it. The bitter gale, the one that's making her cold even in her flannel nightgown with a sweater thrown on top for good measure, the one that's making the furnace in the cellar run constantly as the house creaks and groans and sometimes even crrracks alarmingly, that big cold wind down from Canada, has torn a line down somewhere on the View and all she hears when she picks up the phone is an idiot mmmmm. She diddles the phone's cutoff button a couple of times with the tip of her finger anyway, because that's what you do, but she knows it will do no good, and it doesn't. She's alone in this big old converted Victorian house on Sugar Top Hill as the skies bloom with crazy-jane curtains of color and the temperatures drop to regions of cold best left unimagined. If she tries going next door to the Galloways, she knows the chances are good she'll lose an earlobe or a finger - maybe a couple - to frostbite. She might actually freeze to death on their stoop before she can rouse them. This is the kind of cold you absolutely do not fool with.