Lisey's Story(99)

- Wha'd you do to him? Scott nearly screams.

- Whacked him with a board, I had to, his father replies, sounding oddly defensive. He was coming around and you were still out there playin fiddly-f*ck in the shed. He'll be all right. You can't hurt em much when they're bad-gunky.

Scott barely hears him. Seeing Paul covered with blood that way has swept what happened in the kitchen from his mind. He tries to dart around Daddy and get to his brother, but Daddy grabs him.

- Not unless you don't want to go on living, Sparky Landon says, and what stops Scott isn't so much the hand on his shoulder as the terrible tenderness he hears in his father's voice. Because he'll smell you if you get right up close. Even unconscious. Smell you and come back.

He sees his younger son looking up at him and nods.

- Oh yeah. He's like a wild animal now. A maneater. And if we can't find a way to hold him we'll have to kill him. Do you understand? Scott nods, then voices one loud sob that sounds like the bray of a donkey. With that same terrible tenderness, Daddy reaches out, wipes snot from his nose, and flicks it on the floor.

- Then stop your whingeing and help me with these chains. We'll use that central support-pole and the table with the printingpress on it. That damn press has got to weight four, five hunnert pounds.

- What if those things aren't enough to hold 'im?

Sparky Landon shakes his head slowly.

- Then I dunno.

16

Lying in bed with his wife, listening to The Antlers creak in the wind, Scott says: "It was enough. For three weeks, at least, it was enough. That's where my brother Paul had his last Christmas, his last New Year's Day, the last three weeks of his life - that stinking cellar." He shakes his head slowly.

She feels the movement of his hair against her skin, feels how damp it is. It's sweat. It's on his face, too, so mixed with tears she can't tell which is which.

"You can't imagine what those three weeks were like, Lisey, especially when Daddy went to work and it was just him and me, it and me - "

"Your father went to work?"

"We had to eat, didn't we? And we had to pay for the Number Two, because we couldn't heat the whole house with wood, although God knows we tried. Most of all, we couldn't afford to make people suspicious. Daddy explained it all to me."

I bet he did, Lisey thinks grimly, but says nothing.

"I tole Daddy to cut him and let the poison out like he always did before and Daddy said it wouldn't do any good, cutting wouldn't help a mite because the bad-gunky had gone to his brain. And I knew it had. That thing could still think, though, at least a little. When Daddy was gone, it would call my name. It would say it had made me a bool, a good bool, and the end was a candybar and an RC. Sometimes it even sounded enough like Paul so I'd go to the cellar door and put my head to the wood and listen, even though I knew it was dangerous.

Daddy said it was dangerous, said not to listen and always stay away from the cellar when I was alone, and to stick my fingers in my ears and say prayers real loud or yell 'Smuck you mother, smuck you mother-f*cker, smuck you and the horse you rode in on,' because that and prayers both came to the same and at least they'd shut him out, but not to listen, because he said Paul was gone and there wasn't nothing in the cellar but a bool-devil from the Land of the Blood-Bools, and he said 'The Devil can fascinate, Scoot, no one knows better than the Landons how the devil can fascinate. And the Landreaus before em. First he fascinates the mind and then he drinks up the heart.' Mostly I did what he said but sometimes I went close and listened...and pretended it was Paul...because I loved him and wanted him back, not because I really believed...and I never pulled the bolt..."

Here there falls a long pause. His heavy hair slips restlessly against her neck and chest and at last he says in a small, reluctant child's voice: "Well, once I did...and I dint open the door...I never opened that cellar door unless Daddy was home, and when Daddy was home he only screamed and made the chains rattle and sometimes hooted like a owl. And when he did that sometimes Daddy, he'd hoot back...it was like a joke, you know, how they hooted at each other...Daddy in the kitchen and the...you know...chained up in the cellar...and I'd be ascairt even though I knew it was a joke because it was like they were both crazy...crazy and talking winter-owl talk to each other...and I'd think, 'Only one left, and that's me. Only one who ain't badgunky and that one not even eleven and what would they think if I went to Mulie's and told?' But it didn't do no good thinkin about Mulie's because if he 'us home he'd just chase after me and drag me back. And if he wasn't...if they believed me and came up to t'house with me, they'd kill my brother...if my brother was still in 'ere somewhere...and take me away...and put me in the Poor Home. Daddy said without him to take care of me an Paul, we'd have to go to the Poor Home where they put a clo'pin on your dink if you pee in your bed...and the big kids...you have to give the big kids blowjobs all night long..."

He stops, struggling, caught somewhere between where he is and where he was. Outside The Antlers, the wind gusts and the building groans. She wants to believe that what he's telling her cannot be true - that it is some rich and dreadful childhood hallucination - but she knows it is true. Every awful word. When he resumes she can hear him trying to regain his adult voice, his adult self.

"There are people in mental institutions, often people who've suffered catastrophic frontal-lobe traumas, who regress to animal states. I've read about it. But it's a process that usually occurs over a course of years. This happened to my brother all at once. And once it had, once he'd crossed that line..."