Lisey's Story

X. Lisey and The Arguments Against Insanity

(The Good Brother)

1

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

This line kept going through Lisey's head as she crawled from the memory nook and then slowly across the center space of her dead husband's long and rambling office, leaving an ugly trail behind her: splotches of blood from her nose, mouth, and mutilated breast.

The blood will never come out of this carpet, she thought, and the line recurred, as if in answer: The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

There was insanity in this story, all right, but the only sound she remembered just lately wasn't whirring, purring, or shirring; it was the sound of her screams when Jim Dooley had attached her can opener to her left breast like a mechanical leech. She had screamed, and then she had fainted, and then he had slapped her awake to tell her one more thing. After that he'd let her go back under again, but he had pinned a note to her shirt—after considerately pulling off her ruined bra and buttoning the shirt back up, that was—to make sure she wouldn't forget. She hadn't needed the note. She remembered what he'd said perfectly.

"I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse. And tend yourself by yourself, Missus, you hear me, now? Tell anyone I was here and I'll kill you." That was what Dooley had said. To this the note pinned to her shirt had added: Let's get this business finish, we will both be happier when it is. Signed, your good freind, "Zack"!

Lisey had no idea how long she was out the second time. All she knew was that when she came to, the mangled bra was in the wastebasket and the note was pinned to the right side of her shirt. The left side was soaked with blood. She had unbuttoned enough to take one quick peek, then moaned and averted her eyes. It looked worse than anything Amanda had ever done to herself, including the thing with the navel. As to the pain…all she could remember was something enormous and obliterating.

The handcuffs had been removed, and Dooley had even left her a glass of water. Lisey drank it greedily. When she tried to get to her feet, however, her legs were trembling too badly to hold her. So she had crawled out of the alcove on all fours, dripping blood and bloody sweat on Scott's carpet as she went (ah, but she'd never cared for that oyster-white anyway, it showed every speck of dirt), hair plastered to her forehead, tears drying on her cheeks, blood drying to a crust on her nose, lips, and chin.

At first she thought she was headed for the phone, probably to call Deputy Buttercluck in spite of Dooley's admonitions and the failure of the Castle County Sheriff's Department to protect her on its first try. Then that line of poetry

(the arguments against insanity)

started to go through her head and she saw Good Ma's cedar box lying overturned on the carpet between the stairs going down to the barn and the desk Scott had called Dumbo's Big Jumbo. The cedar box's contents were spilled on the carpet in an untidy litter. She understood that the box and its spilled contents had been her destination all along. She especially wanted the yellow thing she could see draped over the bent purple shape of The Antlers menu.

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

From one of Scott's poems. He didn't write many, and those he did he almost never published—he said they weren't good, and he wrote them just for himself. But she had thought that one very good, even though she hadn't been entirely sure what it meant, or even what it was about. She had particularly liked that first line, because sometimes you just heard things going, didn't you? They fell down, level after level, leaving a hole you could look through. Or fall into, if you weren't careful.

SOWISA, babyluv. You're bound for the rabbit-hole, so strap on nice and tight.

Dooley must have brought Good Ma's box up to the study because he thought it had to do with what he wanted. Guys like Dooley and Gerd Allen Cole, aka Blondie, aka Monsieur Ding-Dong for the Freesias, thought everything had to do with what they wanted, didn't they? Their nightmares, their phobias, their midnight inspirations. What had Dooley thought was in the cedar box? A secret list of Scott's manuscripts (perhaps in code)? God knew. In any case he'd dumped it out, seen nothing but a jumble of uninteresting rickrack (uninteresting to him, at least), and then dragged the widow Landon deeper into the study, looking for a place where he could cuff her up before she regained consciousness. The pipes under the bar sink had done quite nicely.

Lisey crawled steadily toward the scattered contents of the box, her eyes fixed on the yellow knitted square. She wondered if she would have discovered it on her own. She had an idea the answer was no; she had gotten her fill of memories. Now, however—

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound.

So it seemed. And if her precious purple curtain finally came down, would it make that same soft, sad sound? She wouldn't be at all surprised. It had never been much more than spun cobwebs to begin with; look at all she'd already remembered.

No more, Lisey, you don't dare, hush.

"Hush yourself," she croaked. Her outraged breast throbbed and burned. Scott had gotten his chest-wound; now she had hers. She thought of him coming back up her lawn that night, coming out of the shadows while Pluto barked and barked and barked next door. Scott holding up what had been a hand and was now nothing but a clot of blood with things that looked vaguely like fingers sticking out of it. Scott telling her it was a blood-bool, and it was for her. Scott later soaking that sliced-up meat in a basin filled with weak tea, telling her how it was something

(Paul thought this up)

his brother had shown him how to do. Telling her all the Landons were fast healers, they had to be. This memory fell through to the one beneath, the one where she and Scott were sitting under the yum-yum tree four months later. The blood fell down in a sheet, Scott told her, and Lisey asked if Paul soaked his cuts in tea afterward and Scott had said no—

Hush, Lisey—he never said that. You never asked and he never said.

But she had asked. She had asked him all sorts of things, and Scott had answered. Not then, not under the yum-yum tree, but later on. That night, in bed. Their second night in The Antlers, after making love. How could she have forgotten?

Lisey lay for a moment on the oyster-white carpet, resting. "Never forgot," she said. "It was in the purple. Behind the curtain. Big difference." She fixed her eyes on the yellow square and began crawling again.

I'm pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey. Yeah, I know it did.

Scott lying next to her, smoking, watching the smoke from his cigarette go up and up, to that place where it disappeared. The way the stripes on a barber-pole disappear. The way Scott himself sometimes disappeared.

I know, because by then I was doing fractions.

In school?

No, Lisey. He said this in a tone that said more, that said she should know better. Sparky Landon had never been that kind of Daddy. Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral.

But Paul's cuts that day—the day you jumped from the bench— they were bad? Not just nicks?

A long pause while he watched the smoke rise and stack and disappear, leaving only its trail of sweetish-bitter fragrance behind. At last, flat: Daddy cut deep.

To that dry certainty there seemed no possible reply, so she had kept silent.

And then he'd said: Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead, I'll tell you. But you have to ask.

She either couldn't remember what had come next or wasn't ready to, but now she remembered how they had left their refuge under the yum-yum tree. He had taken her in his arms beneath that white umbrella and they had been outside in the snow an instant later. And now, crawling on her hands and knees toward the overturned cedar box, memory

(insanity)

fell through

(with a soft shirring sound)

and Lisey finally allowed her mind to believe what her second heart, her secret hidden heart, had known all along. For a moment they had been neither under the yum-yum tree nor out in the snow but in another place. It had been warm and filled with hazy red light. It had been filled with the sound of distant calling birds and tropical smells. Some of these she knew—frangipani, jasmine, bougainvillea, mimosa, the moist breathing earth upon which they knelt like the lovers they most surely were—but the sweetest ones were unknown to her and she ached for their names. She remembered opening her mouth to speak, and Scott putting the side of his hand

(hush)

to her mouth. She remembered thinking how strange it was that they should be dressed for winter in such a tropical place, and she saw he was afraid. Then they had been outside in the snow. That crazy downpouring October snow.

How long had they been in the between-place? Three seconds? Maybe even less. But now, crawling because she was too weak and shocked to stand, Lisey was at last willing to own up to the truth of it. By the time they made it back to The Antlers that day, she'd gotten a fair distance toward convincing herself it hadn't happened, but it had.

"Happened again, too," she said. "Happened that night."

She was so smucking thirsty. Wanted another drink of water in the worst way, but of course the bar alcove was behind her, she was going the wrong way for water and she could remember Scott singing one of Ole Hank's songs as they drove back that Sunday, singing All day I've faced the barren waste, Without a single taste of water, cool water.

You'll get your drink, babyluv.

"Will I?" Still nothing but a crow-croak. "A drink of water would surely help. This hurts so bad."

To this there was no reply, and perhaps she didn't need one. She had finally reached the scatter of objects around the overturned cedar box. She reached out for the yellow square, plucked it off the purple menu, and closed it tight in her hand. She lay on her side—the one that didn't hurt—and looked at it closely: the little lines of knits and purls, those tiny locks. There was blood on her fingers and it smeared on the wool, but she hardly noticed. Good Ma had knitted dozens of afghans out of squares like this, afghans of rose and gray, afghans of blue and gold, afghans of green and burnt orange. They were Good Ma's specialty and spilled from her needles, one after the other, as she sat in front of the chattering TV at night. Lisey remembered how, as a child, she had thought such knitted blankets were called "africans." Their female cousins (Angletons, Darbys, Wiggenses, and Washburns as well as Debushers almost beyond counting) had all been gifted with africans when they married; each of the Debusher girls had gotten at least three. And with each african came one extra square in the same shade or pattern. Good Ma called these extra squares "delights." They were meant as table

decorations, or to be framed and hung on the wall. Because the yellow african had been Good Ma's wedding present to Lisey and Scott, and because Scott had always loved it, Lisey had saved the accompanying delight in the cedar box. Now she lay bleeding on his carpet, holding the square, and gave up trying to forget. She thought, Bool! The End!, and began to cry. She understood she was incapable of coherence, but maybe that was all right; order would come later, if it was needed.

And, of course, if there was a later.

The gomers and the bad-gunky. For the Landons and the Landreaus before them, it's always been one or the other. And it always comes out.

It was really no surprise Scott had recognized Amanda for what she was—he'd known about cutting behavior firsthand. How many times had he cut himself? She didn't know. You couldn't read his scars the way you could read Amanda's, because…well, because. The one incidence of self-multilation she knew about for sure—the night of the greenhouse—had been spectacular, however. And he had learned about cutting from his father, who only turned his knife on his boys when his own body would not suffice to let the bad-gunky out.

Gomers and bad-gunky. Always one or the other. It always comes out.

And if Scott had missed the worst of the bad-gunky, what did that leave?

In December of 1995, the weather had turned rottenly cold. And something started going wrong with Scott. He had a number of speaking gigs planned after the turn of the year at schools in Texas, Oklahoma, New Mexico, and Arizona (what he referred to as The Scott Landon 1996 Western Yahoo Tour), but called his literary agent and had him cancel the whole deal. The booking agency screamed blue murder (no surprise there, that was three hundred thousand dollars' worth of speaking dates he was talking about flushing down the commode), but Scott held firm. He said the tour was impossible, said he was sick. He was sick, all right; as that winter sank its claws in deeper, Scott Landon had been a sick man, indeed. Lisey knew as early as November that something

2

She knows something's wrong with him, and it isn't bronchitis, as he's been claiming. He has no cough, and his skin's cool to the touch, so even though he won't let her take his

temperature, won't even let her put one of those fever-strip thingies on his forehead, she's pretty sure he's not running a fever. The problem seems to be mental rather than physical, and that scares the hell out of her. The one time she gets up enough courage to suggest he go see Dr. Bjorn, he just about tears her head off, accuses her of being a doctor-junkie "like the rest of your nut-box sisters."

And how is she supposed to respond to that? What, exactly, are the symptoms he's displaying? Would any doctor—even a sympathetic one like Rick Bjorn—take them seriously? He's stopped listening to music when he writes, that's one thing. And he's not writing much, that's another, much bigger, thing. Forward progress on his new novel—which Lisey Landon, admittedly no great book critic, happens to love—has slowed from his usual all-out sprint to a labored crawl. Bigger still…dear Christ, where's his sense of humor? That boisterous sense of good humor can be wearing, but its sudden absence as fall gives way to cold weather is downright spooky; it's like the moment in one of those old jungle movies where the native drums suddenly fall silent. He's drinking more, too, and later into the night. She has always gone to bed earlier than he does—usually much earlier—but she almost always knows when he turns in and what she smells on his breath when he does. She also knows what she sees in his trashcans up in his study, and as her worries grow, she makes a special point to look every two or three days. She's used to seeing beer cans, sometimes a great lot of them, Scott has always liked his beer, but in December of 1995 and early January of 1996 she also begins to see Jim Beam bottles. And Scott is suffering hangovers. For some reason this bothers her more than all the rest. Sometimes he wanders the house—pale, silent, ill—until the middle of the afternoon before finally perking up. On several occasions she has heard him vomiting behind the closed bathroom door, and she knows by the speed with which the aspirin is disappearing that he's suffering bad headaches. Nothing unusual in that, you might say; drink a case of beer or a bottle of Beam between nine and midnight, you're gonna pay the price, Patrick. And maybe that's all it is, but Scott has been a heavy drinker since the night she met him in that University lounge, when he had a bottle squirreled away in his jacket pocket (he shared it with her), and he's never suffered more than the mildest of hangovers. Now when she sees the empties in his wastebasket and that only a page or two has been added to the Outlaw's Honeymoon manuscript on his big desk (some days there are no new pages at all), she wonders just how much more he's drinking than what she knows about.

For a little while she's able to forget her worries in the round of year-end holiday visiting and the jostle of Christmas shopping. Scott has never been much of a shopper even when things are slow and the stores are empty, but this season he throws himself into it with hectic good cheer. He's out with her every smucking day, doing battle at either the Auburn Mall or the Main Street shops in Castle Rock. He's recognized often but cheerfully refuses the frequent autograph requests from people who smell the chance for a one-of-a-kind gift, telling them that if he doesn't stick with his wife, he probably won't see her again until Easter. He may have lost his sense of humor but she never sees him lose his temper, not even when some of the folks who want autographs get pushy, and so for awhile there he seems sort of all right, sort of himself in spite of the drinking, the canceled tour, and his slow progress on the new book.

Christmas itself is a happy day, with lots of presents exchanged and an energetic midday tumble in the sack. Christmas dinner is at Canty and Rich's, and over dessert Rich asks Scott when he's going to produce one of the movies made from his novels. "That's where the big money is," Rich says, seemingly ignorant of the fact that of four film adaptations so far, three have bombed. Only the movie version of Empty Devils (which Lisey has never seen) made money.

On the way home, Scott's sense of humor swoops back in like a big old B-1 bomber and he does a killer imitation of Rich that has Lisey laughing until her belly cramps up. And when they arrive back at Sugar Top Hill, they proceed upstairs for a second tumble in the sack. In the afterglow Lisey finds herself thinking that if Scott is sick, maybe more people should catch what he has, the world would be a better place.

She wakes around two AM on Boxing Day, needing to use the bathroom, and—talk about déjà vu all over again—he's not in bed. But this time not gone. She has come to know the difference without even letting herself know what she means when she thinks

(gone)

about that thing he sometimes does, that place he sometimes goes.

She urinates with her eyes shut, listening to the wind outside the house. It sounds cold, that wind, but she doesn't know what cold is. Not yet. Let another couple of weeks pass and she will. Let another couple of weeks pass and she'll know all sorts of things.

When she's done with the toilet, she peeks out the bathroom window. This looks toward the barn and Scott's study in the converted hayloft. If he was up there—and when he gets restless in the middle of the night, that is where he usually goes—she'd see the lights, perhaps even hear the happy carnival sounds of his rock-and-roll music, very faint. Tonight the barn is dark, and the only music she hears is the pitchpipe of the wind. This makes her a little uneasy; hatches thoughts in the back of her brain

(heart attack stroke)

that are too unpleasant to completely consider, yet a little too strong, given how…how off he's been lately…to completely dismiss. So instead of sleepwalking back to the bedroom, she goes to the bathroom's other door, the one that gives on the upstairs hall. She calls his name and gets no answer, but she sees a slim gold bar of light shining beneath the closed door at the far end. And now, very faint, she hears the sound of music coming from down there. Not rock and roll but country. It's Hank Williams. Ole Hank is singing "Kaw-Liga."

"Scott?" she calls again, and when there's no answer she goes down there brushing the hair out of her eyes, bare feet whispering on a carpet that will later wind up in the attic, frightened for no reason she can articulate, except it has something to do with

(gone)

things that are either finished or should be. All done and buttoned up, Dad Debusher might have said; that was one old Dandy caught from the pool, the one where we all go down to drink, the one where we cast our nets.

"Scott?"

She stands before the guest-room door for a moment and a horrible premonition comes to her: he's sitting dead in the rocking chair in front of the television, dead by his own hand, why has she not seen this coming, haven't all the symptoms been on display for a month or more? He has held out until Christmas, held out for her sake, but now—

"Scott?"

She turns the knob and pushes the door open and he's in the rocking chair just as she has imagined him, but very much alive, swaddled in his favorite Good Ma african, the yellow one. On the television, the sound turned low, is his favorite movie: The Last Picture Show. His eyes don't move from it to her.

"Scott? Are you okay?"

His eyes don't move, don't blink. She begins to be very afraid then, and in the back of her mind one of Scott's strange words

(gomer)

pops off a haunted assembly line, and she swats it back into her subconscious with a barely articulated

(Smuck it!)

curse. She steps into the room and speaks his name again. This time he does blink—thank God—and turns his head to look at her, and smiles. It's the Scott Landon smile she fell in love with the first time she saw it. Mostly the way it makes his eyes turn up at the corners.

"Hey, Lisey," he says. "What're you doing up?"

"I could ask you the same question," she says. She looks for booze—a can of beer, maybe a half-finished bottle of Beam—and doesn't see any. That's good. "It's late, don't you know, late."

There is a long pause during which he seems to think this over very carefully. Then he says, "The wind woke me. It was rattling one of the gutters against the side of the house and I couldn't go back to sleep."

She starts to speak, then doesn't. When you've been married a long time—she supposes how long varies from marriage to marriage, with them it took about fifteen years—a kind of telepathy sets in. Right now it's telling her he has something more to say. So she stays quiet, waiting to see if she's right. At first it seems she is. He opens his mouth. Then the wind gusts outside and she hears it—a low quick rattling like the chatter of metal teeth. He cocks his head toward it…smiles a little…not a nice smile…the smile of someone who has a secret…and closes his mouth again. Instead of saying whatever it was he meant to say, he looks back at the TV screen, where Jeff Bridges—a very young Jeff Bridges—and his best friend are now driving to Mexico. When they get back, Sam the Lion will be dead.

"Do you think you could go to sleep now?" she asks him, and when he doesn't respond, she begins to feel afraid again. "Scott!" she says, a little more sharply than she intended, and when he returns his eyes to her (reluctantly, Lisey fancies, although he has seen this movie at least two dozen times), she repeats her question more quietly. "Do you think you could go back to sleep now?"

"Maybe," he allows, and she sees something that is both terrible and sad: he is afraid. "If you sleep spoons with me."

"As cold as it is tonight? Are you kidding? Come on, turn off the TV and come back to bed."

He does, and she lies there listening to the wind and luxuriating in the man-driven warmth of him.

She begins to see her butterflies. This is what almost always happens to her when she begins to drift into sleep. She sees great red and black butterflies opening their wings in the dark. It has occurred to her that she will see them when her dying-time comes around. The thought scares her, but only a little.

"Lisey?" It's Scott, from far away. He's drifting, too. She senses that.

"Hmmmm?"

"It doesn't like me to talk."

"What doesn't?"

"I don't know." Very faint and far. "Maybe it's the wind. The cold north wind. The one that comes down from…"

The last word might be Canada, probably is, but there's no way to tell for sure because by then she's lost in the land of sleep and he is too, and when they go there they never go together, and she is afraid that is also a preview of death, a place where there may be dreams but never love, never home, never a hand to hold yours when squadrons of birds flock across the burnt-orange sun at the close of the day.

3

There's a period of time—two weeks, maybe—when she goes on trying to believe that things are getting better. Later she'll ask herself how she could be so stupid, so willfully blind, how she could mistake his frantic struggle to hold onto the world (and her!) for any kind of improvement, but of course when straws are all you have, you grasp them.

There are some fat ones to grasp at. During the opening days of 1996 his drinking seems to stop entirely, except for a glass of wine with dinner on a couple of occasions, and he trundles out to his study every day. It will only be later— later, later, percolator, they used to chant when they were little kids building their first word-castles in the sand at the edge of the pool—that she'll realize he hasn't added a single page to the manuscript of his novel during those days, has done nothing but drink secret whiskey and eat Certs and write disjointed notes to himself. Tucked beneath the keyboard of the Mac he's currently using, she'll find one piece of paper—a sheet of stationery, actually, with FROM THE DESK OF SCOTT LANDON printed across the top—upon which he has scrawled Tractor-chain say youre too late Scoot you old scoot, even now. It's only when that cold wind, the one all the way down from Yellowknife, is booming around the house, that she'll finally see the deep crescent-moon cuts in the palms of his hands. Cuts he could only have made with his own fingernails as he struggled to hold onto his life and sanity like a mountain-climber trying to hold onto a smucking ledge in a sleet-storm. It's only later that she'll find his cache of empty Beam bottles, better than a dozen in all, and on that one at least she's able to give herself a pass, because those empties were well-hidden.

4

The first couple of days of 1996 are unseasonably warm; it is what the oldtimers call the January Thaw. But as early as January third, the weather forecasters begin warning of a big change, an awesome cold wave rolling down from the white wastes of central Canada. Mainers are told to make sure their fuel-oil tanks are topped up, that their waterpipes are insulated, and that they have plenty of "warm space" for their animals. Temperatures are going to drop to twenty-five degrees below zero, but the temperatures are going to be the very least of it. They're going to be accompanied by gale-force winds that will drive the chill-factor to sixty or seventy below.

Lisey is frightened enough to call their general contractor after failing to raise any real concern in Scott. Gary assures her that the Landons have got the tightest house in Castle View, tells her he'll keep a close eye on Lisey's kinfolk (especially on Amanda, it almost goes without saying), and reminds her that cold weather is just a part of living in Maine. A few three-dog nights and we'll be on the way to spring, he says.

But when the subzero cold and screaming winds finally roll in on the fifth of January, it's worse than anything Lisey can remember, even casting her mind back to childhood, when every thunderbuster she rode out gleefully as a child seemed magnified into a great tempest and every snow flurry was a blizzard. She keeps all the thermostats in the house turned up to seventy-five and the new furnace runs constantly, but between the sixth and ninth, the temperature inside never rises above sixty-two. The wind doesn't just hoot around the eaves, it screams like a woman being gutted an inch at a time by a madman: one with a dull knife. The snow left on the ground by the January thaw is lifted by those forty-mile-an- hour winds (the gusts kick up to sixty-five, high enough to knock down half a dozen radio towers in central Maine and New Hampshire) and blown across the fields like dancing ghosts. When they hit the storm windows, the granular particles rattle like hail.

On the second night of this extravagant Canadian cold, Lisey wakes up at two in the morning and Scott is gone from their bed once more. She finds him in the guest room, again bundled up in Good Ma's yellow african, once more watching The Last Picture Show. Hank Williams warbles "Kaw-Liga"; Sam the Lion is dead. She has difficulty rousing him, but at last Lisey manages. She asks him if he's all right and Scott says yeah he is. He tells her to look out the window, tells her it's beautiful but to be careful, not to look too long. "My Daddy said it would burn your eyes when it's that bright," he advises.

She gasps for the beauty of it. There are great drifting theater curtains in the sky, and they change color as she watches: green goes to purple, purple to vermilion, vermilion to a queer bloody shade of red she cannot name. Russet perhaps comes close, but that isn't it, exactly; she thinks no one has ever named the shade she's seeing. When Scott twitches the back of her nightgown and tells her that's enough, she ought to stop, she's stunned to look at the digital clock built into the VCR and discover that she's been looking out the frostframed window at the northern lights for ten minutes. "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.

She returns the useless phone to its cradle and hurries back down the hall to him, her slippers whispering. He is as she left him. The whining '50s-vintage country-music soundtrack of The Last Picture Show in the middle of the night was bad but the silence is worse, worse, worst. And just before a giant gust of wind seizes the house and threatens to push it off its foundations (she can hardly believe they haven't lost the electric, surely they will before much longer), she realizes why even the big wind is a relief: she can't hear him breathing. He doesn't look dead, there's even some color in his cheeks, but how does she know he's not?

"Honey?" she murmurs, going to him. "Hon, can you talk to me? Can you look at me?"

He says nothing, and he doesn't look at her, but when she puts her chilly fingers against his neck, she finds that the skin there is warm and she feels the beat of his heart in the big vein or artery that lies just beneath the skin. And something else. She can feel him reaching out to her. In daylight, even cold daylight, windy daylight (like the kind that seems to pervade all the exteriors in The Last Picture Show, now that she thinks of it), she's sure she would scoff at that, but not now. Now she knows what she knows. He needs help, just as much as he did on that day in Nashville, first when the madman shot him and then as he lay shivering on the hot pavement, begging for ice.

"How do I help you?" she murmurs. "How do I help you now?"

It's Darla who answers, Darla as she was as a teenager—"Full of young tits n mean," Good Ma had once said, an

uncharacteristic vulgarity for her, so she must have been exasperated out of all measure.

You aren't gonna help him, why are you talkin about helpin him? Darla asks, and that voice is so real Lisey can almost smell the Coty face-powder Darla was allowed to use (because of her blemishes) and hear the pop of her Dubble Bubble. And say! She's been down to the pool, and cast her net, and brought back quite a catch! He's off his rocker, Lisey, popped his cork, lost his marbles, he's riding the rubber tricycle, and the only way you can help him is to call for the men in the white coats as soon as the phone's working again. Lisey hears Darla's laugh—that laugh of perfect teenage contempt— deep in the center of her head as she looks down at her wideeyed husband sitting in the rocker. Help him! Darla snorts. HELP him? Cheezus pleezus.

And yet Lisey thinks she can. Lisey thinks there's a way.

The trouble is that the way to help is possibly dangerous and not at all sure. She's honest enough to recognize that she has made some of the problems herself. She has stowed away certain memories, such as their amazing exit from beneath the yum-yum tree, and hidden unbearable truths—the truth about Paul the Saintly Brother, for instance—behind a sort of curtain in her mind. There's a certain sound

(the chuffing, dear God that low nasty grunting)

behind there, and certain sights

(the crosses the graveyard the crosses in the bloodlight)

as well. She wonders sometimes if everyone has a curtain like that in their minds, one with a don't-think zone behind it. They should. It's handy. Saves a lot of sleepless nights. There's all sorts of dusty old crapola behind hers; stuff like-a dis, stuff like-a dat, stuff like-a d'other t'ing. All in all, it's quite a maze. Oh leedle Leezy, how you amazenzee me, mein gott…and what do the kids say?

"Don't goinzee there," Lisey mutters, but she thinks she will; she thinks if she is to have any chance of saving Scott, of bringing him back, she must goinzee there…wherever there is.

Oh, but it's right next door.

That's the horror of it.

"You know, don't you?" she says, beginning to weep, but it isn't Scott she's asking, Scott has gone to where the gomers go. Once upon a time, under the yum-yum tree where they sat protected from the world by the strange October snow, he had referred to his job of writing stories as a kind of madness. She had protested—she, practical Lisey, to whom everything was the same—and he had said, You don't understand the gone part. I hope you stay lucky that way, little Lisey.

But tonight while the wind booms down from Yellowknife and the sky blooms with wild colors, her luck has run out.

7

Lying on her back in her dead husband's study, holding the bloody delight against her breast, Lisey said: "I sat down beside him and worked his hand out from under the african so I could hold it." She swallowed. There was a click in her throat. She wanted more water but didn't trust herself to get up, not just yet. "His hand was warm but the floor

8

The floor is cold even through the flannel of her nightgown and the flannel of her longjohns and the silk panties beneath the longies. This room, like all of them upstairs, has baseboard heat that she can feel if she stretches out the hand that isn't holding Scott's, but it's small comfort. The endlessly laboring furnace sends it up, the baseboard heaters send it out, it creeps about six inches across the

floorboards…and then, poof! Gone. Like the stripes on the barber's pole. Like cigarette smoke when it rises. Like husbands, sometimes.

Never mind the cold floor. Never mind if your ass turns blue. If you can do something for him, do it.

But what is that something? How is she supposed to start?

The answer seems to come on the next gust of wind. Start with the tea-cure.

"He-never-told-me-about-that-because-I-never-

asked." This comes out of her so rapidly it could almost be one long exotic word.

If so, it's an exotic one-word lie. He answered her question about the tea-cure that night at The Antlers. In bed, after love. She asked him two or three questions, but the one that mattered, the key question, turned out to be that first one. Simple, too. He could have answered with a plain old yes or no, but when had Scott Landon ever answered anything with a plain old yes or no? And it turned out to be the cork in the neck of the bottle. Why? Because it returned them to Paul. And the story of Paul was, essentially, the story of his death. And the death of Paul led to—

"No, please," she whispers, and realizes she's squeezing his hand far too tight. Scott, of course, makes no protest. In the parlance of the Landon family, he has gone gomer. Sounded funny when you put it that way, almost like a joke on Hee-Haw. Say, Buck, where's Roy?

Well, I tell yew, Minnie—Roy's gone gomer!

[Audience howls with laughter.]

But Lisey isn't laughing, and she doesn't need any of her interior voices to tell her Scott has gone to gomerland. If she wants to fetch him back, first she must follow him.

"Oh God no," she moans, because what that means is already looming in the back of her mind, a large shape wrapped in many sheets. "Oh God, oh God, do I have to?"

God doesn't answer. Nor does she need Him to. She knows what she needs to do, or at least how she needs to start: she must remember their second night at The Antlers, after love. They had been drowsing toward sleep, and she had thought What's the harm, it's Saintly Big Brother you want to know about, not Old Devil Daddy. Go ahead and ask him. So she did. Sitting on the floor with his hand (it's cooling now) folded into hers and the wind booming outside and the sky filled with crazy color, she peers around the curtain she's put up to hide her worst, most perplexing memories and sees herself asking him about the tea-cure. Asking him

9

"After that thing on the bench, did Paul soak his cuts in tea, the way you soaked your hand that night in my apartment?"

He's lying in bed next to her, the sheet pulled up to his hips, so she can see the beginning curl of his pubic hair. He's smoking what he calls the always fabulous post-coital cigarette, and the only light in the room is cast down on them by the lamp on his side of the bed. In the rose-dusty glow of that lamp the smoke rises and disappears into the dark, making her wonder briefly

(was there a sound, a clap of collapsing air under the yum-yum tree when we went, when we left)

about something she's already working to put out of her mind.

Meanwhile, the silence is stretching out. She has just about decided he won't answer when he does. And his tone makes her believe it was careful thought and not reluctance that made him pause. "I'm pretty sure the tea-cure came later, Lisey." He thinks a little more, nods. "Yeah, I know it did, because by then I was doing fractions. One-third plus one-fourth equals seven-twelfths, stuff like-a dat." He grins…but Lisey, who is coming to know his repertoire of expressions well, thinks it is a nervous grin.

"In school?" she asks.

"No, Lisey." His tone says she should know better than this, and when he speaks again, she can hear that somehow chilling childishness

(I trite and I trite)

creeping into his voice. "Me n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. Daddy called public school the Donkey Corral." On the nighttable beside the lamp is an ashtray sitting on top of his copy of Slaughterhouse-Five (Scott takes a book with him everywhere he goes, there are absolutely no exceptions), and he flicks his cigarette into it. Outside, the wind gusts and the old inn creaks.

It suddenly seems to Lisey that perhaps this isn't such a good idea after all, that the good idea would be to just roll over and go to sleep, but she is two-hearted and her curiosity drives her on. "And Paul's cuts that day—the day you jumped from the bench—were bad? Not just nicks? I mean, you know the way kids see things…any busted pipe looks like a flood…"

She trails off. There's a very long pause while he watches the smoke from his cigarette rise out of the lamp's beam and disappear. When he speaks again, his voice is dry and flat and certain. "Daddy cut deep."

She opens her mouth to say something conventional that will put an end to this discussion (all kinds of warning bells are going off in her head, now; whole banks of red lights are flashing), but before she can, he goes on.

"Anyway, that's not what you want to ask. Ask what you want, Lisey. Go ahead. I'll tell you. I'm not going to keep secrets from you—not after what happened this afternoon—but you have to ask."

What did happen this afternoon? That would seem to be the logical question, but Lisey understands this cannot be a logical discussion because it's madness they're circling, madness, and now she's a part of it, too. Because Scott took her somewhere, she knows it, that was not her imagination. If she asks what happened, he'll tell her, he's as much as said so…but it's not the right way in. Her post-coital drowse has departed and she's never felt more awake in her life.

"After you jumped off the bench, Scott…"

"Daddy gave me a kiss, a kiss 'us Daddy's prize. To show the blood-bool was over."

"Yes, I know, you told me. After you jumped off the bench and the cutting was done, did Paul…did he go away somewhere to heal? Is that how come he could go to the store for bottles of dope and then run around the house making a bool hunt so soon after?"

"No." He crushes his cigarette out in the ashtray sitting on top of the book.

She feels the oddest mixture of emotions at that simple negative: sweet relief and deep disappointment. It's like having a thunderhead in her chest. She doesn't know exactly what she was thinking, but that no means she doesn't have to think it any mo—

"He couldn't." Scott speaks in that same dry, flat tone of voice. With that same certainty. "Paul couldn't. He couldn't go." The emphasis on the last word is slight but unmistakable. "I had to take him."

Scott rolls toward her and takes her…but only into his arms. His face against her neck is hot with suppressed emotion.

"There's a place. We called it Boo'ya Moon, I forget why. It's mostly pretty." Purdy. "I took him when he was hurt and I took him when he was dead, but I couldn't take him when he was badgunky. After Daddy kilt him I took him there, to Boo'ya Moon, and burrit him away." The dam gives way and he begins sobbing. He's able to muffle the sounds a little by closing his lips, but the force of those sobs shakes the bed, and for a little while all she can do is hold him. At some point he asks her to turn the lamp out and when she asks him why he tells her, "Because this is the rest of it, Lisey. I think I can tell it, as long as you're holding me. But not with the light on."

And although she is more frightened than ever—even more frightened than on the night when he came out of the dark with his hand in bloody ruins—she frees an arm long enough to turn out the bedside light, brushing his face with the breast that will later suffer Jim Dooley's madness. At first the room is dark and then the furniture reappears dimly as her eyes adjust; it even takes on a faint and hallucinatory glow that announces the moon's approach through the thinning clouds.

"You think Daddy murdered Paul, don't you? You think that's how this part of the story ends."

"Scott, you said he did it with his rifle—"

"But it wasn't murder. They would have called it that if he'd ever been tried for it in court, but I was there and I know it wasn't." He pauses. She thinks he'll light a fresh cigarette, but he doesn't. Outside the wind gusts and the old building groans. For a moment the furniture brightens, just a little, and then the gloom returns. "Daddy could have murdered him, sure. Lots of times. I know that. There were times he would have, if I hadn't been there to help, but in the end that isn't how it was. You know what euthanasia means, Lisey?"

"Mercy-killing."

"Yeah. That's what my Daddy did to Paul."

In the room beyond the bed, the furniture once more shivers toward visibility, then once more retreats into shadow.

"It was the bad-gunky, don't you see? Paul got it just like Daddy. Only Paul got too much for Daddy to cut and let out."

Lisey sort of understands. All those times the father cut the sons—and himself as well, she presumes—he was practicing a kind of wacky preventative medicine.

"Daddy said it mos'ly skip' two generations and then came down twice as hard. 'Come down on you like that tractor-chain on your foot, Scoot,' he said."

She shakes her head. She doesn't know what he's talking about. And part of her doesn't want to.

"It was December," Scott says, "and there come a cold snap. First one of the winter. We lived on that farm way out in the country with open fields all around us and just the one road that went down to Mulie's Store and then to Martensburg. We were pretty much cut off from the world. Pretty much on our own hook, see?"

She does. She does see. She imagines the postman came up that road once in awhile, and of course "Sparky" Landon would drive down it in order to get to

(U.S. Gyppum)

work, but that would have been pretty much it. No school busses, because me'n Paul, we 'us home-schooled. The school busses went to the Donkey Corral.

"Snow made it worse, and cold made it worse still—the cold kept us inside. Still, that year wasn't so bad at first. We had a Christmas tree, at least. There were years when Daddy would get in the bad-gunky…or just plain broody…and there wouldn't be any tree or any presents." He gives out a short, humorless laugh. "One Christmas he must have kept us up until three in the morning, reading from the Book of Revelation, about jars being opened, and plagues, and riders on horses of various shades, and he finally threw the Bible into the kitchen and roared, 'Who writes this smogging bullshit? And who are the morons who believe it?' When he was in a roaring mood, Lisey, he could roar like Ahab during the last days of the Pequod. But this particular Christmas seemed nice enough. Know what we did? We all went up to Pittsburgh together for the shopping, and Daddy even took us to a movie—Clint Eastwood playing a cop and shooting up some city. It gave me a headache, and the popcorn gave me a bellyache, but I thought it was the most wonderful goddam thing I'd ever seen. I went home and started writing a story just like it and read it to Paul that night. It probably stank to high heaven, but he said it was good."

"He sounds like a great brother," Lisey says carefully.

Her care is wasted. He hasn't even heard her. "What I'm telling you is that we were all getting along, had been for months, almost like a normal family. If there is such a thing, which I doubt. But…but."

He stops, thinking. At last, he begins again.

"Then one day not long before Christmas, I was upstairs in my room. It was cold—colder than a witch's tit—and getting ready to snow. I was on my bed, reading my history lesson, when I looked out my window and saw Daddy coming across the yard with an armload of wood. I went down the back stairs to help him stack it in the woodbox so the stovelengths wouldn't get bark all over the floor—that always made him mad. And Paul was

10

Paul is sitting at the kitchen table when his kid brother, just ten years old and needing a haircut, comes down the back stairs with the laces of his sneakers flapping. Scott thinks he'll ask if Paul wants to go out sledding on the hill behind the barn once the wood's in. If Daddy doesn't have any more chores, that is.

Paul Landon, slim and tall and already handsome at thirteen, has a book open in front of him. The book is Introduction to Algebra, and Scott has no reason to believe Paul is doing anything other than solving for x until Paul turns his head to look at him. Scott is still three steps from the bottom of the stairs when Paul does that. It is only an instant before Paul lunges at his younger brother, to whom he has never so much as raised a hand in their lives together, but it is long enough to see that no, Paul wasn't just sitting there. No, Paul wasn't just reading. No, Paul wasn't studying.

Paul was lying in wait.

It isn't blankness he sees in his brother's eyes when Paul comes surging out of his chair hard enough to knock it skittering back against the wall, but pure bad-gunky. Those eyes are blue no more. Something has burst in the brain behind them and filled them with blood. Scarlet seeds stand in the corners.

Another child might have frozen to the spot and been killed by the monster who an hour before had been an ordinary brother with nothing on his mind but homework or perhaps what he and Scott could get Daddy for Christmas if they pooled their money. Scott, however, is no more ordinary than Paul. Ordinary children could never have survived Sparky Landon, and it's almost certainly the experience of living with his father's madness that saves Scott now. He knows the bad-gunky when he sees it, and wastes no time on disbelief. He turns instantly and tries to flee back up the stairs. He makes only three steps before Paul grabs him by the legs.

Snarling like a dog whose yard has been invaded, Paul curls his arms around Scott's shins and yanks the younger boy's legs out from under him. Scott grabs the banister and holds on. He gives a single two-word yell—"Daddy, help!"—and then is quiet. Yelling wastes energy. He needs all of his to hold on.

He doesn't have enough strength to do so, of course. Paul is three years older, fifty pounds heavier, and much stronger. In addition to these things, he has run mad. If Paul pulls him free of the banister then, Scott will be badly hurt or killed in spite of his quick reaction, but instead of getting Scott, what Paul gets are Scott's corduroy pants and both sneakers, which he forgot to tie when he jumped down off his bed.

("If I'd tied my sneakers," he will tell his wife much later as they lie in bed on the second floor of The Antlers in New Hampshire, "we're most likely not here tonight. Sometimes I think that's all my life comes down to, Lisey—a pair of untied Keds, size seven.")

The thing that was Paul roars, stumbles backward with a hug of pants in its arms, and trips over the chair in which a handsome young fellow sat down an hour previous to map Cartesian coordinates. One sneaker falls to the bumpy, hillocky linoleum. Scott, meanwhile, is struggling to get going again, to get up to the second-floor landing while there's still time, but his sock feet spin out from under him on the smooth stair-riser and he goes back down to one knee. His tattered underwear has been pulled partway down, he can feel a cold draft blowing on the crack of his ass, and there's time to think Please God, I don't want to die this way, with my fanny out to the wind. Then the brother-thing is up, bellowing and casting aside the pants. They skid across the kitchen table, leaving the algebra book but knocking the sugar-bowl to the floor—knocking it galley-west, their father might have said. The thing that was Paul leaps for him and Scott is bracing for its hands and the feel of its nails biting into his skin when there's a terrific wooden thonk! and a hoarse, furious shout:—Leave 'im alone, you smuckin bastard! You bad-gunky fuck!

He forgot all about Daddy. The draft on his ass was Daddy coming in with the wood. Then Paul's hands do grab him, the fingernails do bite in, and he's pulled backward, his grip on the banister broken as easily as if it were a baby's. In a moment he will feel Paul's teeth. He knows it, this is the real bad-gunky, the deep bad-gunky, not what happens to Daddy when Daddy sees people who aren't there or makes a blood-bool on himself or one of them (a thing he does less and less to Scott as Scott grows older), but the real deal, what Daddy meant all the times he'd just laugh and shake his head when they asked him why the Landreaus left France even though it meant leaving all their money and land behind, and they were rich, the Landreaus were rich, and he's going to bite now, he's going to bite me right now, RAH-CHEER—

He never feels Paul's teeth. He feels hot breath on the unprotected meat of his left side just above the hip, and then there's another heavy wooden thonk! as Daddy brings the stovelength down on Paul's head again—two-handed, with all his strength. The sound is followed by a number of loose sliding sounds as Paul's body goes slithering down to the kitchen linoleum.

Scott turns over. He's lying splayed out on the lower stairs, dressed in nothing but an old flannel shirt, his underpants, and white athletic socks with holes in the heels. One foot is almost touching the floor. He's too stunned to cry. His mouth tastes like the inside of a piggybank. That last whack sounded awful, and for an instant his powerful imagination paints the kitchen with Paul's blood. He tries to cry out, but his shocked, flattened lungs can produce only a single dismayed squawk. He blinks and sees that there's no blood, only Paul lying facedown in the sugar from the now defunct bowl, which lies bust in four big and change. That one'll never dance the tango again, Daddy sometimes says when something breaks, a glass or a plate, but he doesn't say it now, just stands over his unconscious son in his yellow work coat. There's snow on his shoulders and in his shaggy hair, which is starting to go gray. In one gloved hand he holds the stovelength. Behind him, scattered in the entry like pickup sticks, is the rest of his armload. The door is still open and the cold draft is still blowing in. And now Scott sees there is blood, just a little, trickling from Paul's left ear and down the side of his face.

—Daddy, is he dead?

Daddy slings the stovelength into the woodbox and brushes his long hair back. There's melting snow in the stubble on his cheeks—No he aint. That would be too easy. He tromps to the back door and slams it shut, cutting off the draft. His every movement expresses disgust, but Scott has seen him act so before—when he gets Official Letters about taxes or schooling or things like that—and is pretty sure that what he really is is scared.

Daddy comes back and stands over his floorbound boy. He rocks from one booted foot to the other awhile. Then he looks up at the other one.

—Help me get him down cellar, Scoot.

It isn't wise to question Daddy when he tells you to do a thing, but Scott is frightened. Also, he is next door to naked. He comes down to the kitchen and starts pulling his pants on.—Why, Daddy? What are you going to do with him?

And for a wonder, Daddy doesn't hit him. Doesn't even yell at him.

—I'll be smucked if I know. Truss him up down there for a start while I think about it. Hurry up. He won't be out long.

—Is it really the bad-gunky? Like with the Landreaus? And your Uncle Theo?

—What do you think, Scoot? Get his head, less you want it to bump all the way down. He won't be out long I tell you, and if he starts again, you might not be so lucky. Me either. Badgunky's strong.

Scott does as his father says. It's the nineteen-sixties, it's America, men will soon be walking on the moon, but here they have a boy to deal with who has seemingly gone feral in the turn of a moment. The father simply accepts the fact. After his first shocked questions, the son does, as well. When they reach the bottom of the cellar stairs, Paul begins to stir again and make thick sounds deep in his throat. Sparky Landon puts his hands around his older son's throat and begins to choke him. Scott screams in horror and tries to grab his father.

—Daddy, no!

Sparky Landon releases one hand from what it's been doing long enough to administer an absent backhand blow to his younger son. Scott goes reeling back and strikes the table sitting in the middle of the dirt-floored room. Standing on it is an ancient hand-crank printing press that Paul has somehow coaxed back into working. He has printed some of Scott's stories on it; they are the younger brother's first publications. The crank of this quarter-ton behemoth bites painfully into Scott's back and he crumples up, grimacing, watching as his father resumes choking.

—Daddy, don't kill 'im! PLEASE DON'T KILL 'IM!

—I ain't, Landon says without looking around, I should, but I aint. Not yet, anyway. More fool me, but he's my own boy, my fuckin firstborn, and I won't unless I have to. Which I fear I will. Sweet Mother Machree! But not yet. Mother-fogged if I will. Only it won't do to let him wake up. You aint never seen anything like this, but I have. I got lucky upstairs because I was behind him. Down here I could chase him two hours and never catch him. He'd run up the walls and halfway across the sweetmother ceiling. Then, when he wore me down…

Landon removes his hands from Paul's throat and peers fixedly into the still white face. That little trickle of blood from Paul's ear seems to have stopped.

—There. How you like that, you mother, you mother-fuck? He's out again. But he not for long. Fetch out that coil of rope from understair. That'll do until we can get some chain out of the shed. Then I dunno. Then it depends.

—Depends on what, Daddy?

Scared. Has he ever been so scared? No. And his father is looking at him in a way that scares him even more. Because it is a knowing way.

—Why, I guess it depends on you, Scoot. You've made him better a lot of times…and why do you want to come over all cow's eyes that way? You think I didn't know? Jayzus, for a smart boy ain't you dumb! He turns his head and spits on the dirt floor. You've made him better of a lot of things. Maybe you can make him better of this. I never heard of anyone getting better from the bad-gunky…not the real bad-gunky…but I never heard of anybody just like you, either, so maybe you can. Have on 'til your cheeks crack, my old man would've said. But for now just fetch out that coil of rope from understair. And step to it, you little gluefoot mother-fuck, because he's

11

"He's stirring already," Lisey said as she lay on the oysterwhite carpet of her dead husband's study. "He's

12

"Stirring already," Lisey says as she sits on the cold floor of the guest room, holding her husband's hand—a hand that is warm but dreadfully lax and waxy in her own. "Scott said

13

The arguments against insanity fall through with a soft shirring sound;

these are the sounds of dead voices on dead records

floating down the broken shaft of memory.

When I turn to you to ask if you remember,

When I turn to you in our bed

14

In bed with him is where she hears these things; in bed with him at The Antlers, after a day when something happened she absolutely cannot explain. He tells her as the clouds thin and the moon nears like an announcement and the furniture swims to the very edge of visibility. She holds him in the dark and listens, not wanting to believe (helpless not to), as the young man who will shortly become her husband says, "Daddy tole me to fetch out that coil of rope from understair. 'And you want to step to it, you little gluefoot mother-fuck,' he says, 'because he's not gonna stay out for long. And when he comes to

15

—When he comes to he's gonna be one ugly bug.

Ugly bug. Like Scooter you old Scoot and the bad-gunky, ugly bug is an interior idiom of his family that will haunt his dreams (and his speech) for the rest of his productive but too-short life.

Scott gets the coil of rope from beneath the stairs and brings it to Daddy. Daddy trusses Paul up with quick, dancing economy, his shadow looming and turning on the cellar's stone walls in the light of three hanging seventy-five-watt bulbs, which are controlled by a turn-switch at the top of the stairs. He ties Paul's arms so stringently behind him that the balls of his shoulders stand out even through his shirt. Scott is moved to speak again, afraid of Daddy though he is.

—Daddy, that's too tight!

Daddy shoots a glance Scott's way. It's just a quick one, but Scott sees the fear there. It scares him. More than that, it awes him. Before today he would have said his Daddy wasn't ascairt of nothing but the School Board and their damned Registered Mails.

—You don't know, so shut up! I aint having him get a-loose! He might not kill us before it was over if that happen, but I'd most certainly have to kill him. I know what I'm doin!

You don't, Scott thinks, watching Daddy tie Paul's legs together first at the knees, then at the ankles. Already Paul has begun to stir again, and to mutter deep in his throat. You're only guessing. But he understands the truth of Daddy's love for Paul. It may be ugly love, but it's true and strong. If it wasn't, Daddy wouldn't guess at all. He would have just kept hammering Paul with that stovelength until he was dead. For just a moment part of Scott's mind (a cold part) wonders if Daddy would run the same risk for him, for Scooter old Scoot who didn't even dare jump off a three-foot bench until his brother stood cut and bleeding before him, and then he swats the thought into darkness. It isn't him who got the badgunky.

At least, not yet.

Daddy finishes by tying Paul around the middle to one of the painted steel posts that hold up the cellar's ceiling.—There, he says, stepping away, panting like a man who's just roped a steer in a rodeo ring. That'll hold him awhile. You go on out to the shed, Scott. Get the light chain that's laying just inside the door and the big heavy tractor-chain that's in the bay on the left, with the truck parts. Do you know where I mean?

Paul has been sagging over the rope around his torso. Now he sits up so suddenly he bangs his head on the post with sickening force. It makes Scott grimace. Paul looks at him with eyes that were blue only an hour ago. He grins, and the corners of his mouth stretch up far higher than they should be able to…almost to the lobes of his ears, it seems.

—Scott, his father says.

For once in his life, Scott pays no attention. He's mesmerized by the Halloween mask that used to be his brother's face. Paul's tongue comes dancing from between his parted teeth and does a jitterbug in the dank cellar air. At the same time his crotch darkens as he pisses his pa—

There's a clout upside his head that sends Scott reeling backward and he hits the printing-press table again.

—Don't look at him, nummie, look at me! That ugly bug'll hypnotize you like a snake does a bird! You better wake the smuck up, Scooter—that aint your brother anymore. Scott gapes at his father. Behind them, as if to underline Daddy's point, the thing tied to the post lets out a roar much too loud to have come from a human chest. But that's all right, because it isn't a human sound. Not even close.

—Go get those chains, Scotty. Both of em. And be quick. That tie-job aint gonna hold him. I'm gonna go upstairs and get my .30-06. If he gets a-loose before you get back with those chains—

—Daddy, please don't shoot him! Don't shoot Paul!

—Bring the chains. Then we'll see what we can figger out.

—That tractor-chain's too long! Too heavy!

—Use the wheelbarra, nummie. The big barra. Go on, now, step to it.

Scott looks over his shoulder once and sees his father backing to the foot of the stairs. He does it slowly, like a liontamer leaving the cage after the act is over. Below him, spotlighted in the glare of one hanging bulb, is Paul. He's whamming the back of his head so rapidly against the post that Scott thinks of a jackhammer. At the same time he's jerking from side to side. Scott can't believe Paul isn't bleeding or knocking himself unconscious, but he's not. And he sees his father is right. The ropes won't hold him. Not if he keeps up that constant assault.

He won't be able to, he thinks as his father goes one way (to get his gun out of the front closet) and Scott goes another (to yank on his boots). He'll kill himself if he goes on like that. But then he thinks of the roar he heard bursting out of his brother's chest—that impossible catmurder roar—and doesn't really believe it.

And as he runs coatless into the cold, he thinks he might even know what's happened to Paul. There's a place where he can go when Daddy has hurt him, and he has taken Paul there when Daddy has hurt Paul. Yes, plenty of times. There are good things in that place, beautiful trees and healing water, but there are also bad things. Scott tries not to go there at night, and when he does he's quiet and comes back quick, because the deep intuition of his child's heart tells him night is when the bad things mostly come out. Night is when they hunt.

If he can go there, is it so hard to believe that something—a bad-gunky something—could get inside Paul and then come over here? Something that saw him and marked him, or maybe just a dumb germ that crawled up his nose and stuck in his brain?

And if so, whose fault is that? Who took Paul in the first place?

In the shed, Scott throws the light chain in the wheelbarrow. That's easy, the work of only seconds. Getting the tractorchain in there is a lot harder. The tractor-chain is puffickly huh-yooge, talking all the while in its clanky language, which is all steel vowels. Twice heavy loops slip through his trembling arms, the second time pinching his skin and dragging it open, bringing blood in bright rosettes. The third time he almost has it in the wheelbarrow when a twenty-pound armload of links lands crooked, on the side of the barrowbed instead of on the square, and the entire load of chainlink topples over on Scott's foot, burying it in steel and making him scream a perfect soprano choir–cry of pain.

—Scooter, you comin before the turn of two thousand? Daddy bawls from the house. If you're comin, you better damn well motherfuckin come!

Scott looks that way, eyes wide and terrified, then sets the wheelbarrow up again and bends over the big greasy heap of chain. His foot will still be bruise-gaudy a month later and he'll feel pain there all the way to the end of his life (that's one problem traveling to that other place is never able to fix), but at the time he feels nothing after the initial flare. He again begins the job of loading the links into the wheelbarrow, feeling the hot sweat go rolling down his sides and back, smelling the wild stink of it, knowing that if he hears a gunshot it will mean Paul's brains are out on the cellar floor and it's his fault. Time becomes a physical thing with weight, like dirt. Like chain. He keeps expecting Daddy to yell at him again from the house and when he still hasn't by the time Scott begins trundling the wheelbarrow back toward the yellow gleam of the kitchen lights, Scott begins to have a different fear: that Paul has gotten a-loose after all. It isn't Paul's brains lying down there on the sour-smelling dirt, it's Daddy's guts, pulled from his living stomach by the thing that was Scott's brother just this afternoon. Paul's up the stairs and hiding in the house and as soon as Scott goes inside the bool hunt will start. Only this time he will be the prize.

All that's his imagination, of course, his damned old imagination that runs like a wildeyed nighthorse, but when his father leaps out onto the porch it has done enough work so that for a moment Scott sees not Andrew Landon but Paul, grinning like a goblin, and he shrieks. When he raises his hands to guard his face the wheelbarrow almost tips over again. Would have, if Daddy hadn't reached out to steady it. Then he raises one of those hands to swat his son but lowers it almost at once. Later there may be swatting, but not now. Now he needs him. So instead of hitting Daddy only spits into his right hand and rubs it against his left. Then he bends, oblivious of the cold out here on the back stoop in his underwear shirt and grabs hold of the wheelbarrow's front end.

—I'm gonna yank it up, Scooter. You hang on those handles and steer and don't let the mother tip. I gave him another tonk—I had to—but it won't keep him out long. If we spill this load of chain, I don't think he's gonna live through the night. I won't be able to let him. You understand?

Scott understands that his brother's life is now riding in a seriously overloaded wheelbarrow filled with chain that weighs three times what he does. For one wild moment he seriously considers simply running away into the windy dark, and as fast as he can go. Then he grabs the handles. He is unaware of the tears spilling from his eyes. He nods at his Daddy and his Daddy nods back. What passes between them is nothing but life and death.

—On three. One…two…keep it straight now, you little whoredog…three!

Sparky Landon lifts the wheelbarrow from the ground to the stoop with a cry of effort that escapes in white vapor. His underwear shirt splits open beneath one arm and a tuft of crazy ginger hair springs free. While the overloaded barrow is in the air the damned thing yaws first left and then right and the boy thinks stay up you mother, you whoredog mothersmuck. He corrects each tilt, crying at himself not to push too hard, not to overdo it you stupid mother, you stupid whoredog badgunky mother. And it works, but Sparky Landon wastes no time in congratulations. What Sparky Landon does is to back his way into the house, rolling the wheelbarrow after him. Scott limps behind on his ballooning foot.

In the kitchen, Daddy turns the wheelbarrow around and trundles it straight for the cellar door, which he has closed and bolted. The wheel makes a track through the spilled sugar. Scott never forgets that.

—Get the door, Scott.

—Daddy, what if he's…there?

—Then I'll knock him galley-west with this thing. If you want a shot at saving him, quit running your nonsense and open that smogging door!

Scott pulls back the bolt and opens the door. Paul isn't there. Scott can see Paul's bloated shadow still attached to the pole, and something that has been strung up high and tight inside him relaxes a little.

—Stand aside, son.

Scott does. His father runs the wheelbarrow to the top of the cellar stairs. Then, with another grunt, he tips it up, braking the barrow's wheel with one foot when it tries to backroll. The chain hits the stairs with a mighty unmusical clang, splintering two of the risers and then crashing most of the way down. Daddy slings the wheelbarrow to one side and starts down himself, reaching the come-to-rest chain at the halfway mark and kicking it ahead of him the rest of the way. Scott follows and has just stepped over the first broken riser when he sees Paul lolling sideways from the post, the left side of his face now covered with blood. The corner of his mouth is twitching senselessly. One of his teeth lies on the shoulder of his shirt.

—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-fuck 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-fucker, 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…"

Scott swallows. The click in his throat is as loud as a turning light-switch.

"When I came down the cellar stairs with his food—meat and vegetables on a pie-plate, the way you'd bring food to a big dog like a Great Dane or a German Shepherd—he'd rush to the end of the chains that held him to the post, one around his neck and one around his waist, with drool flying from the corners of his mouth and then the whole works would snub up and he'd go flying, still howling and barking like a booldevil, only sort of strangled until he got his breath back, you know?"

"Yes," she says faintly.

"You had to put the plate on the floor—I still remember the smell of that sour dirt when I bent over, I'll never forget it—and then push it to where he could get it. We had a bust' rake handle for that. It didn't do to get too close. He'd claw you, maybe pull you in. I didn't need Daddy to tell me that if he caught me, he'd eat as much of me as he could, alive and screaming. And this was the brother who made the bools. The one who loved me. Without him I never would have made it. Without him Daddy would have killed me before I made five, not because he meant to but because he was in his own bad-gunky. Me and Paul made it together. Buddy system. You know?"

Lisey nods. She knows.

"Only that January my buddy was cross-chained in the cellar—to the post and to the table with the printing-press on it—and you could measure the boundary of his world by this arc…this arc of turds…where he went to the end of his chains…and squatted…and shat."

For a moment he puts the heels of his hands to his eyes. The cords stand out on his neck. He breathes through his mouth— long harsh shaking breaths. She doesn't think she has to ask him where he learned the trick of keeping his grief silent; that she now knows. When he's still again, she asks: "How did your father get the chains on him in the first place? Do you remember?"

"I remember everything, Lisey, but that doesn't mean I know everything. Half a dozen times he put stuff in Paul's food, of that I'm positive. I think it was some kind of animal tranquilizer, but how he got it I have no idea. Paul gobbled down everything we gave him except for greens, and usually food energized him. He'd yowl and bark and leap around; he'd run to the end of his chains—trying to break them, I guess—or jump up and pound his fists on the ceiling until his knuckles bled. Maybe he was trying to break through, or maybe it was just for the joy of it. Sometimes he'd lie down in the dirt and masturbate.

"But once in awhile he'd only be active for ten or fifteen minutes and then stop. Those were the times Daddy must have give him the stuff. He'd squat down, muttering, then fall over on his side and put his hands between his legs and go to sleep. The first time he did that, Daddy put on these two leather belts he made, except I guess you'd call the one that went around Paul's neck a choker, right? They had big metal claps at the back. He loop the chains through em, the tractorchain through the waist-belt clap, the lighter chain through the choker-belt clap at the nape of his neck. Then he used a little hand-torch to weld them claps shut. And that was how Paul was trussed. When he woke up he was wild to find himself that way. Like to shook the house down." The flattened, nasal accents of rural Pennsylvania have crept so far into his voice that house becomes almost Germanic, almost haus. "We stood at the top of the stairs watchin 'im, and I beg Daddy to let 'im out before he broke 'is neck or choke 'imself, but Daddy, he said he wun't choke and Daddy was right. What happen after three weeks was he started to pull table and even center-pos'— the steel center-pos' that held up the kitchen floor—but he never broke his neck and he never choke 'imself.

"The other times Daddy knock him out was to see if I could take him to Boo'ya Moon—did I tell you that's what me n Paul called it, the other place?"

"Yes, Scott." Crying herself now. Letting the tears flow, not wanting him to see her wiping her eyes, not wanting to let him see her pitying that boy in that farmhouse.

"Daddy want to see if I could take him and make him better like the times when Daddy cut him, or like that one time Daddy poke his eye with the pliers and make it come a little way out and Paul crite and crite because he couldn't hardly see good, or once Daddy yell at me and say 'Scoot, you little whoredog, you mother-killing mother!' for trackin in the spring muddy and push me down and crack my tailbone so I couldn't walk so well. Only after I went and had a bool…you know, a prize…my tailbone was okay again." He nods against her. "And Daddy, he see and give me a kiss and say, 'Scott, you're one in a million. I love you, you little motherfucker.' And I kiss him and say 'Daddy, you one in a million. I love you, you big motherfucker.' And he laughed." Scott pulls back from her and even in the gloom she can see that his face has almost become a child's face. And she can see the goonybird wonder there. "He laughed so hard he almos' fell out of his chair—I made my father laugh!"

She has a thousand questions and doesn't dare ask a single one. Isn't sure she could ask a single one.

Scott puts a hand to his face, rubs it, looks at her again. And he's back. Just like that. "Christ, Lisey," he says. "I've never talked about this stuff, never, not to anyone. Are you okay with this?"

"Yes, Scott."

"You're one hell of a brave woman, then. Have you started telling yourself it's all bullshit yet?" He's even grinning a little. It's an uncertain grin, but it's genuine enough, and she finds it dear enough to kiss: first one corner, then the other, just for balance.

"Oh, I tried," she says. "It didn't work."

"Because of how we boomed out from under the yum-yum tree?"

"Is that what you call it?"

"That was Paul's name for a quick trip. Just a quick trip that got you from here to there. That was a boom."

"Like a bool, only with an m."

"That's right," he says. "Or like a book. A book's a bool, only with a k."

17

I guess it depends on you, Scoot.

These are his father's words. They linger and do not leave.

I guess it depends on you.

But he is only ten years old and the responsibility of saving his brother's life and sanity—maybe even his soul—weighs on him and steals his sleep as Christmas and New Year's pass and cold snowy January begins.

You've made him better a lot of times, you've made him better of a lot of things.

It's true, but there's never been anything like this and Scott finds he can no longer eat unless Daddy stands beside him, hectoring him into each bite. The lowest, snuffling cry from the thing in the cellar unzips his thin sleep, but most generally that's okay, because most generally what he's leaving behind are lurid, red-painted nightmares. In many of these he finds himself alone in Boo'ya Moon after dark, sometimes in a certain graveyard near a certain pool, a wilderness of stone markers and wooden crosses, listening as the laughers cackle and smelling as the formerly sweet breeze begins to smell dirty down low, where it combs through the tangles of brush. You can come to Boo'ya Moon after dark, but it's not a good idea, and if you find yourself there once the moon has fully risen, you want to be quiet. Just as quiet as a sweetmother. But in his nightmares, Scott always forgets and is appalled to find himself singing "Jambalaya" at the top of his voice.

Maybe you can make him better of this.

But the first time Scott tries he knows it's probably impossible. He knows as soon as he puts a tentative arm around the snoring, stinking, beshitted thing curled at the foot of the steel support post. He might as well try to strap a grand piano on his back and then do the cha-cha with it. Before, he and Paul have gone easily to that other world (which is really only this world turned inside-out like a pocket, he will later tell Lisey). But the snoring thing in the cellar is an anvil, a bank-safe…a grand piano strapped to a ten-year-old's back.

He retreats to Daddy, sure he'll be paddled and not sorry. He feels that he deserves to be paddled. Or worse. But Daddy, who sat at the foot of the stairs with a stovelength in one hand watching the whole thing, doesn't paddle or strike with his fist. What he does is brush Scott's dirty, clumpy hair away from the nape of his neck and plant a kiss there with a tenderness that makes the boy quake.

—Aint really surprised, Scott. Bad-gunky likes it right where it is.

—Daddy, is Paul in there at all anymore?

—Dunno. Now he's got Scott between his open spread legs so that there are green Dickies on either side of the boy. Daddy's hands are locked loosely around Scott's chest and his chin is on Scott's shoulder. Together they look at the sleeping thing curled at the foot of the post. They look at the chains. They look at the arc of turds that mark the border of its basement world.—What do you think, Scott? What do you feel?

He considers lying to Daddy, but only for a moment. He won't do that when the man's arms are around him, not when he feels Daddy's love coming through in the clear, like WWVA at night. Daddy's love is every bit as true as his anger and madness, if less frequently seen and even less frequently demonstrated. Scott feels nothing, and reluctantly says so.

—Little buddy, we can't go on this way.

—Why not? He's eatin, at least…

—Sooner or later someone'll come and hear him down here. A smucking door-to-door salesman, one lousy Fuller Brush man, that's all it'd take.

—He'll be quiet. Bad-gunky'll make him be quiet.

—Maybe, maybe not. There's no telling what bad-gunky'll do, not really. And there's the smell. I can sprinkle lime until I'm blue in the face and that shit-stink is still gonna come up through the kitchen floor. But most of all…Scooter, can't you see what he's doin to that motherless table with the printin-press on it? And the post? The sweetmother post?

Scott looks. At first he can barely credit what he's seeing, and of course he doesn't want to credit what he's seeing. That big table, even with five hundred pounds of ancient hand-crank Stratton printing-press on it, has been pulled at least three feet from its original position. He can see the square marks in the hardpacked earth where it used to be. Worse still is the steel post, which butts against a flat metal flange at its top end. The white-painted flange presses in turn against the beam running directly beneath their kitchen table. Scott can see a dark right-angle tattooed on that white piece of metal and knows it's where the support post used to rest. Scott measures the post itself with his eye, trying to pick up a lean. He can't, not yet. But if the thing continues to yank on it with all its inhuman strength…day in and day out… —Daddy, can I try again?

Daddy sighs. Scott cranes around to look into his hated, feared, loved face.

—Daddy?

—Have on 'til your cheeks crack, Daddy says. Have on and good luck to you.

18

Silence in the study over the barn, where it was hot and she was hurt and her husband was dead.

Silence in the guest room, where it's cold and her husband is gone.

Silence in the bedroom at The Antlers, where they lie together, Scott and Lisey, Now we are two.

Then the living Scott speaks for the one that's dead in 2006 and gone in 1996, and the arguments against insanity do more than fall through; for Lisey Landon, they finally collapse completely: everything the same.

19

Outside their bedroom at The Antlers, the wind is blowing and the clouds are thinning. Inside, Scott pauses long enough to get a drink from the glass of water he always keeps by the side of the bed. The interruption breaks the hypnotic regression that has once more begun to grip him. When he resumes, he seems to be telling instead of living, and she finds this an enormous relief.

"I tried twice more," he says. Tried, not trite. "I used to think trying that last time was how I got him killed. Right up until tonight I thought that, but talking about it—hearing myself talk about it—has helped more than I ever would have believed. I guess psychoanalysts have got something with that old talking-cure stuff after all, huh?"

"I don't know." Nor does she care. "Did your father blame you?" Thinking, Of course he did.

But once more she seems to have underestimated the complexity of the little triangle that existed for awhile on an isolated farmyard hill in Martensburg, Pennsylvania. Because, after hesitating a moment, Scott shakes his head.

"No. It might have helped if he'd taken me in his arms—like he did after the first time I tried—and told me it wasn't my fault, wasn't anybody's fault, that it was just the bad-gunky, like cancer or cerebral palsy or something, but he never did that, either. He just hauled me away with one arm…I hung there like a puppet whose strings had been cut…and afterward we just…" In the brightening dimness, Scott explains all his silence about his past with one terrible gesture. He puts a finger to his lips for a second—it is a pallid exclamation point below his wide eyes—and holds it there: Shhhhh.

Lisey thinks of how it was after Jodi got pregnant and went away, and nods her understanding. Scott gives her a grateful look.

"Three tries in all," he resumes. "The second was only three or four days after my first go. I tried as hard as I could, but it was just like the first time. Only by then you could see a lean in the post he was chained to, and there was a second arc of turds, farther out, because he'd moved the table a little more and gotten a little extra slack in that chain. Daddy was starting to be afraid he might snap one of the table-legs, even though they were metal, too.

"After my second try, I told Daddy I was pretty sure I knew what was wrong. I couldn't do it—couldn't take him—because he was always knocked out when I got close to him. And Daddy said, 'Well what's your plan, Scooter, you want to grab him when he's awake and raving? He'd rip your smockin head off.' I said I knew it. I knew more than that, Lisey—I knew that if he didn't rip my head off in the cellar, he'd rip it off on the other side, in Boo'ya Moon. So then I ast Daddy if he couldn't knock him out just a little—you know, make him woozy. Enough so I could get in close and hold him the way I was holding you, today, under the yum-yum tree."

"Oh, Scott," she says. She is afraid for the ten-year-old boy even though she knows it must have come out all right; knows he lived to father the young man lying beside her.

"Daddy said it was dangerous. 'Playin with fire there, Scoot,' he said. I knew I was, but there wasn't any other way. We couldn't keep him in the cellar much longer; even I could see that. And then Daddy—he kind of ruffled my hair and said, 'What happen to the little pissant ascairt to jump off the hall bench?' I was surprised he even remembered that, because he was so far in the bad-gunky, and I was proud."

Lisey thinks what a dismal life it must have been, where pleasing such a man could make a child proud, and reminds herself he was only ten. Ten, and alone with a monster in the cellar much of the time. The father was also a monster, but at least a rational one some of the time. A monster capable of doling out the occasional kiss.

"Then…" Scott looks up into the dim. For a moment the moon comes out. It dashes a pale and playful paw across his face before retreating into the clouds once more. When he resumes, she hears the child beginning to take over once more. "Daddy— see, Daddy never ast what I saw or where I went or what I did when I went there and I don't think he ever ast Paul—I dunno if Paul even remembered too much—but he come close then. He said, 'And if you take him like that, Scoot. What happens if he wakes up? Is he just gonna be suddenly all better? Because if he ain't, I won't be there to help you.'

"But I thought about that, see? Thought about it and thought about it until it seem like my brains'd bust wide open." Scott gets up on one elbow and looks at her. "I knew it had to end as well as Daddy, maybe even better. Because of the pos'. And the table. But also because of how he was losin weight, and gettin sores on his face from not eatin the right food—we give him veg'ables, but everything except the taters and onyums he slang away from him and one of his eyes—the one Daddy hurt before—had come over all milky-white on top of the red. Also more of his teeth was fallin out and one of his elbows, it come over all crookit. He was fallin apart from being down 'ere, Lisey, and what wasn't fallin apart from no sunlight and wrong food he was beatin to death. Do you see?"

She nods.

"So I had this little idea I tole Daddy. He said, 'You think you're pretty motherfucking smart for ten, don't you?' And I said no, I wasn't smart about hardly anything, and if he thought there was some other way that was safer and better, then okay. Only he didn't. He said, 'I think you're pretty motherfucking smart for ten, tell you that. And you turned out to have some guts in you after all. Unless you back out.'

" 'I won't back out,' I said.

"And he said, 'You won't need to, Scooter, because I'll be standing right at the foot of the stairs with my sweetmother deer-gun

20

Daddy stands at the foot of the stairs with his deer-gun, his .30-06, in his hands. Scott stands beside him, looking at the thing chained to the metal post and the printing-press table, trying not to tremble. In his righthand pocket is the slim instrument Daddy has given him, a hypodermic with a plastic cap on the needle-tip. Scott doesn't need his Daddy to tell him it's a fragile mechanism. If there's a struggle, it may break. Daddy offered to put it in a little white cardboard box that once held a fountain pen, but getting the hypo out of the box would take an extra couple of seconds—at least—and that might mean the difference between life and death if he succeeds in getting the thing chained to the post over to Boo'ya Moon. In Boo'ya Moon there will be no Daddy with a .3006 deer-gun. In Boo'ya Moon there will just be him and the thing that slipped into Paul like a hand into a stolen glove. Just the two of them on top of Sweetheart Hill.

The thing that used to be his brother lies sprawled with its back against the center-post and its legs splayed. It's naked except for Paul's undershirt. Its legs and feet are dirty. Its flanks are caked with shit. The pie-plate, licked clean even of grease, lies by one grimy hand. The extra-large hamburger that was on it disappeared down the Paul-thing's gullet in a matter of seconds, but Andrew Landon agonized over the patty's creation for almost half an hour, chucking his first effort out into the night after deciding he loaded too much of "the stuff" into it. "The stuff" is white pills that look almost exactly like the Tums and Rolaids Daddy sometimes takes. The one time Scott asked Daddy where they came from, Daddy said— Why don't you shut your goddam mouth, Curious George, before I shut it for you and when Daddy says something like that you take the hint if you've got any sense. Daddy ground the pills up with the bottom of a waterglass. He talked as he worked, maybe to himself, maybe to Scott, while below them the thing chained to the printing-press roared monotonously for its supper.—Easy enough to figure when you want to knock him out, Daddy said, looking from the pile of white powder to the ground meat.—Be easier still if I wanted to kill the troublesome motherfucker, ay? But no, I don't want to do that, I just want to give him a chance to kill the one that's still all right, more fool am I. Well smog it and smuck it, God hates a coward. He used the side of his pinky with surprising delicacy to separate a little line of white powder from the pile. He pinched some up, sprinkled it onto the meat like salt, kneaded it in, then pinched up a tiny bit more and kneaded that in, too. He didn't bother much with what he called hot coozine when it came to the thing downstairs, said it would be happy to eat its dinner raw—still warm and shaking on the bone, for that matter.

Now Scott stands beside his Daddy, hypo in pocket, watching the dangerous thing loll against its post, snoring with its upper lip pulled back. It's grizzling from the corners of its mouth. The eyes are half-open but there's no sign of its irises; Scott can see only the gleaming, glabrous whites…Only the whites aint white anymore, he thinks.

—Go on, goddam you, Daddy says, giving him a thump on the shoulder. If you're gonna do it, then go on before I lose my nerve or drop with a sweetmother heart-attack…or do you think he's shammin? Only pretendin to be out?

Scott shakes his head. The thing's not trying to fool them, he would feel that—and then looks at his father wonderingly.

—What? Daddy asks irritably. What's on your mind besides your smuckin hair?

—Are you really—?

—Am I really scared? That what you want to know?

Scott nods, suddenly shy.

—Yeah, to fuckin death. Did you think you 'us the only one? Now close your mouth and do it if you're gonna. Let's have an end to this.

He will never understand why his father's acknowledgment of fear makes him feel braver; all he knows is that it does. He walks toward the center-post. He touches the barrel of the hypo inside his pocket one more time as he goes. He reaches the outer arc of turds and steps over it. The next step takes him over the inner ring and into what you might call the thing's den. Here the smell is intense: not the odor of shit or even hair and skin but rather of fur and pelt. The thing has a penis that is bigger than Paul's was. Paul's peach-fuzzy groin has thatched in with the thing's coarse, dense pubic hair, and the feet at the end of Paul's legs (those legs are the only things that still look the same) have a queerly turned-in look, as if the bones in his ankles are warping. Boards left out in the rain, Scott thinks; it's not quite nonsense.

Then his eyes return to the thing's face—to its eyes. The lids are still mostly fallen, and there's still no sign of irises, only bloody whites. The breathing is likewise unchanged; the dirty hands continue to lie limp, the palms up as if in surrender. Yet Scott knows he has entered the red zone. It will not do to hesitate now. The thing will scent him and come awake at any second. This will happen in spite of "the stuff" Daddy put in the hamburger, and so if he can do it, if he can take the thing that has stolen his brother—

Scott continues forward, walking on legs he can now barely feel. Part of his mind is absolutely convinced that he's going to his death. He won't even be able to boom away, not once the Paul-thing takes hold of him. Nevertheless, he steps within range of its grasp, into the most intimate concentration of its wild stench, and puts his hands on its naked, clammy sides. He thinks

(Paul come with me now)

and

(Bool Boo'ya Boo'ya Moon sweet water the pool)

and for just one heartbreaking heartbroken moment it almost happens. There's the familiar sense of things starting to rush away; up comes the hum of insects and the delicious daytime perfume of the trees on Sweetheart Hill. Then the thing's long-nailed hands are around Scott's neck. It opens its mouth and roars the sounds and smells of Boo'ya Moon away on a draft of carrion breath. To Scott it feels like someone has just shot a flaming boulder onto the delicate forming grid of his…his what? It's not his mind that takes him to that other place, not precisely his mind…and there's no time to think about it further because the thing has got him, it's got him. Everything Daddy was afraid of has come to pass. Its mouth has come unhinged in some nightmarish fashion that confounds sanity, seeming to drop its lower jaw all the way to its

(beastbone)

breastbone, contorting the dirty face into something from which every last vestige of Paul—and humanity itself—has disappeared. This is the bad-gunky with its mask off. Scott has time to think It's going to take my whole head in a single bite, like a lollipop. That monstrous mouth yawns, the red eyes sparkle in the naked glow of the hanging lightbulbs, and Scott is going nowhere except to his death. The thing's head draws back far enough to bang the post, then lashes forward.

But Scott has once again forgotten about Daddy. Daddy's hand comes out of the dim, seizes the Paul-thing by the hair, and somehow wrenches the head backward. Then Daddy's other hand appears, thumb curled around the stock of his deer-gun where the stock is thinnest, forefinger hugging the trigger. He socks the gun's muzzle into the shelf of the thing's upslanted chin.

—Daddy, no! Scott shrieks.

Andrew Landon pays no attention, can afford to pay no attention. Although he's gotten a huge handful of the thing's hair, it's ripping free of his fist just the same. Now it's bellowing, and its bellows sound dreadfully like one word.

Like Daddy.

—Say hello to hell, you bad-gunky motherfucker, Sparky Landon says, and pulls the trigger. The .30-06's discharge is deafening in the enclosed space of the cellar; it will ring in Scott's ears for two hours or more. The thing's shaggy backhair flies up, as in a sudden gust of breeze, and a large splash of crimson paints the leaning center-post. The thing's legs give a single crazy cartoon kick and go still. The hands around Scott's neck twitch momentarily tighter and then fall palms-up, flump, onto the dirt. Daddy's arm encircles Scott and lifts him up.

—Are you all right, Scoot? Can you breathe?

—I'm okay, Daddy. Did you have to kill him?

—Are you brainless?

Scott hangs limp in the circle of his father's arm, unable to believe it's happened even though he knew it might. He wishes he could faint. Wishes—a little, anyway—that he could die himself.

Daddy gives him a shake.—He was gonna kill you, wasn't he?

—Y-Y-Yeah.

—You're fucking-A he was. Christ, Scotty, he was rippin his own sweetmother hair out by the roots to get at you. To get at your smoggin throat!

Scott knows this is true, but he knows something else as well.—Lookit 'im, Daddy—lookit 'im now!

For a moment or two longer he hangs from the circle of his father's arm like a ragdoll or a puppet whose strings have been cut, then Landon slowly lowers him down and Scott knows his father is seeing what Scott wanted him to see: just a boy. Just an innocent boy who has been chained in the cellar by his lunatic father and dogsbody younger brother, then starved until he's rack-thin and covered with sores; a boy who has struggled so pitifully hard for his freedom that he actually moved the steel post and the cruelly heavy table to which he has been chained. A boy who has lived three nightmare weeks as a prisoner down here before finally being shot in the head.

—I see 'im, Daddy says, and the only thing grimmer than his voice is his face.

—Why doesn't he look like before, Daddy? Why—

—Because the bad-gunky's gone, you numbskull. And here's an irony even a badly shaken ten-year-old can appreciate, at least a bright one like Scott: now that Paul lies dead, chained to a post in the cellar with his brains blown out, Daddy has never looked or sounded saner. And if anyone else sees him like this, I'll be for either the state prison in Waynesburg or locked in that smucking nutbarn up Reedville. That's if they don't lynch me first. We'll have to bury him, although aint it gonna be a bitch-kitty with the ground like it is, hard as arn.

Scott says,—I'll take him, Daddy.

—How you gonna take him? You couldn't take him when he was alive!

He doesn't have the language to explain that now it will be no more than going there dressed in his clothes, which he always does. That anvil-weight, bank-vault weight, piano-weight, is gone from the thing chained to the post; the thing chained to the post is now no more than the green husk you strip off an ear of corn. Scott just says,—I can do it now.

—You're a little bag of boast and wind, Daddy says, but he leans the deer-gun against the table with the printing-press on it. He runs a hand through his hair and sighs. For the first time he looks to Scott like a man who could get old.

—Go on, Scott, might as well give her a try. Can't hurt.

But now that there's no actual danger, Scott is bashful.

—Turn around, Daddy.

—WHAT the FUCK you say?

There's a potential beating in Daddy's voice, but for once Scott doesn't back down. It isn't the going part that bothers him; he doesn't care if Daddy sees that. What he's bashful about is Daddy seeing him take his dead brother in his arms. He's going to cry. He feels it coming on already, like rain on a late spring afternoon, when the day has been hot with a foretaste of summer.

—Please, he says in his most placating voice. Please, Daddy.

For a moment Scott is quite sure that his father is going to rush across the cellar to where his surviving son stands, with his tripled shadow racing beside him on the rock walls, and backhand him—perhaps knock him spang into his big brother's dead lap. He's been backhanded plenty of times and usually even the thought of it makes him cringe, but now he stands straight between Paul's splayed legs, looking into his father's eyes. It's hard to do that, but he manages. Because they have survived a terrible passage together, and will have to keep it between themselves forever: Shhhhhh. So he deserves to ask, and he deserves to look in Daddy's eyes while he waits for his answer.

Daddy doesn't come at him. Instead he takes a deep breath, blows it out, and turns around.—You'll be tellin me when to warsh the floors and scrub out the tawlit next, I guess, he grumbles. I'll give you a count of thirty, Scoot

21

"I'll give you a count of thirty and then I'm turning around again," Scott tells her. "I'm pretty sure that's how he finished it, but I never heard because by then I was gone off the face of the earth. Paul too, right out of his chains. I took him with me as easy as ever once he was dead; maybe easier. I bet Daddy never finished counting to thirty. Hell, I bet he never even got started before he heard the clink of chains or maybe the sound of air rushing in to fill the place where we'd been and he turned around and he saw he had the cellar all to himself." Scott has relaxed against her; the sweat on his face and arms and body is drying. He has told it, gotten the worst of it out of him, sicked it up.

"The sound," she says. "I wondered about that, you know. If there was a sound under the willow tree when we…you know…came back out."

"When we boomed."

"Yes, when we…that."

"When we boomed, Lisey. Say it."

"When we boomed." Wondering if she's crazy. Wondering if he is, and if it's catching.

Now he does light another cigarette, and in the matchglow his face is honestly curious. "What did you see, Lisey? Do you remember?"

Doubtfully, she says: "There was a lot of purple, slanting down a hill…and I had a sense of shade, like there were trees right behind us, but it was all so quick…no more than a second or two…"

He laughs and gives her a one-armed hug. "That's Sweetheart Hill you're talking about."

"Sweetheart—?"

"Paul named it that. There's dirt all around those trees—soft, deep, I don't think it's ever winter there—and that's where I buried him. That's where I buried my brother." He looks at her solemnly and says, "Do you want to go see, Lisey?"

22

Lisey had been asleep on the study floor in spite of the pain—

No. She hadn't been asleep, because you couldn't sleep with pain like this. Not without medical help. So what had she been?

Mesmerized.

She tried the word on for size and decided it fit just about perfectly. She had slid into a kind of doubled (maybe even trebled) recall. Total recall. But beyond this point her memories of the cold guest bedroom where she'd found him catatonic and those of the two of them in the creaky secondfloor bed at The Antlers (these memories seventeen years older but even clearer) were blotted out. Do you want to go see, Lisey? he had asked her—yes, yes—but whatever had come next was drowned in brilliant purple light, hidden behind that curtain, and when she tried to reach for it, authority-voices from childhood (Good Ma's, Dandy's, all her big sisters') clamored in alarm. No, Lisey! That's far enough, Lisey! Stop there, Lisey!

Her breath caught. (Had it caught as she lay there with her love?)

Her eyes opened. (They had been wide as he took her in his arms, of that she was sure.)

Bright morning Junelight—twenty-first-century Junelight— replaced the staring, glaring purple of a billion lupin. The pain of her lacerated breast flooded back in with the light. But before Lisey could react to either the light or the panicky voices commanding her to go no farther, someone called to her from the barn below, startling her so badly that she came within a thread of screaming. If the voice had stopped short at Missus, she would have.

"Mrs. Landon?" A brief pause. "Are you up there?"

No trace of border South in that voice, only a flat Yankee drawl that turned the words into Aaa you up theah, and Lisey knew who was down theah: Deputy Alston. He'd told her he'd keep checking back, and here he was, as promised. This was her chance to tell him hell yes, she was up here, she was lying on the floor bleeding because the Black Prince of the Incunks had hurt her, Alston had to take her to No Soapa with the flashers and the siren going, she needed stitches in her breast, a lot of them, and she needed protection, needed it around the clock—

No, Lisey.

It was her own mind that sent the thought up (of this she was positive) like a flare into a dark sky (well…almost positive), but it came to her in Scott's voice. As if it would gain authority that way.

And it must have worked, because "Yes, I'm here, Deputy!" was all she called back.

"Everything fi'-by? Okay, I mean?"

"Five-by, that's affirmative," she said, amazed to find she actually sounded five-by-five. Especially for a woman whose blouse was soaked in blood and whose left breast was throbbing like a…well, there was really no accurate simile. It was just throbbing.

Down below—at the very foot of the stairs, Lisey calculated— Deputy Alston laughed appreciatively. "I just stopped on my way over to Cash Corners. They got a little house-fire over there." House-fiah. "Arson suspected." Aaason. "You be all right on your own for a couple-three hours?"

"Fine."

"Got your cell phone?"

She did indeed have her cell phone and wished she were on it right now. If she had to keep shouting down to him, she was probably going to pass out. "Rah-cheer!" she called back.

"Ayuh?" A little dubious. God, what if he came up and saw her? He'd be plenty dubious then, dubious to the nth power. But when he spoke again the voice was moving away. She could hardly believe she was glad, but she was. Now that this was begun, she wanted to finish it. "Well, you call if you need anything. And I'll be checking back later on. If you go out, leave a note so I'll know you're all right and when to expect you back, okay?"

And Lisey, who now began to see—vaguely—a course of events ahead of her, called back "Check!" She'd have to begin by returning to the house. But first, before anything else, a drink of water. If she didn't get some more water, and soon, her throat might catch fiah like that house over to Cash Corners.

"I'll be coming by Patel's on my way back, Mrs. Landon, would you like me to pick anything up?"

Yes! A six-pack of ice-cold Coke and a carton of Salem Lights!

"No thanks, Deputy." If she had to talk much more, her voice would give out. Even if it didn't, he'd hear something wrong in it.

"Not even doughnuts? They have great doughnuts." A smile in his voice.

"Dieting!" It was all she dared.

"Oh-oh, I heard that," he said. "You have a nice day, Mrs. Landon."

Please God no more, she prayed, and called back, "You too, Deputy!"

Clump-clump-clumpety-clump, and away he went.

Lisey listened for the sound of an engine and after awhile thought she heard one starting up, but very faint. He must have parked by her mailbox and then walked the length of the driveway.

Lisey lay where she was a moment longer, gathering herself, then rose to a sitting position. Dooley had sliced diagonally across her breast and up toward the hollow of her armpit. The ragged, wandering gash had stiffened and closed up a little, but her movement tore it open again. The pain was enormous. Lisey cried out and that made matters even worse. She felt fresh blood run down her ribcage. Those dark wings began to steal over her vision again and she willed them away, repeating the same mantra over and over again until the world grew solid: I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this, I have to get behind the purple. I have to finish this and get behind the purple.

Yes, behind the purple. On the hillside it had been lupin; in her mind it was the heavy curtain she had constructed herself— maybe with Scott's help, certainly with his tacit approval.

I've gotten behind it before.

Had she? Yes.

And I can do it again. Get behind it or rip the goddam thing down if I have to.

Question: Had she and Scott ever spoken of Boo'ya Moon again after that night at The Antlers? Lisey thought not. They had their code words, of course, and God knew those words had floated out of the purple on occasion when she'd been unable to find him in malls and grocery stores…not to mention the time that nurse misplaced him in his smucking hospital bed…and there was the muttering reference to his long boy when he'd been lying in the parking lot after Gerd Allen Cole had shot him…and Kentucky…Bowling Green, as he lay dying…

Stop, Lisey! the voices chorused. You mustn't, little Lisey! they cried. Mein gott, you don't darenzee!

She had tried to put Boo'ya Moon behind her, even after the winter of '96, when—

"When I went there again." Her voice was dry but clear in her dead husband's study. "In the winter of 1996 I went again. I went to bring him back."

There it was, and the world did not end. Men in white coats did not materialize out of the walls to carry her away. In fact she thought she even felt a little better, and maybe that wasn't so surprising. Maybe when you got right down to where the short hairs grew, truth was a bool, and all it wanted was to come out.

"Okay, it's out now—some of it, the Paul part—so can I get a smucking drink of water?"

Nothing told her no, and using the edge of Dumbo's Big Jumbo as a support, Lisey managed to pull herself to her feet. The dark wings came again, but she hung her head over, trying to keep as much blood in her miserable excuse for a brain as possible, and this time the faintness passed more quickly. She set sail for the bar alcove, walking her own backtrail of blood, taking slow steps with her feet wide apart, thinking she must look like an old lady whose walker had been stolen.

She made it, sparing only a brief look for the glass lying on the carpet. She wanted nothing more to do with that one. She got another out of the cabinet, once again using her right hand—the left was still clutching the bloody square of knitting—and drew cold water. Now the water was running again and the pipes barely chugged at all. She swung out the glass mirror over the basin, and inside was what she had been hoping for: a bottle of Scott's Excedrin. No childproof cap to slow her down, either. She winced at the vinegary smell that wafted from the bottle after she popped the cap, and checked the expiration date: JUL 05. Oh well, she thought, a girl's gotta do what a girl's gotta do.

"I think Shakespeare said that," she croaked, and swallowed three of the Excedrin. She didn't know how much good they would do her, but the water was heavenly and she drank until her belly cramped. Lisey stood clutching the lip of her dead husband's bar sink, waiting for the cramp to pass. Finally it did. That left only the pain in her beaten-up face and the much deeper throbbing in her lacerated breast. In the house she had something much stronger than Scott's head-bonkers (although certainly no fresher), Vicodin from Amanda's previous adventure in self-mutilation. Darla also had some, and Canty had Manda-Bunny's bottle of Percocet. They had all agreed without ever really even discussing it that Amanda herself couldn't be allowed access to the hard stuff; she might get feeling yucky and decide to take everything at once. Call it a Tequila Sunset.

Lisey would try for the house—and the Vicodin—soon, but not quite yet. Walking in the same careful feet-wide-apart way, a half-filled glass of water in one hand and the blood-soaked square of african in the other, Lisey made her way to the dusty booksnake and sat down there, waiting to see what three geriatric Excedrin might do for her pain. And as she waited, her thoughts turned once more to the night she had found him in the guest room—in the guest room but gone.

I kept thinking we were on our own. That wind, that smucking wind

23

She's listening to that killer wind scream around the house, listening to snowgrit whip against the windows, knowing they're on their own—that she is on her own. And as she listens, her thoughts turn once more to that night in New Hampshire when the hour was none and the moon kept teasing the shadows with its inconstant light. She remembers how she opened her mouth to ask if he could really do it, could really take her, and then closed it again, knowing it to be the kind of question you only ask when you want to play for time…and don't you only play for time when you're not on the same side?

We're on the same side, she remembers thinking. If we're going to get married, we better be.

But there was one question that needed asking, maybe because that night at The Antlers it was her turn to jump off the bench. "What if it's night over there? You said there are bad things over there at night."

He smiled at her. "It's not, honey."

"How do you know?"

He shook his head, still smiling. "I just do. The way a kid's dog knows it's time to go sit by the mailbox because the schoolbus will be right along. It's almost sunset over there. It often is."

She didn't understand that, but didn't ask—one question always led on to another, that had been her experience, and the time for questions was done. If she meant to trust him, the time for questions was done. So she had taken a deep breath and said, "All right. It's our frontloaded honeymoon. Take me someplace that isn't New Hampshire. This time I want a good look."

He crushed his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and took her lightly by her upper arms, his eyes dancing with excitement and good humor—how well she remembers the feel of his fingers on her flesh that night. "You've got a yard of guts, little Lisey—I'll tell the world that. Hold on and let's see what happens."

And he took me, Lisey thinks as she sits in the guest room, now holding the waxy-cool hand of the breathing man-doll in the rocker. But she feels the smile on her face—little Lisey, big smile—and wonders how long it's been there. He took me, I know he did. But that was seventeen years ago, when we were both young and brave and he was all present and accounted for. Now he's gone.

Except his body is still here. Does that mean he can no longer go physically, as he did when he was a child? As she knows he has from time to time since she herself has known him? As he did from the hospital in Nashville, for example, when the nurse couldn't find him?

It is then that Lisey feels the faint tightening of his hand on hers. It's almost imperceptible, but he is her love and she feels it. His eyes still stare off toward the blank face of the TV from above the folds of the yellow african, but yes, his hand is squeezing hers. It is a kind of long-distance squeeze, and why not? He's plenty far away, even if his body is here, and where he is, he might be squeezing with all his might.

Lisey has a sudden brilliant intuition: Scott is holding a conduit open for her. God knows what it's costing him to do it, or how long he can keep it up, but that's what he's doing. Lisey lets go of his hand and gets up on her knees, ignoring the tingling burst of pins and needles in her legs, which have almost gone to sleep, likewise ignoring another great cold gust of wind that shakes the house. She tears away enough of the african so she can slide her arms between Scott's sides and his unresisting arms, so she can clasp her hands at the middle of his back and hug him. She puts her urgent face in the path of his blank stare.

"Pull me," she whispers to him, and gives his limp body a shake. "Pull me to where you are, Scott."

There's nothing, and she raises her voice to a shout.

"Pull me, goddam you! Pull me to where you are so I can bring you home! Do it! IF YOU WANT TO COME HOME, TAKE ME TO WHERE YOU ARE!"

24

"And you did," Lisey muttered. "You did and I did. I'll be smucked if I know how this thing is supposed to work now that you're dead and gone instead of just gomered out in the guest room, but that's what it's all been about, hasn't it? All of this."

And she did have an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was far back in her mind, just a shape behind that curtain of hers, but it was there.

Meantime, the Excedrin had kicked in. Not a lot, but maybe enough so she could get down to the floor of the barn without passing out and breaking her neck. If she could get there, she could get into the house where the really good dope was stashed…assuming it still worked. It better work, because she had things to do and places to go. Some of them far places, indeed.

"Journey of a thousand miles begin with single step, Liseysan," she said, and got up from the booksnake.

Once more walking in slow, shuffling steps, Lisey set sail for the stairs. It took her almost three minutes to negotiate them, clinging to the banister every step of the way and pausing twice when she felt faint, but she made it without falling, sat for a little while on the sheeted mein gott bed to catch her breath, and then began the long expedition to the back door of her house.