Lisey's Story

XI. Lisey and The Pool

(Shhhh—Now You Must Be Still)

1

Lisey's greatest fear, that the late-morning heat would overcome her and she'd pass out halfway between the barn and the house, came to nothing. The sun obliged her by ducking behind a cloud, and a cap of cool breeze materialized to briefly soothe her overheated skin and flushed, swollen face. By the time she got to the back stoop, the deep laceration in her breast was pounding again, but the dark wings stayed away. There was a bad moment when she couldn't find her housekey, but eventually her fumbling fingers touched the fob—a little silver elf—beneath the wad of Kleenex she usually carried in her right front pocket, so that was all right. And the house was cool. Cool and silent and blessedly hers. Now if it would only remain hers while she tended herself. No calls, no visitors, no six-foot deputies lumbering up to the back door to check on her. Also, please God (pretty please) no return visit from the Black Prince of the Incunks.

She crossed the kitchen and got the white plastic basin out from under the sink. It hurt to bend, hurt a lot, and once more she felt the warmth of flowing blood on her skin and soaking the remains of her shredded top.

He got off on doing it—you know that, don't you?

Of course she did.

And he'll be back. No matter what you promise—no matter what you deliver—he'll be back. Do you know that, too?

Yes, she knew that, too.

Because to Jim Dooley, his deal with Woodbody and Scott's manuscripts are all just so much ding-dong for the freesias. There's a reason why he went for your boob instead of your earlobe or maybe a finger.

"Sure," she told her empty kitchen—shady, then suddenly bright as the sun sailed out from behind a cloud. "It's the Jim Dooley version of great sex. And next time it will be my pussy, if the cops don't stop him."

You stop him, Lisey. You.

"Don't be silly, dollink," she told the empty kitchen in her best Zsa Zsa Gabor voice. Once again using her right hand, she opened the cupboard over the toaster, took out a box of Lipton teabags, and put them into the white basin. She added the bloody square of the african from Good Ma's cedar box, although she had absolutely no idea why she was still carrying it. Then she began trudging toward the stairs.

What's silly about it? You stopped Blondie, didn't you? Maybe you didn't get the credit, but you were the one who did it.

"That was different." She stood looking up the stairs with the white plastic basin under her right arm, held against her hip so the box of tea and the piece of knitting wouldn't fall out. The stairs looked approximately eight miles high. Lisey thought there really ought to be clouds swirling around the top.

If it was different, why are you going upstairs?

"Because that's where the Vicodin is!" she cried to the empty house. "The damned old feel-better pills!"

The voice said one more thing and fell silent.

"SOWISA, babyluv is right," Lisey agreed. "You better believe it." And she began the long, slow trek up the stairs.

2

Halfway up the wings came back, darker than ever, and for a moment Lisey was sure she was going to black out. She was telling herself to fall forward, onto the stairs, rather than backward into space, when her vision cleared again. She sat down with the basin drawn across her legs and stayed that way, head hung over, until she had counted to a hundred with a Mississippi between each number. Then she got up again and finished her climb. The second floor was cross-drafted and even cooler than the kitchen, but by the time Lisey got there she was sweating profusely again. The sweat ran into the laceration across her breast, and soon there was a maddening salt-sting on top of the deeper ache. And she was thirsty again. Thirsty all the way down her throat and into her stomach, it seemed. That, at least, could be remedied, and the sooner the better.

She glanced into the guest room as she made her slow way by. It had been redone since 1996—twice, actually—but she found it was all too easy to see the black rocking chair with the University of Maine seal on the back…and the blank eye of the television…and the windows filled with frost that changed color as the lights in the sky changed…

Let it go, little Lisey, it's in the past.

"It's all in the past but none of it's done!" she cried irritably. "That's the smucking trouble!"

To that there was no answer, but here, at long last, was the master bedroom and its adjacent bathroom—what Scott, never known for his delicacy, had been wont to call Il Grande Poopatorium. She set down the basin, dumped out the toothglass (still two brushes, now both of them hers, alas), and filled the tumbler to the brim with cold water. This she drank off greedily, then she did take a moment to look at herself. At her face, anyway.

What she saw was not encouraging. Her eyes were glittering blue sparks peering out of dark caves. The skin beneath them had gone a dark blackish brown. Her nose was canted to the left. Lisey didn't think it was broken, but who knew? At least she could breathe through it. Below her nose was a great crust of dried blood that had broken both right and left around her mouth, giving her a grotesque Fu Manchu mustache. Look, Ma, I'm a biker, she tried to say, but the words wouldn't quite come out. It was a shitty joke, anyway.

Her lips were so severely swollen they actually turned out from the inside, giving her battered face a grotesquely exaggerated come-and-kiss-me pout.

Was I thinking of going up to Greenlawn, home of the famous Hugh Alberness, in this condish? Was I really? Pretty funny— they'd get one look and then call for an ambulance to take me to a real hospital, the kind where they've got an ICU.

That isn't what you were thinking. What you were thinking—

But she closed that off, remembering something Scott used to say: Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but for the time being she'd do well to take this as she had the stairs: head down and one step at a time.

Lisey had another bad moment when she couldn't find the Vicodin. She almost gave up, thinking one of the three springcleaning girls might have walked away with the bottle, before finding it hiding behind Scott's multi-vitamins. And, wonder of wonders, the expiration on these babies was this very month.

"Waste not, want not," Lisey said, and washed down three of them. Then she filled the plastic basin with lukewarm water and threw in a handful of teabags. She watched the clear water begin to stain amber for a moment or two, then shrugged and dumped in the rest of the teabags. They settled to the bottom of the darkening water and she thought of a young man saying It stings a little but it works really really good. In another life, that had been. Now she would see for herself.

She took a clean washcloth from the rod beside the sink, dropped it into the basin, and wrung it out gently. What are you doing, Lisey? she asked herself…but the answer was obvious, wasn't it? She was still following the trail her dead husband had left her. The one that led into the past.

She let the tatters of her blouse slip to the bathroom floor, and, with a grimace of anticipation, applied the tea-soaked washcloth to her breast. It did hurt, but compared to the nettlesome sting of her own sweat, it was almost pleasant, in an astringent mouthwash-on-the-canker kind of way.

It works. It really really works, Lisey.

Once she had believed that—sort of—but once she had been twenty-two and willing to believe lots of things. What she believed in now was Scott. And Boo'ya Moon? Yes, she guessed she believed in that, too. A world that was waiting right next door, and behind the purple curtain in her mind. The question was whether or not it might be in reach for the celebrated writer's gal pal now that he was dead and she was on her own.

Lisey wrung blood and tea out of the washcloth, dipped it again, replaced it on her wounded breast. This time the sting was even less. But it's no cure, she thought. Just another marker on the road into the past. Out loud she said, "Another bool."

Holding the washcloth gently against her and taking the bloody square of african—Good Ma's delight—in the hand folded beneath her breast, Lisey went slowly into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, looking at the silver spade with COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY incised on the scoop. Yes, she really could see a small dent where she'd connected first with Blondie's gun and then with Blondie's face. She had the spade, and although the yellow african in which Scott had wrapped himself on those cold nights in 1996 was long gone, she did have this remnant, this delight.

Bool, the end.

"I wish it was the end," Lisey said, and lay back with the washcloth still on her breast. The pain was funneling away, but that was just Amanda's Vicodin taking hold, doing what neither Paul's tea-cure nor Scott's out-of-date aspirin could. When the Vicodin wore off, the pain would be back. So would Jim Dooley, author of the pain. The question was, what was she going to do in the meantime? Could she do something?

The one thing you absolutely cannot do is drift off to sleep.

No, that would be bad.

I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse, Dooley had told her, and Dooley had set things up so she was in a lose-lose situation. He had also told her to tend herself and not tell anyone he'd been here. So far she'd done that, but not because she was afraid of being killed. In a way, knowing that he meant to kill her anyway gave her a leg up. She didn't have to worry anymore about trying to reason with him, at least. But if she called the Sheriff's Department…well…

"You can't go on a bool hunt when the house is full of great big clutter-bugging deputies," she said. "Also…"

Also, I believe that Scott's still having his say. Or trying to.

"Honey," she told the empty room, "I only wish I knew what it was."

3

She looked over at the digital clock on the bedside table and was astounded to see it was only twenty to eleven. Already this day seemed a thousand years long, but she suspected that was because she had spent so much of it re-living the past. Memories screwed up perspective, and the most vivid ones could annihilate time completely while they held sway.

But enough about the past; what was happening right now?

Well, Lisey thought, let's see. In the Kingdom of Pittsburgh, the former King of the Incunks is no doubt suffering the sort of terror my late husband used to call Stinky Testicle Syndrome. Deputy Alston's over in Cash Corners, inspecting a little house-fiah. Aaaason suspected, deah. Jim Dooley? Maybe laid up in the woods near here, whittling on a stick with my Oxo can opener in his pocket, waiting for the day to pass. His PT Cruiser could be tucked away in any one of a dozen deserted barns or sheds on the View, or in the Deep Cut, across the Harlow town line. Darla's probably on her way to the Portland Jetport to pick up Canty. Good Ma would say she's gone tooting. And Amanda? Oh, Amanda's gone, babyluv. Just as Scott knew she would, sooner or later. Didn't he do everything but reserve her a smucking room? Because it takes one to know one. As the saying is.

Out loud she said: "Am I supposed to go to Boo'ya Moon? Is that the next station of the bool? It is, isn't it? Scott, you goon, how do I do that with you dead?"

You're getting ahead of yourself again, aren't you?

Sure—carrying on about her inability to reach a place she had as yet not given herself permission to fully remember.

You've got to do a lot more than lift that curtain and peep under the hem.

"I've got to rip it down," she said dismally. "Don't I?"

No answer. Lisey took that for a yes. She rolled over on her side and picked up the silver spade. The inscription winked in the morning sunlight. She wrapped the bloody piece of african around the handle, then took hold of it that way.

"All right," she said, "I'll rip it down. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said all right. I said Geronimo."

Lisey paused, thinking.

"No. I didn't. I said it his way. I said Geromino. And what happened? What happened then?"

She closed her eyes, saw only brilliant purple, and could have cried for frustration. Instead she thought SOWISA, babyluv: strap on when it seems appropriate, and tightened her grip on the handle of the spade. She saw herself swinging it. She saw it glitter in the hazy August sun. And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. That light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus. Most of all what pierced her was the memory of his skin on her skin, the beat of his blood running in counterpoint against the beat of her own, for they had been lying naked in their bed at The Antlers and now knelt naked in the purple lupin near the top of the hill, naked in the thickening shadows of the sweetheart trees. And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

Lying on her widow's bed with the spade clamped in her hands, a much older Lisey cried out in joy for what was remembered and grief for what was gone. Her heart was mended even as it was broken again. Cords stood out on her neck. Her swollen lips drew down and broke open, exposing her teeth and spilling fresh blood into the gutters of her gums. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and slipped down her cheeks to her ears, where they hung like exotic jewelry. And the only clear thought in her mind was Oh Scott, we were never made for such beauty, we were never made for such beauty, we should have died then, oh my dear, we should have, naked and in each other's arms, like lovers in a story.

"But we didn't," Lisey murmured. "He held me and said we couldn't stay long because it was getting dark and it wasn't safe after dark, even most of the sweetheart trees turned bad then. But he said there was something he wanted

4

"There's something I want to show you before we go back," he says, and pulls her to her feet.

"Oh, Scott," she hears herself saying, very faint and weak. "Oh, Scott." It seems to be the only thing she can manage. In a way this reminds her of the first time she felt an orgasm approaching, only this is drawn out and drawn out and drawn out, it's like all coming and no arrival.

He's leading her someplace. She feels high grass whispering against her thighs. Then it's gone and she realizes they're on a well-worn path cutting through the drifts of lupin. It leads into what Scott calls the sweetheart trees, and she wonders if there are people here. If there are, how do they stand it? Lisey wonders. She wants to look again at that ascending goblin moon, but doesn't dare.

"Be quiet under the trees," Scott says. "We should be okay a little longer, but better safe than sorry is a good rule to follow even on the edge of the Fairy Forest."

Lisey doesn't think she could talk much above a whisper even if he demanded it. She's doing well to manage Oh, Scott.

He's standing under one of the sweetheart trees now. It looks like a palm, only its trunk is shaggy, green with what looks like fur rather than moss. "God, I hope nothing's knocked it over," he says. "It was okay the last time I was here, the night you were so mad and I put my hand through that dumb greenhouse—ah, okay, there!" He pulls her off the path to the right. And near one of two outlying trees that seem to guard the place where the path slips into the woods, she sees a simple cross made of two boards. To Lisey they look like nothing more than crate-slats. There's no burial mound—if anything, the ground here is slightly sunken—but the cross is enough to tell her it's a grave. On the marker's horizontal arm is one carefully printed word: PAUL.

"The first time I did it in pencil," he says. His voice is clear, but it seems to be coming from far away. "Then I tried a ballpoint, but of course it didn't work, not on rough wood like that. Magic Marker was better, but it faded. Finally I did it in black paint, from one of Paul's old paint-by-the- numbers kits."

She looks at the cross in the strange mixed light of the dying day and the rising night, thinking (as much as she is able to think), All of it's true. What seemed to happen when we came out from under the yum-yum tree really did happen. It's happening now, only longer and clearer.

"Lisey!" He's hectic with joy, and why the hell not? He hasn't been able to share this place with anyone since Paul's death. The few times he's come here, he's had to come alone. To mourn alone. "There's something else—let me show you!"

Somewhere a bell rings, very faint—a bell that sounds familiar. "Scott?"

"What?" He's kneeling in the grass. "What, babyluv?"

"Did you hear…?" But it's stopped. And surely that was her imagination. "Nothing. What were you going to show me?" Thinking, As if you haven't shown me enough.

He's sweeping his hands through the high grass near the foot of the cross, but there seems to be nothing there and slowly his goofy, happy smile begins to fade. "Maybe something took i—" he begins, then breaks off. His face tightens in a momentary wince, then relaxes, and he lets loose a halfhysterical laugh. "Here it is, and damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it, that'd be a joke on me, all right—after all these years!—but the cap's still on! Look, Lisey!"

She would have said nothing could divert her from the wonder of where she is—the red-orange sky in the east and west deepening to a weird greenish-blue overhead, the exotic mixed odors, and somewhere, yes, another faint chime of some lost bell—but what Scott is holding up to the last fading daylight does the trick. It's the hypodermic needle his father gave him, the one Scott was supposed to stick Paul with once the boys were over here. There are little speckles of rust on the sleeve of metal at its base, but otherwise it looks brand new. "It was all I had to leave," Scott says. "I didn't have a picture. The kids who went to Donkey School used to get pictures, at least."

"You dug the grave…Scott, you dug it with your bare hands?"

"I tried. And I did scoop out a little hollow—the ground here is soft—but the grass…pulling out the grass slowed me down…tough old weeds, boy…and then it started getting dark and the laughers started…"

"The laughers?"

"Like hyenas, I think, only mean. They live in the Fairy Forest."

"The Fairy Forest—did Paul name it that?"

"No, me." He gestures to the trees. "Paul and I never saw the laughers up close, mostly just heard them. But we saw other things…I saw other things…there's this one thing…" Scott looks toward the rapidly darkening masses of sweetheart trees, then at the path, which fades away quickly when it enters the forest. There's no mistaking the caution in his voice when he speaks again. "We have to go back soon."

"But you can take us, can't you?"

"With you to help? Sure."

"Then tell me how you buried him."

"I can tell you that when we go back, if you—"

But the slow shake of her head silences him.

"No. I understand about why you don't want to have kids. I get that now. If you ever came to me and said, 'Lisey, I've changed my mind, I want to take the chance,' we could talk about it because there was Paul…and then there was you."

"Lisey—"

"We could talk about it then. Otherwise we're never going to talk about gomers and bad-gunky and this place again, okay?" She sees the way he's looking at her and softens her tone. "It's not about you, Scott—not everything is, you know. This happens to be about me. It's beautiful here…" She looks around. And she shivers. "It's too beautiful. If I spent too much time here—or even too much time thinking about it—I think the beauty would drive me insane. So if our time is short, for once in your smucking life, you be short. Tell me how you buried him."

Scott half-turns away from her. The orange light of the setting sun paints the line of his body: flange of shoulderblade, tuck of waist, curve of buttock, the long shallow arc of one thigh. He touches the arm of the cross. In the high grass, barely visible, the glass curve of the hypo glimmers like a forgotten bit of trumpery treasure.

"I covered him with grass, then I went home. I couldn't come back for almos' a week. I was sick. I had a fever. Daddy give me o'meal in the morning and soup when he come home from work. I was ascairt of Paul's ghos, but I never seen his ghos. Then I got better and trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Just me. I thought the aminals— animals—would have ett'n on him—the laughers and such—but they din't yet, so I went back and trite to come over again, this time with a play-shovel I found in our old toybox in the attic. That went and that's what I dug his grave with, Lisey, a red plastic play-shovel we had for the san'box when we 'us very wee."

The sinking sun has started to fade to pink. Lisey puts her arm around him and hugs him. Scott's arms encircle her and for a moment or two he hides his face in her hair. "You loved him so very much," she says.

"He was my brother" is what he replies, and it is enough.

As they stand there in the growing gloom, she sees something else, or thinks she does. Another piece of wood? That's what it looks like, another crate-slat lying just beyond the place where the path leaves the lupin-covered hill (where lavender is now turning a steadily darker purple). No, not just one— two.

Is it another cross, she wonders, one that has fallen apart?

"Scott? Is someone else buried here?"

"Huh?" He sounds surprised. "No! There's a graveyard, sure, but it's not here, it's by the—" He catches sight of what she's looking at and gives a little chuckle. "Oh, wow! That's not a cross, it's a sign! Paul made it right around the time of the first bool hunts, back when he could still come on his own sometimes. I forgot all about that old sign!" He pulls free of her and hurries to where it lies. Hurries a little way down the path. Hurries under the trees. Lisey isn't sure she likes that.

"Scott, it's getting dark. Don't you think we better go?"

"In a minute, babyluv, in just a minute." He picks up one of the boards and brings it back to her. She can make out letters, but they're faint. She has to bring the slat close to her eyes before she can read what's there:

TO THE POOL.

"Pool?" Lisey asks.

"Pool," he agrees. "Rhymes with bool, don't you know." And actually laughs. Only that's when, somewhere deep in what he calls the Fairy Forest (where night has surely come already), the first laughers raise their voices.

Only two or three, but the sound still terrifies Lisey more than anything she has ever heard in her life. To her those things don't sound like hyenas, they sound like people, lunatics cast into the deepest depths of some nineteenthcentury Bedlam. She grasps Scott's arm, digging into his skin with her nails, and tells him in a voice she barely recognizes as her own that she wants to go back, he has to take her back right now.

Dim and distant, a bell tinkles.

"Yes," he says, tossing the signboard into the weeds. Above them a dark draft of air stirs the sweetheart trees, making them sigh and give off a perfume that's stronger than the lupin—cloying, almost sickly. "This really isn't a safe place after dark. The pool is safe, and the beach…the benches…maybe even the graveyard, but—"

More laughers join the chorus. In a matter of moments there are dozens of them. Some of the laughter runs up a jagged scale and turns into broken-glass screams that make Lisey feel like screaming back. Then they descend again, sometimes to guttering chuckles that sound as if they're coming from mud.

"Scott, what are those things?" she whispers. Above his shoulder the moon is a bloated gas balloon. "They don't sound like animals at all."

"I don't know. They run on all fours, but sometimes they…never mind. I never saw them close up. Neither of us did."

"Sometimes they what, Scott?"

"Stand up. Like people. Look around. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting back. You want to go back now, right?"

"Yes!"

"Then close your eyes and visualize our room at The Antlers. See it as well as you can. It will help me. It will give us a boost."

She closes her eyes and for one terrible second nothing comes. Then she's able to see how the bureau and the tables flanking the bed swam out of the gloom when the moon fought clear of the clouds and this brings back the wallpaper (rambler roses) and the shape of the bedstead and the comic-opera creak of the springs each time one of them moved. Suddenly the terrifying sound of those things laughing in the

(Forest Fairy Forest)

darkling woods seems to be fading. The smells are fading, too, and part of her is sad to be leaving this place, but mostly what she feels is relief. For her body (of course) and her mind (most certainly), but most of all for her soul, her immortal smucking soul, because maybe people like Scott Landon can jaunt off to places like Boo'ya Moon, but such strangeness and beauty were not made for ordinary folk such as she unless it's between the covers of a book or inside the safe dark of a movie theater.

And I only saw a little, she thinks.

"Good!" he tells her, and Lisey hears both relief and surprised delight in his voice. "Lisey, you're a champ—" at this is how he finishes, but even before he does, before he lets go of her and she opens her eyes, Lisey knows

5

"I knew that we were home," she finished, and opened her eyes. The intensity of her recall was so great that for a moment she expected to see the moonshadowy stillness of the bedroom they'd shared for two nights in New Hampshire twenty-seven years ago. She had been gripping the silver spade so tightly that she had to will her fingers open, one by one. She laid the yellow delight square—blood-crusted but comforting—back on her breast.

And then what? Are you going to tell me that after that, after all that, the two of you just rolled over and went to sleep?

That was pretty much what had happened, yes. She'd been anxious to start forgetting all of it, and Scott had been more than willing. It had taken all his courage to bring his past up in the first place, and no wonder. But she had asked him one more question that night, she remembered, and had almost asked another the following day, when they were driving back to Maine, before realizing she didn't have to. The question she'd asked had been about something he'd said just before the laughers started up, scaring all curiosity from her mind. She'd wanted to know what Scott meant when he'd said Back when he could still come on his own sometimes. Meaning Paul.

Scott looked startled. "Been long years since I've thought of that," he said, "but yeah, he could. It was just hard for him, the way hitting a baseball was always hard for me. So mostly he let me do it, and I think after awhile he lost the knack completely."

The question she'd thought to ask in the car was about the pool to which the broken sign had once pointed the way. Was it the one he always spoke about in his lectures? Lisey didn't ask because the answer was, after all, self-evident. His audiences might believe the myth-pool, the language-pool (to which we all go down to drink, to swim, or perhaps to catch a little fish) was figurative; she knew better. There was a real pool. She knew then because she knew him. She knew now because she had been there. You reached it from Sweetheart Hill by taking the path that led into the Fairy Forest; you had to pass both the Bell Tree and the graveyard to get there.

"I went to get him," she whispered, holding the spade. Then she said abruptly, "Oh God I remember the moon," and her body broke out so painfully in gooseflesh that she writhed on the bed.

The moon. Yes, that. A bloody orange hophead moon, so suddenly different from the northern lights and the killing cold she had just left behind her. It had been sexy summer–crazy, that moon, darkly delicious, lighting the stone cleft of valley near the pool better than she might have wished. She could see it now almost as well as then because she had cut through the purple curtain, had ripped it most righteously, but memory was only memory and Lisey had an idea hers had taken her almost as far as it could. A little more, maybe—another picture or two from her own personal booksnake—but not much, and then she would actually have to go back there, to Boo'ya Moon.

The question was, could she?

Then another question occurred to her: What if he's one of the shrouded ones now?

For an instant, an image struggled to come clear in Lisey's mind. She saw scores of silent figures that might have been corpses wrapped in old-fashioned winding sheets. Only they were sitting up. And she thought they were breathing.

A shudder rolled through her. It hurt her lacerated breast in spite of the Vicodin she had on board, but there was no way to stop that shudder until it had run its course. When it had, she found herself able to face practical considerations again. The foremost was whether she could get over to that other world on her own…because she had to go, shrouded ones or not.

Scott had been able to do it on his own, and had been able to take his brother Paul. As an adult he had been able to take Lisey from The Antlers. The crucial question was what had happened seventeen years later, on that cold January night in 1996.

"He wasn't entirely gone," she murmured. "He squeezed my hand." Yes, and the thought had crossed her mind that somewhere he might have been squeezing with every ounce of his force and being, but did that mean he had taken her?

"I yelled at him, too." Lisey actually smiled. "Told him if he wanted to come home he had to take me to where he was…and I always thought he did…"

Bullshit, little Lisey, you never thought about it at all. Did you? Not until today, when you almost literally got your tit in the wringer and had to. So if you're thinking about it, really think about it. Did he pull you to him that night? Did he?

She was on the verge of concluding it was one of those questions, like the chicken-or-egg thing, to which there was no satisfactory answer, when she remembered his saying Lisey, you're a champ at this!

Say she had done it by herself in 1996. Even so, Scott had been alive, and that squeeze of his hand, feeble as it had been, was enough to tell her he was there on the other side, making a conduit for her—

"It's still there," she said. She was gripping the handle of the shovel again. "That way through is still there, it must be, because he prepared for all of this. Left me a smucking bool hunt to get me ready. Then, yesterday morning, in bed with Amanda…that was you, Scott, I know it was. You said I had a blood-bool coming…and a prize…a drink, you said…and you called me babyluv. So where are you now? Where are you when I need you to get me over?"

No answer but the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Close your eyes. He'd said that, too. Visualize. See as well as you can. It will help. Lisey, you're a champ at this.

"I better be," she told the empty, sunny, Scottless bedroom. "Oh honey, I just better be."

If Scott Landon had had a fatal flaw, it might have been thinking too much, but that had never been her problem. If she had stopped to consider the situation on that hot day in Nashville, Scott almost certainly would have died. Instead she had simply acted, and saved his life with the shovel she now held.

I trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go.

Would the silver spade from Nashville go?

Lisey thought yes. And that was good. She wanted to keep it with her. "Friends to the end," she whispered, and closed her eyes.

She was summoning her memories of Boo'ya Moon, now vivid indeed, when a disturbing question broke her deepening concentration: another troublesome thought to divert her.

What time is it there, little Lisey? Oh, not the hour, I don't mean that, but is it daytime or nighttime? Scott always knew— he said he did, anyway—but you're not Scott.

No, but she remembered one of his favorite rock 'n roll tunes: "Night Time Is the Right Time." In Boo'ya Moon, nighttime was the wrong time, when smells turned rotten and food could poison you. Nighttime was when the laughers came out—things that ran on all fours but sometimes stood up like people and looked around. And there were other things, worse things.

Things like Scott's long boy.

It's very close, honey. That's what he told her as he lay under the hot Nashville sun on the day when she had been sure he was dying. I hear it taking its meal. She had tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about; he had pinched her and told her not to insult his intelligence. Or her own.

Because I'd been there. Because I'd heard the laughers and believed him when he said there were worse things waiting. And there were. I saw the thing he was talking about. I saw it in 1996, when I went to Boo'ya Moon to bring him home. Just its side, but that was enough.

"It was endless," Lisey muttered, and was horrified to realize she really believed this to be the truth. It had been night in 1996. Night when she had gone to Scott's other world from the cold guest room. She had gone down the path, into the woods, into the Fairy Forest, and—

A motor exploded into life nearby. Lisey's eyes flew open and she nearly screamed. Then she relaxed again, little by little. It was only Herb Galloway, or maybe the Luttrell kid Herb sometimes hired, cutting the grass next door. This was entirely different from the bitterly cold night in January of '96 when she'd discovered Scott in the guest room, there and still breathing but gone in every other way that mattered.

She thought: Even if I could do it, I can't do it like this— it's too noisy.

She thought: The world is too much with us.

She thought: Who wrote that? And, as happened so frequently, that thought came trailing its painful little red caboose: Scott would know.

Yes, Scott would know. She thought of him in all the motel rooms, bent over a portable typewriter (SCOTT AND LISEY, THE EARLY YEARS!) and then later, with his face lit by the glow of his laptop. Sometimes with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside him, sometimes with a drink, always with the curl of hair falling forgotten across his forehead. She thought of him lying on top of her in this bed, of chasing her full-tilt through that awful house in Bremen (SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY!), both of them naked and laughing, horny but not really happy, while trucks and cars rumbled around and around the traffic-circle up the street. She thought of his arms around her, all the times his arms had been around her, and the smell of him, and the sandpaper rasp his cheek made against hers, and she thought she would sell her soul, yes, her immortal smucking soul, for no more than the sound of him down the hall slamming the door and then yelling Hey, Lisey, I'm home—everything the same?

Hush and close your eyes.

That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It's a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it's so sad—

She didn't want to think about that sadness, nor did she want to think about her hurt breast, where the pain had begun to creep back. She turned her thoughts to Boo'ya Moon again, instead. She recalled how utterly amazing and wonderful it had been to go from the bitter subzero Maine night to that tropical place in the wink of a maiden's eye. The somehow sad texture of the air, and the silky aromas of frangipani and bougainvillea. She remembered the tremendous light of the setting sun and the rising moon and how, far off, that bell was ringing. That same bell.

Lisey realized that the sound of the riding mower in the Galloways' yard now seemed oddly distant. So was the blat of a passing motorcycle. Something was happening, she was almost sure of it. A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning. Maybe the world was not too much with her, after all.

But what if you get over there and it's night? Assuming that what you feel isn't just a combination of narcotics and wishful thinking, what if you get over there and it's night, when the bad things come out? Things like Scott's long boy? Then I'll come back here.

If you have time, you mean.

Yes, that's what I mean, if there's t—

Suddenly, shockingly, the light shining through the lids of her closed eyes changed from red to a dim purple that was almost black. It was as if a shade had been pulled. But a shade wouldn't account for the glorious mixture of smells that suddenly filled her nose: the mixed perfume of all those flowers. Nor could it account for the grass she now felt pricking her calves and naked back.

She'd made it. Gotten over. Come through.

"No," Lisey said with her eyes still shut—but it was feeble, little more than a token protest.

You know better, Lisey, Scott's voice whispered. And time is short. SOWISA, babyluv.

And because she knew that voice was absolutely right—time was indeed short—Lisey opened her eyes and sat up in her talented husband's childhood refuge.

Lisey sat up in Boo'ya Moon.

6

It was neither night nor day, and now that she was here, she wasn't surprised. She had come just before twilight on her previous two trips; was it any wonder it was just before twilight again?

The sun, brilliant orange, stood above the horizon at the end of the seemingly endless field of lupin. Looking the other way, Lisey could see the first rising arc of the moon—one far bigger than the biggest harvest moon she had ever seen in her life.

That's not our moon, is it? How can it be?

A breeze ruffled the sweaty ends of her hair, and somewhere not too far distant, that bell tinkled. A sound she remembered, a bell she remembered.

You better hurry up, don't you think?

Yes indeed. It was safe at the pool, or so Scott had said, but the way there led through the Fairy Forest, and that was not. The distance was short, but she'd do well to hurry.

She half-ran up the slope to the trees, looking for Paul's marker. At first she didn't see it, then spotted it leaning far over to one side. She didn't have time to straighten the cross…but took the time, anyway, because Scott would have taken the time. She set the silver spade aside for a moment (it had indeed come with her, as had the yellow knitted square) so she could use both hands. There must be weather here, because the single painstakingly printed word—PAUL—had faded to little more than a ghost.

I think I straightened it last time, too, she thought. In '96. And thought I'd like to look for the hypodermic needle, only there was no time.

Nor was there now. This was her third real trip to Boo'ya Moon. The first hadn't been so bad because she'd been with Scott and they'd gone no farther than the broken signpost reading TO THE POOL before returning to the bedroom at The Antlers. The second time, however, in 1996, she'd had to take the path into the Fairy Forest on her own. She couldn't recall what bravery she must have summoned, not knowing how far it was to the pool or what she'd find when she got there. Not that this trip didn't have its own unique set of difficulties. She was topless, her badly gored left breast was starting to throb again, and God only knew what sort of things the smell of her blood might attract. Well, it was too late to worry about that now.

And if something does come at me, she thought, picking up the spade by its short wooden handle, one of those laughers, for instance, I'll just bop it one with Little Lisey's Trusty Maniac Swatter, Copyright 1988, Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved.

Somewhere up ahead, that bell tinkled again. Barefoot, barebreasted, blood-smeared, wearing nothing but a pair of old denim shorts and carrying a spade with a silver scoop in her right hand, Lisey set off toward the sound along the rapidly darkening path. The pool was up ahead, surely no more than half a mile distant. There it was safe even after dark, and she would take off the few clothes she still wore, and wash herself clean.

7

It grew dim very quickly once she was under the canopy of trees. Lisey felt the urge to hurry more strongly than ever, but when the wind stirred the bell again—it was very close, now, and she knew it was hung from a branch by a bit of stout cord—she stopped, struck by a complex overlay of recall. She knew the bell was hung on a piece of cord because she had seen it on her last trip here, ten years ago. But Scott had swiped it long before that, even before they were married. She knew because she had heard it in 1979. Even then it had sounded familiar, in an unpleasant way. Unpleasant because she had hated the sound of that bell long before it had come over here to Boo'ya Moon.

"And I told him," she murmured, switching the spade to her other hand and brushing back her hair. The yellow square of delight lay over her left shoulder. Around her the sweetheart trees rustled like whispering voices. "He didn't say much, but I guess he took it to heart."

She set off again. The path dipped, then rose to the top of a hill where the trees were a little thinner and strong red light shone through them. Not quite sunset yet, then. Good. And here the bell hung, nodding from side to side just enough to produce the faintest chime. It had, once upon a time, sat beside the cash register of Pat's Pizza & Café in Cleaves Mills. Not the kind of bell you hit with your palm, the discreet hotel-desk species that went ding! once and then shut up, but a kind of miniature silver school bell with a handle that went ding-a-ling for as long as you wanted to keep on shaking it. And Chuckie G., the cook who was on duty most nights during the year or so Lisey had waitressed at Pat's, had loved that bell. Sometimes, she remembered telling Scott, she heard its annoying silver ding-a-ling in her dreams, along with Chuckie G. bawling, leather-lunged: Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle! Hungry people! Yes, in bed she had told Scott how much she had hated Chuckie G.'s annoying little bell, in the spring of 1979 it must have been, because not long after that the annoying little bell had disappeared. She'd never associated Scott with its disappearance, not even when she'd heard it the first time she'd been here—too many other things going on then, too much weird input—and he had never said a word about it. Then, in 1996, while searching for him, she had heard Chuckie G.'s long-lost bell again, and that time she had

(let's hustle hungry people order's up)

known it for what it was. And the whole thing had made perfect crackpot sense. Scott Landon had been the man, after all, who thought the Auburn Novelty Shop was the hardy-har capital of the universe. Why wouldn't he have thought it a fine joke to swipe the bell that so annoyed his girlfriend and bring it to Boo'ya Moon? To hang it rah-cheer beside the path for the wind to ring?

There was blood on it last time, the deep voice of memory whispered. Blood in 1996.

Yes, and it had frightened her, but she had pushed on, anyway…and the blood was gone now. The weather that had faded Paul's name from the marker's crosspiece had also washed the bell clean. And the stout length of cord upon which Scott had hung it twenty-seven years before (always assuming time was the same over here) had almost worn away—soon the bell would tumble to the path. Then the joke would be over.

And now intuition spoke to her as powerfully as it ever had in her life, not in words but in a picture. She saw herself laying the silver spade at the foot of the Bell Tree, and she did so without pause or question. Nor did she ask herself why; it looked too perfect lying there at the foot of the old, gnarled tree. Silver bell above, silver spade below. As to why it should be perfect…she might as well ask herself why Boo'ya Moon existed in the first place. She'd thought the spade had been made for her protection this time. Apparently not. She gave it one more look (it was all the time she could afford) and then moved on.

8

The path led her down into another fold of forest. Here the strong red light of evening had faded to dimming orange and the first of the laughers woke somewhere ahead of her in the darker reaches of the woods, its horribly human voice climbing that glass mad-ladder and making her arms break out in gooseflesh.

Hurry, babyluv.

"Yes, all right."

Now a second laugher joined the first, and although she felt more gooseflesh ripple up her bare back, she thought she was all right. Just up ahead the path curved around a vast gray rock she remembered very well. Beyond it lay a deep rockhollow—oh yes, deep and puffickly huh-yooge—and the pool. At the pool she would be safe. It was scary at the pool, but it was also safe. It—

Lisey became suddenly, queerly positive that something was stalking her, just waiting for the last of the light to drain away before making its move.

Its lunge.

Heart pounding so hard it hurt her mutilated breast, she dodged around the great gray bulk of that protruding stone. And the pool was there, lying below like a dream made real. As she looked down at that ghostly shining mirror, the last memories clicked into place, and remembering was like coming home.

9

She comes around the gray rock and forgets all about the dried smear of blood on the bell, which has so troubled her. She forgets the screaming, windy cold and brilliant northern lights she has left behind. For a moment she even forgets Scott, whom she's come here to find and bring back…always assuming he wants to come. She looks down at the ghostly shining mirror of the pool and forgets everything else. Because it's beautiful. And even though she's never been here before in her life, it's like coming home. Even when one of those things starts to laugh she isn't afraid, because this is safe ground. She doesn't need anyone to tell her that; she knows it in her bones, just as she knows Scott has been talking about this place in his lectures and writing about it in his books for years.

She also knows that this is a sad place.

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the shore; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about. It's also about

(giving in)

waiting. Just sitting…and looking out over those dreamy waters…and waiting. It's coming, you think. It's coming soon, I know it is. But you don't know exactly what and so the years pass.

How can you know that, Lisey?

The moon told her, she supposes; and the northern lights that burn your eyes with their cold brilliance; the sweet-dust smell of roses and frangipani on Sweetheart Hill; most of all Scott's eyes told her as he struggled just to hold on, hold on, hold on. To keep from taking the path that led to this place.

More cackling voices rise in the deeper reaches of the woods and then something roars, momentarily silencing them. Behind her, the bell tinkles, then falls still again.

I ought to hurry.

Yes, even though she senses hurry is antithetical to this place. They need to be getting back to their house on Sugar Top as soon as possible, and not because there's danger of wild beasts, of ogres and trolls and

(vurts and seemies)

other strange creatures deep in the Fairy Forest where it's always dark as a dungeon and the sun never shines, but because the longer Scott stays here, the less likely she'll ever be able to bring him back. Also…

Lisey thinks of how it would be to see the moon burning like a cold stone in the still surface of the pool below—and she thinks: I might get fascinated.

Yes.

Old wooden steps lead down this side of the slope. Beside each one is a stone post with a word carved into it. She can read these in Boo'ya Moon, but knows they would mean nothing to her back home; nor will she be able to remember anything but the

simplest: X means bread.

The stairs end in a downsloping ramp running to her left that finally empties at ground level. Here a beach of fine white sand glimmers in the rapidly failing light. Above the beach, carved on step-backs into a rock wall, are perhaps two hundred long, curved stone benches that look down on the pool. There might be space for a thousand or even two thousand people here if they were seated side by side, but they're not. She thinks there can be no more than fifty or sixty in all and most of them are hidden in gauzy wrappings that look like shrouds. But if they're dead, how can they be sitting? Does she even want to know?

On the beach, standing scattered, are maybe two dozen more. And a few people—six or eight—are actually in the water. They wade silently. As Lisey reaches the bottom of the steps and begins making her way toward the beach, her feet treading easily along the sunken rut of a path many other feet have walked before her, she sees a woman bend over and begin to lave her face. She does this with the slow gestures of someone in a dream, and Lisey recalls that day in Nashville, how everything fell into slow motion when she realized Blondie meant to shoot her husband. That was also like a dream, but wasn't.

Then she sees Scott. He's sitting on a stone bench nine or ten rows up from the pool. He's still got Good Ma's african, only here it's not bundled around him because it's too warm. It's just drawn across his knees, with the balance puddled over his feet. She doesn't know how the african can be both here and in the house on the View at the same time and thinks: Maybe because some things are special. The way Scott is special. And she? Is a version of Lisey Landon still back in the house on Sugar Top Hill? She thinks not. She thinks she is not that special, not her, not little Lisey. She thinks that, for better or worse, she is entirely here. Or entirely gone, depending on which world you're talking about.

She pulls in breath, meaning to call his name, then doesn't. A powerful intuition stops her.

Shhhh, she thinks. Shhhh, little Lisey, now

10

Now you must be still, she thought, as she had in January of 1996.

All was as it had been then, only now she saw it a little better because she had come a little earlier; the shadows in the stone valley that cupped the pool were only beginning to gather. The water had the shape, almost, of a woman's hips. At the beach end, where the hips would nip into the waist, was an arrowhead of fine white sand. Upon it, standing far apart from one another, were four people, two men and two women, staring raptly at the pool. In the water were half a dozen more. No one was swimming. Most were in no deeper than their calves; one man was in up to his waist. Lisey wished she could have read the expression on this man's face, but she was still too far away. Behind the waders and the people standing on the beach—those who hadn't yet found enough courage to get wet, Lisey was convinced—was the sloping headland that had been carved into dozens or maybe hundreds of stone benches. Upon them, widely scattered, sat as many as two hundred people. She seemed to remember only fifty or sixty, but this evening there were definitely more. Yet for every person she could see, there had to be at least four in those horrible

(cerements)

wrappings.

There's a graveyard, too. Do you remember?

"Yes," Lisey whispered. Her breast was hurting badly again, but she looked at the pool and remembered Scott's sliced-up hand. She also remembered how quickly he had recovered from being shot in the lung by the madman—oh, the doctors had been amazed. There was better medicine than Vicodin for her, and not far away.

"Yes," she said again, and began making her way along the downsloping path, this time with only one unhappy difference: there was no Scott Landon sitting on a bench down there.

Just before the path ended at the beach, she saw another path splitting off to her left and away from the pool. Lisey was once more all but overwhelmed by memory as she saw the moon

11

She sees the moon rising through a kind of slot in the massive granite outcropping that cups the pool. That moon is bloated and gigantic, just as it was when her husband-to-be brought her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers, but in the widening clearing to which that slot leads, its infected red-orange face is broken into jagged segments by the silhouettes of trees and crosses. So many crosses. Lisey is looking into what might almost be a rustic country graveyard. Like the cross Scott made for his brother Paul, these appear to be made of wood, and although some are quite large and a few are ornate, they all look handmade and many are the worse for wear. There are rounded markers as well, and some of these might be made of stone, but in the gathering gloom, Lisey cannot tell for sure. The light of the rising moon hinders rather than helps, because everything in the graveyard is backlit.

If there's a graveyard here, why did he bury Paul back there? Was it because he died with the bad-gunky?

She doesn't know or care. What she cares about is Scott. He's sitting on one of those benches like a spectator at a badly attended sporting event, and if she intends to do something, she'd better get busy. "Keep your string a-drawing," Good Ma would have said—that was one she caught from the pool.

Lisey leaves the graveyard and its rude crosses behind. She walks along the beach toward the stone benches where her husband sits. The sand is firm and somehow tingly. Feeling it against her soles and heels makes her realize that her feet are bare. She's still wearing her nightgown and layers of underthings, but her slippers didn't travel. The feel of the sand is dismaying and pleasant at the same time. It's also strangely familiar, and as she reaches the first of the stone benches, Lisey makes the connection. As a kid she had a recurring dream in which she'd go zooming around the house on a magic carpet, invisible to everyone else. She'd awaken from those dreams exhilarated, terrified, and sweat-soaked to the roots of her hair. This sand has the same magic-carpet feel…as if she were to bend her knees and then shoot upward, she might fly instead of jump.

I'd swoop over that pool like a dragonfly, maybe dragging my toes in the water…swoop around to the place where it outflows in a brook…along to where the brook fattens into a

river…swooping low…smelling the damp rising up from the water, breaking through the little rising mists like scarves until I finally reached the sea…and then on…yes, on and on and on…

Tearing herself away from this powerful vision is one of the hardest things Lisey has ever done. It's like trying to rise after days of hard work and only a few hours of heavy and beautifully restful sleep. She discovers she's no longer on the sand but sitting on a bench in the third tier up from the little beach, looking out at the water with her chin propped on her palm. And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become buttery, and will soon turn to silver.

How long have I been here? she asks herself, dismayed. She has an idea it's not really been that long, somewhere between fifteen minutes and half an hour, but even that is far too long…although she certainly understands how this place works now, doesn't she?

Lisey feels her eyes being drawn back to the pool—the peace of the pool, where now only two or three people (one is a woman with either a large bundle or a small child in her arms) are wading in the deepening evening—and forces herself to look away, up at the rock horizons that encircle this place and at the stars peeping through the darkening blue above the granite and the few trees that fringe it up there. When she begins to feel a little more like herself, Lisey stands up, turns her back on the water, and locates Scott again. It's easy. That yellow knitted african all but screams, even in the gathering dark.

She goes to him, stepping up from one level to the next, as she would at a football stadium. She detours away from one of the shrouded creatures…but she's close enough to see the very human shape beneath its gauzy wrappings; hollow eyesockets and one hand that peeps out.

It is a woman's hand, with chipped red polish on the nails.

When she reaches Scott, her heart is pumping hard and she feels a little out of breath, even though the climb hasn't been difficult. In the distance the laughers have begun cackling up and down the scale, sharing their endless joke. Back the way she came, faint but still audible, she hears the fitful tinkle of Chuckie G.'s bell, and she thinks, Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle!

"Scott?" she murmurs, but Scott doesn't look at her. Scott is looking raptly at the pool, where the faintest hazy mist—a mere exhalation—has begun to rise in the light of the rising moon. Lisey allows herself only one quick glance that way before returning her regard firmly to her husband. She's learned her lesson about looking too long at the pool. Or so she hopes. "Scott, it's time to come home."

Nothing. No response whatsoever. She remembers protesting that he wasn't crazy, writing stories didn't make him crazy, and Scott telling her I hope you stay lucky, little Lisey. But she hadn't, had she? Now she knows a lot more. Paul Landon went bad-gunky and wound up raving his life away chained to a post in the cellar of an isolated farmhouse. His younger brother has married and had an undeniably brilliant career, but now the bill has come due.

Your garden-variety catatonic, she thinks, and shivers.

"Scott?" she murmurs again, almost directly into his ear. She has taken both of his hands in hers. They are cool and smooth, waxy and lax. "Scott, if you're in there and you want to come home, squeeze my hands."

For the longest time there's nothing but the sound of the laughing things deep in the woods, and somewhere closer by the shocking, almost womanish cry of a bird. Then Lisey feels something that is either wishful thinking or the barest twitch of his fingers against hers.

She tries to think what she should do next, but the only thing she's sure of is what she shouldn't do: let the night swim up around them, dazzling her with silvery moonlight from above even as it drowns her in shadows rising from below. This place is a trap. She's sure that anyone who stays at the pool for very long will find it impossible to leave. She understands that if you look at it for a little while, you'll be able to see anything you want to. Lost loves, dead children, missed chances—anything.

The most amazing thing about this place? That there aren't more people hanging out on the stone benches. That they aren't packed in shoulder-to-shoulder like spectators at a smucking World Cup soccer match.

She catches movement in the corner of her eye and looks up the path leading from the beach to the stairs. She sees a stout gentleman wearing white pants and a billowing white shirt open all the way down the front. A great red gash runs down the left side of his face. His iron-gray hair is standing up at the back of his oddly flattened-looking head. He looks around briefly, then steps from the path to the sand.

Beside her, speaking with great effort, Scott says: "Car crash."

Lisey's heart takes a wild spring in her chest, but she's careful not to look around or to squeeze down too tightly on his hands, although she cannot forbear a slight twitch. Striving to keep her voice even, she says: "How do you know?"

No answer from Scott. The stout gentleman in the billowing shirt spares one more dismissive glance for the silent folk sitting on the stone benches, then turns his back on them and wades into the pool. Silver tendrils of moonsmoke rise around him, and Lisey once more has to drag her eyes away.

"Scott, how do you know?"

He shrugs. His shoulders also seem to weigh a thousand pounds— that, at least, is how it looks to her—but he manages. "Telepathy, I suppose."

"Will he get better now?"

There's a long pause. Just when she thinks he won't answer, he does. "He might," he says. "He's…it's deep…in here." Scott touches his own head—indicating, Lisey thinks, some sort of brain injury. "Sometimes things just…go too far."

"Then do they come and sit here? Wrap themselves in sheets?"

Nothing from Scott. What she's afraid of now is losing what little of him she's found. She doesn't need anyone to tell her how easily it could happen; she can feel it. Every nerve in her body knows this news.

"Scott, I think you want to come back. I think it's why you hung on so hard all last December. And I think it's why you brought the african. It's hard to miss, even in the gloom."

He looks down, as if seeing it for the first time, then actually smiles a little. "You're always…saving me, Lisey," he says.

"I don't know what you're—"

"Nashville. I was going down." With every word he seems to gain animation. For the first time she allows herself to really hope. "I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot—so hot—and you gave me ice. Do you remember?"

She remembers that other Lisa

(I spilled half the fucking Coke getting back here)

and how Scott's shivering suddenly stopped when she popped a sliver of ice onto his bloody tongue. She remembers Cokecolored water dripping out of his eyebrows. She remembers it all. "Of course I do. Now let's get out of here."

He shakes his head, slowly but firmly. "It's too hard. You go on, Lisey."

"I'm supposed to go without you?" She blinks her eyes fiercely, only realizing when she feels the sting that she has begun to cry.

"It won't be hard—do it like that time in New Hampshire." He speaks patiently, but still very slowly, as if every word were a great weight, and he is purposely misunderstanding her. She's almost sure of it. "Just close your eyes…concentrate on the place you came from…see it…and that's the place you'll go back to."

"Without you?" she repeats fiercely, and below them, slowly, like a man moving underwater, a guy in a red flannel shirt turns to look at them.

Scott says, "Shhhh, Lisey—here you must be still."

"What if I don't want to be? This isn't the smucking library, Scott!"

Deep in the Fairy Forest the laughers howl as if this is the funniest thing they've ever heard, a knee-slapper worthy of the Auburn Novelty Shop. From the pool there's a single sharp splash. Lisey glances that way and sees the stout gentleman has gone to…well, to somewhere else. She decides she doesn't give a good goddam if it's underwater or Dimension X; her business now is with her husband. He's right, she's always saving him, just call her the U.S. Cavalry. And it's okay, she knew that practical shit was never exactly going to be Scott's main deal when she married him, but she has a right to expect a little help, doesn't she?

His gaze has drifted back to the water. She has an idea that when night comes and the moon begins to burn there like a drowned lamp, she'll lose him for good. This frightens and infuriates her. She stands up and snatches Good Ma's african. It came from her side of the family, after all, and if this is to be their divorce, she will have it back—all of it—even if it hurts him. Especially if it hurts him.

Scott looks at her with an expression of sleepy surprise that makes her angrier still.

"Okay," she says, speaking with brittle lightness. It's a tone foreign to her and seemingly to this place, as well. Several people look around, clearly disturbed and—perhaps—irritated. Well, smuck them and the various horses (or hearses, or ambulances) they rode in on. "You want to stay here and eat lotuses, or whatever the saying is? Fine. I'll just go on back down the path—"

And for the first time she sees a strong emotion on Scott's face. It's fear. "Lisey, no!" he says. "Just boom back from here! You can't use the path! It's too late, almost night!"

"Shhhh!" someone says.

Fine. She'll shhhh. Bundling the yellow african higher in her arms, Lisey starts back down the risers. Two benches down from the bottom she chances a glance back. Part of her is sure that he'll follow her; this is Scott, after all. No matter how strange this place may be, he's still her husband, still her lover. The idea of divorce has crossed her mind, but surely it is absurd, a thing for other people but not for Scott and Lisey. He will not allow her to leave alone. But when she looks over her shoulder he's just sitting there in his white tee-shirt and green long underwear bottoms, with his knees together and his hands clasped tightly as if he is cold even here, where the air is so tropical. He's not coming, and for the first time Lisey lets herself acknowledge that it may be because he can't. If that is so, her choices are down to a pair: stay here with him or go home without him.

No, there's a third. I can gamble. I can shoot the works, as the saying is. Bet the farm. So come on, Scott. If the path is really dangerous, get off your dead ass and keep me from taking it.

She wants to look back as she crosses the beach, but doing that would show weakness. The laughers are closer now, which means that whatever else might be lurking near the path back to Sweetheart Hill will be closer, too. It will be full dark by now under the trees, and she guesses she'll have that sense of something stalking her before she gets far; that sense of something closing in. It's very close, honey, Scott told her that day in Nashville as he lay on the broiling pavement, bleeding from the lung and near death. And when she tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about, he had told her not to insult his intelligence.

Or her own.

Never mind. I'll deal with whatever's in the woods when—if—I have to. All I know right now is that Dandy Debusher's girl Lisey has finally got it strapped all the way on. That mysterious "it" Scott said you could never define because it changed from one jackpot to the next. This is the total deal, SOWISA, babyluv, and do you know what? It feels pretty good. She begins making her way up the slanting path that leads to the steps and behind her

12

"He called me," Lisey murmured.

One of the women who had been standing at the edge of the pool now stood up to her knees in that still water, looking dreamily off to the horizon. Her companion turned to Lisey, her brows drawn together in a disapproving frown. At first Lisey didn't understand, then she did. People didn't like you to talk here, that hadn't changed. She had an idea that in Boo'ya Moon, few things did.

She nodded as if the frowning woman had requested

clarification. "My husband called my name, tried to stop me. God knows what it cost him to do that, but he did."

The woman on the beach—her hair was blond but dark at the roots, as if it needed touching up—said, "Be…quiet, please. I need…to think."

Lisey nodded—fine by her, although she doubted the blond woman was doing as much thinking as she might believe—and waded into the water. She thought it would be cool, but in fact it was almost hot. The heat coursed up her legs and made her sex tingle in a way it hadn't in a long time. She waded out farther but got no deeper than her waist. She took another half a dozen steps, looked around, and saw she was at least ten yards beyond the farthest of the other waders, and remembered that good food turned bad after dark in Boo'ya Moon. Might the water also turn bad? Even if it didn't, might not dangerous things come out here as well as in the woods? Pool-sharks, so to speak? And if that was the case, might she not find herself too far out to get back before one of them decided dinner was served?

This is safe ground.

Only it wasn't ground, it was water, and she felt a panicky urge to flounder back to the beach before some killer U-boat with teeth took off one of her legs. Lisey fought the fear down. She had come a long way, not just once but twice, her breast hurt like hell, and by God she would get what she'd come for.

She took in a deep breath, and then, not knowing what to expect, lowered herself slowly to her knees on the sandy bottom, letting the water cover her breasts—the one that was unhurt and the one that was badly wounded. For a moment her left breast hurt more than ever; she thought the pain would tear the top of her head off. But then

13

He calls her name again, loud and panicky—"Lisey!"

It cuts through the dreamy silence of this place like an arrow with fire at its tip. She almost looks back because there's agony as well as panic in that cry, but something deep inside tells her she must not. If she is to have any chance at all of rescuing him, she must not look back. She has made her wager. She passes the graveyard, its crosses gleaming in the light of the rising moon, with hardly a glance and climbs the steps with her back straight and her head up, still holding Good Ma's african bundled high in her arms so she won't trip on it, and she feels a crazy exhilaration, the kind she reckons you only experience when you've put everything you own—the house the car the bank account the family dog—on one throw of the dice. Above her (and not far) is the vast gray rock marking the head of the path that leads back to Sweetheart Hill. The sky is filled with strange stars and foreign constellations. Somewhere the northern lights are burning in long curtains of color. Lisey may never see them again, but she thinks she's okay with that. She reaches the top of the steps and with no hesitation walks around the rock and that is when Scott pulls her backward against him. His familiar odor has never smelled so good to her. At the same moment, she becomes aware that something is moving on her left, moving fast, not on the path leading to the hill of lupins but just beside it.

"Shhhh, Lisey," Scott whispers. His lips are so close they tickle the cup of her ear. "For your life and mine, now you must be still."

It's Scott's long boy. She doesn't need him to tell her. For years she has sensed its presence at the back of her life, like something glimpsed in a mirror from the corner of the eye. Or, say, a nasty secret hidden in the cellar. Now the secret is out. In gaps between the trees to her left, sliding at what seems like express-train speed, is a great high river of meat. It is mostly smooth, but in places there are dark spots or craters that might be moles or even, she supposes (she does not want to suppose and cannot help it) skin cancers. Her mind starts to visualize some sort of gigantic worm, then freezes. The thing over there behind those trees is no worm, and whatever it is, it's sentient, because she can feel it thinking. Its thoughts aren't human, aren't in the least comprehensible, but there is a terrible fascination in their very alienness…

It's the bad-gunky, she thinks, cold all the way to the bone. Its thoughts are the bad-gunky and nothing else.

The idea is awful but also right. A sound escapes her, something between a squeal and a moan. It's just a little sound, but she sees or senses that the thing's endless express-train progress has suddenly slowed, that it may have heard her.

Scott knows, too. The arm around her, just below her breasts, tightens a bit more. Once again his lips move against the cup of her ear. "If we're going home, we have to go right now," he murmurs. He's totally with her again, totally here. She doesn't know if it's because he's no longer looking at the pool or because he's terrified. Maybe it's both. "Do you understand?"

Lisey nods. Her own fear is so great it's incapacitating, and any sense of exhilaration at having him back is gone. Has he lived with this all his life? If so, how has he lived with it? But even now, in the extremity of her terror, she supposes she knows. Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

"Concentrate, Lisey. Do it now. Bust your brains."

She closes her eyes and sees the guest room of their house on Sugar Top Hill. Sees Scott sitting in the rocker. Sees herself sitting on the chilly floor beside him, holding his hand. He is gripping her hand as hard as she is gripping his. Behind them, the frost-filled panes of the window are filled with fantastic shifting light. The TV is on and The Last Picture Show is once more playing. The boys are in Sam the Lion's black-and-white poolroom and Hank Williams is on the juke singing "Jambalaya."

For a moment she feels Boo'ya Moon shimmer, but then the music in her mind—music that was for a moment so clear and happy— fades. Lisey opens her eyes. She's desperate to see home, but the big gray rock and the path leading away through the sweetheart trees are both still there. Those strange stars still blaze down, only now the laughers are silent and the harsh whispering of the bushes has stilled and even Chuckie G.'s bell has quit its fitful tinkling because the long boy has stopped to listen and the whole world seems to hold its breath and listen with it. It's over there, not fifty feet away on their left; Lisey can now actually smell it. It smells like old farts in turnpike rest area bathrooms, or the poison whiff of bourbon and cigarette smoke you sometimes get when you turn the key and walk into a cheap motel room, or Good Ma's pissy diapers when she was old and raving senile; it's stopped behind the nearest rank of sweetheart trees, has paused in its tunnelish run through the woods, and dear God they aren't going, they aren't going back, they are for some reason stuck here.

Scott's whisper is now so low he hardly seems to be speaking at all. If not for the faint sensation of his lips moving against the sensitive skin of her ear, she could almost believe this was telepathy. "It's the african, Lisey—sometimes things will go one way but not the other. Usually things that can double. I don't know why, but that's it. I feel it like an anchor. Drop the african."

Lisey opens her arms and lets it fall. The sound it makes is only the softest sigh (like the arguments against insanity falling into some ultimate basement), but the long boy hears it. She feels a shift in the rowing direction of its unknowable thoughts; feels the hideous pressure of its insane regard. One of the trees snaps with an explosive rending noise as the thing over there begins to turn, and she closes her eyes again and sees the guest room as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, sees it with desperate intensity, and through a perfect magnifying lens of terror.

"Now," Scott murmurs, and the most amazing thing happens. She feels the air turn inside out. Suddenly Hank Williams is singing "Jambalaya." He's singing

14

He was singing because the TV was on. She could now remember this as clearly as anything in her life, and she wondered how she ever could have forgotten it.

Time to get off Memory Lane, Lisey—time to go home.

Everybody out of the pool, as the saying was. Lisey had gotten what she'd come here for, had gotten it while caught up in that last terrible memory of the long boy. Her breast still hurt, but the fierce throbbing was down to a dull ache. She had felt worse as a teenager, after spending a long hot day in a bra that was too small for her. From where she knelt chindeep in the water she could see that the moon, now smaller and almost pure silver, had risen above all but the highest of the trees in the graveyard. And now a new fear rose to trouble her: what if the long boy came back? What if it heard her thinking about it and came back? This was supposed to be a safe place and Lisey thought it probably was—from the laughers and the other nasty things that might live in the Fairy Forest, at least—but she had an idea that the long boy might not be bound by any rules that held the other things away from here. She had an idea the long boy was…different. The title of some old horror story first occurred to her, then clanged in her mind like an iron bell: "Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad." This was followed by the title of the only Scott Landon book she had ever hated: Empty Devils.

But before she could start back to the sand, before she could even get to her feet again, Lisey was struck by yet another memory, this one far more recent. It was of waking in bed with her sister Amanda just before dawn and finding that past and present had gotten all tangled together. Worse still, Lisey had come to believe that she wasn't in bed with her sister at all, but with her dead husband. And in a way, that had been true. Because although the thing in bed with her had been wearing Manda's nightgown and had spoken in Manda's voice, it had used the interior language of their marriage and phrases only Scott could have known.

You have a blood-bool coming, the thing in bed with her had said, and along had come the Black Prince of the Incunks with her own Oxo can opener in his nasty bag of tricks.

It goes behind the purple. You've already found the first three stations. A few more and you'll get your prize.

And what prize had the thing in bed with her promised? A drink. She had guessed a Coke or an RC Cola because those had been Paul's prizes, but now she knew better.

Lisey lowered her head, buried her battered face in the pool, and then, without allowing herself to think about what she was doing, took two quick swallows. The water in which she stood was almost hot, but what she took in her mouth was cool and sweet and refreshing. She could have drunk a good deal more, but some intuition told her to stop at two sips. Two was just the right number. She touched her lips and found that the swelling there was almost gone. She wasn't surprised.

Not trying to be quiet (and not bothering to be grateful, at least not yet), Lisey floundered back to the beach. It seemed to take forever. No one was wading near shore now, and the beach was empty. Lisey thought she saw the woman she'd spoken to sitting on one of the stone benches with her companion, but couldn't be sure because the moon hadn't risen quite enough. She looked a bit higher, and her gaze fixed on one of the wrapped figures a dozen or so benches up from the water. Moonlight had coated one side of this creature's gauzy head with thin silver gilt, and a queer certainty came to her: that was Scott, and he was watching her. Didn't the idea make a kind of crazy sense? Didn't it, if he had held onto enough consciousness and will to come to her in the moments before dawn, as she lay in bed with her catatonic sister? Didn't it, if he was determined to have his say just one more time?

She felt the urge to call his name, even though to do so would surely be dangerous madness. She opened her mouth and water from her wet hair ran into her eyes, stinging them. Faintly, she heard the wind tinkling Chuckie G.'s bell.

It was then that Scott spoke to her, and for the last time.

—Lisey.

Infinitely tender, that voice. Calling her name, calling her home.

—Little

15

"Lisey," he says. "Babyluv."

He's in the rocking chair and she's sitting on the cold floor, but he's the one doing the shivering. Lisey has a sudden brilliant memory of Granny D saying Afeard and shidderin in the dark and it hits her that he's cold because now all of the african is in Boo'ya Moon. But that's not all—the whole frigging room is cold. It was chilly before but now it's cold, and the lights are out, as well.

The constant whooshy whisper of the furnace has ceased, and when she looks out the frosty window she can see only the extravagant colors of the northern lights. The Galloways' pole-light next door has gone dark. Power outage, she thinks, but no—the television is still on and that damned movie is still playing. The boys from Anarene, Texas, are hanging out in the pool-hall, soon they'll go to Mexico and when they come back Sam the Lion will be dead, he'll be wrapped in gauze and sitting on one of those stone benches overlooking the p—

"That's not right," Scott says. His teeth are chattering slightly, but she can still hear the perplexity in his voice. "I never turned the goddam movie on because I thought it would wake you up, Lisey. Also—"

She knows that's true, when she came in here this time and found him the TV was off, but right now she's got something far more important on her mind. "Scott, will it follow us?"

"No, baby," he says. "It can't do that unless it gets a real good whiff of your scent or a fix on your…" He trails off. It's the movie he's still most concerned with, it seems. "Also, it's never 'Jambalaya' in this scene. I've watched The Last Picture Show fifty times, except for Citizen Kane it may be the greatest movie ever made, and it's never 'Jambalaya' in the pool-hall scene. It's Hank Williams, sure, but it's 'KawLiga,' the song about the Indian chief. And if the TV and the VCR are working, where's the damn lights?"

He gets up and flicks the wall-switch. There's nothing. That big cold wind from Yellowknife has finally killed their power, and power all over Castle Rock, Castle View, Harlow, Motton, Tashmore Pond, and most of western Maine. At the same instant Scott flicks the useless light-switch on, the TV goes off. The picture dwindles to a bright white point that glows for a moment, then disappears. The next time he tries his tape of The Last Picture Show, he'll discover a ten-minute stretch in the middle of it is blank, as if wiped clean by a powerful magnetic field. Neither of them will ever speak of it, but Scott and Lisey will understand that although both of them were visualizing the guest room, it was probably Lisey who hollered them home with the greatest force…and it was certainly Lisey who visualized ole Hank singing "Jambalaya" instead of "Kaw-Liga." As it was Lisey who so fiercely visualized both the VCR and the TV running when they returned that those appliances did run for almost a minute and a half, even though the electricity was out from one end of Castle County to the other.

He stokes up the woodstove in the kitchen with oak chunks from the woodbox and she makes them a jackleg bed—blankets and an air-mattress—on the linoleum. When they lie down, he takes her in his arms.

"I'm afraid to go to sleep," she confesses. "I'm afraid that when I wake up in the morning, the stove will be out and you'll be gone again."

He shakes his head. "I'm all right—it's past for awhile."

She looks at him with hope and doubt. "Is that something you know, or just something you're saying to soothe the little wife?"

"Which do you think?"

She thinks this isn't the ghost-Scott she's been living with since November, but it's still hard for her to believe in such miraculous changes. "You seem better, but I'm leery of my own wishful thinking."

In the stove, a knot of wood explodes and she jumps. He holds her closer. She snuggles against him almost fiercely. It's warm under the covers; warm in his arms. He is all she has ever wanted in the dark.

He says, "This…this thing that has troubled my family…it comes and goes. When it passes, it's like a cramp letting go."

"But it will come back?"

"Lisey, it might not." The strength and surety in his voice so surprises her that she looks up to check his face. She sees no duplicity there, even of the kindly sort meant to ease a troubled wife's heart. "And if it does, it might never come back as strongly as it did this time."

"Did your father tell you that?"

"My father didn't know much about the gone part. I've felt this tug toward…the place where you found me…twice before. Once the year before I met you. That time booze and rock music got me through. The second time—"

"Germany," she says flatly.

"Yes," he says. "Germany. That time you pulled me through, Lisey."

"How close, Scott? How close was it in Bremen?"

"Close," he says simply, and it makes her cold. If she had lost him in Germany, she would have lost him for good. Mein gott. "But that was a breeze compared to this. This was a hurricane."

There are other things she wants to ask him, but mostly she only wants to hold him and believe him when he says that maybe things will be okay. The way you want to believe the doctor, she supposes, when he says the cancer is in remission and may never come back.

"And you're okay." She needs to hear him say it one more time. Needs to.

"Yes. Good to go, as the saying is."

"And…it?" She doesn't need to be more specific. Scott knows what she's talking about.

"It's had my scent for a long time, and it knows the shape of my thoughts. After all these years, we're practically old friends. It could probably take me if it wanted to, but it would be an effort, and that fella's pretty lazy.

Also…something watches out for me. Something on the bright side of the equation. There is a bright side, you know. You must know, because you're a part of it."

"Once you told me you could call it, if you wanted to." She says this very low.

"Yes."

"And sometimes you want to. Don't you?"

He doesn't deny it, and outside the wind howls a long cold note along the eaves. Yet here under the blankets in front of the kitchen stove, it's warm. It's warm with him.

"Stay with me, Scott," she says.

"I will," he tells her. "I will as long as

16

"I will as long as I can," Lisey said.

She realized several things at the same time. One was that she had returned to her bedroom and her bed. Another was that the bed would have to be changed, because she had come back soaking wet, and her damp feet were coated with beach sand from another world. A third was that she was shivering even though the room wasn't particularly cold. A fourth was that she no longer had the silver spade; she had left it behind. The last was that if the seated shape had indeed been her husband, she had almost certainly seen him for the last time; her husband was now one of the shrouded things, an unburied corpse.

Lying on her wet bed in her soaking shorts, Lisey burst into tears. She had a great deal to do now, and had come back with most of the steps clear in her mind—she thought that might also have been part of her prize at the end of Scott's last bool hunt—but first she needed to finish grieving for her husband. She put an arm over her eyes and lay so for the next five minutes, sobbing until her eyes were swollen nearly shut and her throat ached. She had never thought she would want him so much or miss him so badly. It was a shock. Yet at the same time, and although there was also still some pain in her damaged breast, Lisey thought she had never felt so well, so glad to be alive, or so ready to kick ass and take down names.

As the saying was.