Lisey's Story

XV. Lisey and The Long Boy

(Pafko at the Wall)

1

"Amanda, come here!"

"In a minute, Lisey, the movie's almost—"

"Amanda, right now!"

She picked up the telephone, confirmed the nothing inside it, put it back down. She knew everything. It seemed to have been there all along, like the sweet taste in her mouth. The lights would be next, and if Amanda didn't come before he doused them—

But there she was, standing between the entertainment alcove and the long main room, looking suddenly afraid and old. On the VHS tape the coach's wife would soon be throwing the coffee pot at the wall, angry because her hands were too unsteady to pour. Lisey wasn't surprised to see her own hands were trembling. She picked up the .22. Amanda saw her do it and looked more frightened than ever. Like a lady who would have preferred to be in Philadelphia, all things considered. Or catatonic. Too late, Manda, Lisey thought.

"Lisey, is he here?"

"Yes."

In the distance thunder rumbled, seeming to agree.

"Lisey, how do you kn—"

"Because he's cut the phone."

"The cell—"

"Still in the car. The lights will go next." She reached the end of the big redwood desk—Dumbo's Big Jumbo indeed, she thought, you could almost put a jet fighter down on the smucking thing—and now it was a straight shot to where her sister was standing, maybe eight steps across the rug with the maroon smears of her own blood on it.

When she reached Amanda the lights were still on, and Lisey had a moment's doubt. Wasn't it possible, after all, that a tree-branch knocked loose by the afternoon storms had finally fallen, taking down a telephone line?

Sure, but that's not what's happening.

She tried to give Amanda the gun. Amanda didn't want to take it. It thumped to the carpet and Lisey tensed for the explosion, which would be followed by either Amanda's scream of pain or her own as one of them took a bullet in the ankle. The gun didn't go off, just stared into the distance with its single idiot eye. As Lisey bent down to get it, she heard a thud from below, as if someone had walked into something down there and knocked it over. A cardboard box filled with mostly blank pages, say—one of a stack.

When Lisey looked up at her sister again, Amanda's hands were pressed, left over right, on the scant shelf of her bosom. Her face had gone pale; her eyes were dark pools of dismay. "I can't hold that gun," she whispered. "My hands…see?" She turned them palms out, displaying the cuts.

"Take the smucking thing," Lisey said. "You won't have to shoot him."

This time Amanda closed her fingers reluctantly around the Pathfinder's rubber grip. "Do you promise?"

"No," Lisey said. "But almost."

She peered toward the stairs leading down to the barn. It was darker at that end of the study, far more ominous, especially now that Amanda had the gun. Untrustworthy Amanda, who might do anything. Including, maybe fifty percent of the time, what you asked of her.

"What's your plan?" Amanda whispered. In the other room, Ole Hank was singing again, and Lisey knew The Last Picture Show's final credits were rolling.

Lisey put a finger across her lips in a Shhh gesture

(now you must be still)

and backed away from Amanda. One step, two steps, three steps, four. Now she was in the middle of the room, equidistant from Dumbo's Big Jumbo and the alcove doorway where Amanda held the .22 awkwardly with the barrel pointed at the bloodstained rug. Thunder rumbled. Country music played. From below: silence.

"I don't think he's down there," Amanda whispered.

Lisey took another backward step toward the big red maple desk. She still felt entirely keyed up, was almost vibrating with tension, but the rational part of her had to admit that Amanda might be right. The telephone was out, but up here on the View you could count on losing your service at least twice a month, especially during or just after storms. That thump she'd heard when she bent to pick up the gun…had she heard a thump? Or had it just been her imagination?

"I don't think anyone's down th—" Amanda began, and that was when the lights went out.

2

For a few seconds—endless ones—Lisey could see nothing, and damned herself for not bringing the flashlight from the car. It would have been so easy. It was all she could do to stay where she was, and she had to keep Amanda where she was.

"Manda, don't move! Stand still until I tell you!"

"Where is he, Lisey?" Amanda was starting to cry. "Where is he?"

"Why, right here, Missy," Jim Dooley said easily from the pitch blackness where the stairs were. "And I can see you both with these goggles I got on. You look a smidge green, but I can see you fine."

"He can't, he's lying," Lisey said, but she felt a sinking in her middle. She hadn't counted on him having some sort of night-vision equipment.

"Oh, Missus—if I'm lyin, I'm dyin." The voice was still coming from the stairhead, and now Lisey began to see a dim figure there. She couldn't see his paper sack of horrors, but oh Jesus she could hear it crackling. "I see you well enough to know it's Miss Tall-N-Scrawny with the peashooter. I want you to drop that gun on the floor, Missy Tall. Right now." His voice sharpened and cracked like the end of a whip loaded with shot. "Mind me, now! Drop hit!"

It was full dark out now, and if there was a moon it either hadn't risen or was occluded, but enough ambient light came through the skylights to show Lisey that Amanda was lowering the gun. Not dropping it yet, but lowering it. Lisey would have given anything to have been holding it herself, but—

But I need both hands free. So when the time comes I can grab you, you sonofabitch.

"No, Amanda, hold onto it. I don't think you'll have to shoot him. That's not the plan."

"Drop it, Missy, that's the plan."

Lisey said, "He comes in here where he doesn't belong, he calls you mean names, then tells you to drop the gun? Your own gun?"

The barely-there phantom that was Lisey's sister raised the Pathfinder again. Amanda didn't point it at the black cutout hovering in the shadows by the stairs, only held it with the muzzle pointing toward the ceiling, but she was still holding it. And her back had straightened.

"I tole you drop hit!" the dim figure nearly snarled, but something in Dooley's voice told Lisey he knew that battle was lost. His damned bag rattled.

"No!" Amanda shouted. "I won't! You…you get on out of here! Get out and leave my sister alone!"

"He won't," Lisey said before the shadow at the head of the stairs could reply. "He won't because he's crazy."

"You want to watch out for talk like that," Dooley said. "You seem to be forgettin I can see you like you 'us on a stage." "But you are crazy. Just as crazy as the kid who shot my husband in Nashville. Gerd Allen Cole. Do you know about him? Sure you do, you know everything about Scott. We used to laugh about guys like you, Jimmy—"

"That's enough now, Missus—"

"We called you Deep Space Cowboys. Cole was one and you're another. Slyer and meaner—because you're older—but not much different. A Deep Space Cowboy is a Deep Space Cowboy. You toooour the Milky Smuckin Way."

"You want to stop that talk," Dooley said. He was snarling again, and this time, Lisey thought, not just for effect. "I'm here on bi'ness." The paper bag rattled and now she could see the shadow move. The stairs were maybe fifty feet away from the desk and in the darkest part of the long main room. But Dooley was moving toward her as if her words were reeling him in and now her eyes were fully adapted to the gloom. Another few steps and his fancy mail-order goggles would make no difference. They would be on equal footing. Visually, at least.

"Why should I? It's true." And it was. Suddenly she knew everything she needed to know about Jim Dooley, alias Zack McCool, alias the Black Prince of the Incunks. The truth was in her mouth, like that sweet taste. It was that sweet taste.

"Don't provoke him, Lisey," Amanda said in a terrified voice.

"He provokes himself. All the provocation he needs comes right out of the overheated warp-drive inside his own head. Just like Cole."

"I ain't nuthin like him!" Dooley shouted.

Brilliant knowledge in every nerve-ending. Exploding in every nerve-ending. Dooley might have learned about Cole while reading up on his literary hero, but Lisey knew this wasn't so. And it all made such perfect, divine sense.

"You were never in Brushy Mountain. That was just a tale you told Woodbody. Barstool talk. But you were locked up, all right. That much was true. You were in the looneybin. You were in the looneybin with Cole."

"Shut up, Missus! You listen-a me and shut up right now!"

"Lisey, stop!" Amanda cried.

She paid no attention to either of them. "Did you two discuss your favorite Scott Landon books…when Cole was medicated enough to talk rationally, that is? Bet you did. He liked Empty Devils best, right? Sure. And you liked The Coaster's Daughter. Just a couple of Deep Space Cowboys talking books while they got a few repairs in their smucking guidance systems—"

"That's enough, I said!" Swimming out of the gloom. Swimming out of it like a diver coming up from black water into the green shallows, goggles and all. Of course divers didn't hold paper bags in front of their chests as if to shield their hearts from the blows of cruel widows who knew too much. "I ain't goan warn you again—"

Lisey took no notice. She didn't know if Amanda was still holding the gun and no longer cared. She was delirious. "Did you and Cole talk about Scott's books in group therapy? Sure you did. About the father stuff. And then, after they let you out, there was Woodsmucky, just like a Daddy in a Scott Landon book. One of the good Daddies. After they let you out of the nutbarn. After they let you out of the scream factory. After they let you out of the laughing academy, as the saying i—"

With a shriek, Dooley dropped his paper sack (it clanked) and launched himself at Lisey. She had time to think, Yes. This is why I needed my hands free.

Amanda also shrieked, hers overlapping his. Of the three of them only Lisey was calm, because only Lisey knew precisely what she was doing…if not precisely why. She made no effort to run. She opened her arms to Jim Dooley and caught him like a fever.

3

He would have knocked her to the floor and landed on top of her—Lisey had no doubt this was his intention—if not for the desk. She let his weight carry her back, smelling the sweat in his hair and on his skin. She also felt the curve of the goggles digging into her temple and heard a low, rapid clicking sound just below her left ear.

That's his teeth, she thought. That's his teeth, trying for my neck.

Her butt smacked against the long side of Dumbo's Big Jumbo. Amanda screamed again. There was a loud report and a brief brilliant flash of light.

"Leave her alone, motherfucker!"

Big talk but she fired into the ceiling, Lisey thought, and tightened her locked hands behind Dooley's neck as he bent her backward like a dance-partner at the end of a particularly amorous tango. She could smell gun-smoke, her ears were ringing, and she could feel his cock, heavy and almost fully erect.

"Jim," she whispered, holding him. "I'll give you what you want. Let me give you what you want."

His grip loosened a little. She sensed his confusion. Then, with a feline yowl, Amanda landed on his back and Lisey was forced down again, now almost sprawling on the desk. Her spine gave a warning creak, but she could see the oval smudge of his face—enough to make out how afraid he looked. Was he afraid of me all along? she wondered.

Now or never, little Lisey.

She sought his eyes behind the weird circles of glass, found them, locked in on them. Amanda was still yowling like a cat on a hot griddle, and Lisey could see her fists hammering Dooley's shoulders. Both fists. So she had fired that one shot into the ceiling, then dropped the gun. Ah well, maybe it was for the best.

"Jim." God, his weight was killing her. "Jim."

His head dipped, as if drawn by the lock of her eyes and the force of her will. For a moment Lisey didn't think she would be able to reach him, even so. Then, with a final desperate lunge—Pafko at the wall, Scott would have said, quoting God knew who—she did. She breathed the meat and onions he'd eaten for his supper as she settled her mouth on his. She used her tongue to force his lips open, kissed harder, and so passed on her second sip of the pool. She felt the sweetness go. The world she knew wavered and then began to go with it. It happened fast. The walls turned transparent and that other world's mingled scents filled her nose: frangipani, bougainvillea, roses, night-blooming cereus.

"Geromino," she said into his mouth, and as if it had only been waiting for that word, the solid weight of the desk beneath her turned to rain. A moment later it was gone completely. She fell; Jim Dooley fell on top of her; Amanda, still screaming, fell on top of both.

Bool, Lisey thought. Bool, the end.

4

She landed on a thick mat of grass that she knew so well she might have been rolling around in it her whole life. She had time to register the sweetheart trees and then the breath was driven out of her in a large and noisy woof. Black spots danced before her in the sunset-colored air.

She might have passed out if Dooley hadn't rolled away. Amanda he shrugged off his back as if she had been no more than a troublesome kitten. Dooley surged to his feet, staring first down the hill carpeted with purple lupin and then turning the other way, toward the sweetheart trees that formed the outrider of what Paul and Scott Landon had called the Fairy Forest. Lisey was shocked by Dooley's aspect. He looked like some weird flesh-and-hair-covered skull. After a moment she realized it was his narrowness of face combined with evening shadows, and what had happened to his goggles. The lenses hadn't made the trip to Boo'ya Moon. His eyes stared out through the holes where they had been. His mouth hung open. Spit ran between the upper and lower lips in silver strings.

"You always…liked…Scott's books," Lisey said. She sounded like a winded runner, but her breath was returning and the black flecks in front of her eyes were disappearing. "How do you like his world, Mr. Dooley?"

"Where…" His mouth moved, but he couldn't finish.

"Boo'ya Moon, on the edge of the Fairy Forest, near the grave of Scott's brother, Paul."

She knew that Dooley would be as dangerous to her (and to Amanda) over here as in Scott's study once such wits as he possessed came back to him, but she still allowed herself a moment to look over that long purple slope, and at the darkening sky. Once more the sun was going down in orange fire while the full moon rose opposite. She thought, as she had before, that the mixture of heat and cold silver might kill her with its feverish beauty.

Not that it was beauty she had to worry about. A sunburned hand fell on her shoulder.

"What are you doin-a me, Missus?" Dooley asked. His eyes bulged inside the empty goggles. "You tryin to hypno-lize me? Because it won't work."

"Not at all, Mr. Dooley," Lisey said. "You wanted what was Scott's, didn't you? And surely this is better than any unpublished story, or even cutting a woman with her own can opener, wouldn't you say? Look! A whole other world! A place made of imagination! Dreams spun into whole cloth! Of course it's dangerous in the forest—dangerous everywhere at night, and it's almost night now—but I'm confident that a brave and strapping lunatic such as yourself—"

She saw what he meant to do, saw her murder clearly in those weird socketed eyes, and cried out her sister's name…in alarm, yes, but also starting to laugh. In spite of everything. Laughing at him. Partly because he looked pretty silly with the glass gone out of his goggles, mostly because at this mortal moment the punchline of some ancient whore-house joke had popped into her mind: Hey, youse guys, your sign fell down! The fact that she couldn't remember the joke itself only made it funnier.

Then her breath was gone and Lisey could no longer laugh. She could only rattle.

5

She clawed at Dooley's face with her short but far from nonexistent nails and left three bleeding gouges in one cheek, but the grip on her throat didn't loosen—if anything, it tightened down. The rattle coming from her was louder now, the sound of some primitive mechanical device with dirt in its gears. Mr. Silver's potato-grader, maybe.

Amanda, where the smuck are you? she thought, and then Amanda was there. Pounding her fists on Dooley's back and shoulders had done no good. This time she fell on her knees, grasped his crotch through his jeans with her wounded hands…and twisted.

Dooley howled and thrust Lisey away. She flew into the high grass, fell on her back, and then scrambled to her feet again, gasping breath down her fiery throat. Dooley was bent over with his head down and his hands between his legs, a painful pose that brought Lisey a clear memory of a seesaw accident in the schoolyard and Darla saying matter-of-factly: "That's just one of the reasons I'm glad I'm not a boy."

Amanda charged him.

"Manda, no!" Lisey shouted, but too late. Even hurt, Dooley was miserably quick. He evaded Amanda easily, then clubbed her aside with one bony fist. He tore off the useless goggles with the other hand and threw them into the grass: he slang them forth. All pretense at sanity had left those blue eyes. He could have been the dead thing in Empty Devils, climbing implacably out of the well to exact its revenge.

"I dunno just where we are, but I tell you one thing, Missus: you ain't never goan home."

"Unless you catch me, you're the one who's never going home," Lisey said. Then she laughed again. She was frightened— terrified—but it felt good to laugh, perhaps because she understood that her laughter was her knife. Every peal from her burning throat drove the point deeper into his flesh.

"Don't you run 'at hee-haw sound at me, you bitch, don't you goddam dare!" Dooley roared, and ran at her.

Lisey turned to flee. She had taken no more than two running steps toward the path into the woods when she heard Dooley scream in pain. She looked over her shoulder and saw him on his knees. There was something jutting out of his upper arm, and his shirt was darkening rapidly around it. Dooley staggered to his feet and plucked at it with a curse. The jutting thing wiggled but didn't come out. Lisey saw a flash of yellow, running away from it in a line. Dooley cried out again, then seized the thing stuck in his flesh with his free hand.

Lisey understood. It came in a flash, too perfect not to be true. He had started to run after her, but Amanda had tripped him before he could do more than get started. And he had come down on Paul Landon's wooden grave-marker. The crosspiece was sticking out of his bicep like an oversized pin. Now he yanked it free and threw it aside. More blood flowed from the open wound, scarlet creeping down his shirtsleeve to the elbow. Lisey knew she had to make sure Dooley didn't turn his rage on Amanda, who was lying helplessly in the grass almost at his feet.

"Can't catch a flea, can't catch me!" Lisey chanted, drawing on playground lore she didn't even know she remembered. Then she stuck her tongue out at Dooley, twiddling her fingers in her ears for good measure.

"You bitch! You cunt!" Dooley screamed, and charged.

Lisey ran. She wasn't laughing now, she was finally too afraid to laugh, but she was still wearing a terrified smile as her feet found the path and she ran into the Fairy Forest, where it was already night.

6

The marker that said TO THE POOL was gone, but as Lisey ran down the first stretch—the path a dim white line that seemed to float amid the darker masses of the surrounding trees— broken cackles arose from ahead of her. Laughers, she thought, and chanced a look back over her shoulder, thinking that if her friend Dooley heard those babies, he might change his mind about—

But no. Dooley was still there, visible in the stutters of fading light because he had gained on her, he was really flying along in spite of the black blood now coating his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist. Lisey tripped over a root in the path, almost lost her balance, and somehow managed to keep it, in part by reminding herself that Dooley would be on top of her five seconds after she fell. The last thing she'd feel would be his breath, the last thing she'd smell would be the curdling aroma of the surrounding trees as they changed to their more dangerous night-selves, and the last thing she'd hear would be the insane laughter of the hyena-things that lived deeper in the forest.

I can hear him panting. I can hear that because he's gaining. Even running at top speed—and I won't be able to keep this up for long—he can run a little bit faster than I can. Why doesn't that squeeze in the balls she fetched him slow him down? Why doesn't the blood-loss?

The answer to those questions was simple, the logic stark: they were slowing him down. Without them, she'd be caught already. Lisey was in third gear. She tried to find fourth and couldn't. Apparently she didn't have a fourth gear. Behind her, the harsh and rapid sound of Jim Dooley's breathing grew closer still, and she knew that in only a minute, maybe less, she would feel the first brush of his fingers on the back of her shirt.

Or in her hair.

7

The path tilted and grew steeper for a few moments; the shadows grew deeper. She thought she might finally be gaining a little bit on Dooley. She didn't dare cast a glance back to see, and she prayed that Amanda wouldn't try following them. It might be safe on Sweetheart Hill, and it might be safe at the pool, but it wasn't a bit safe in these woods. Jim Dooley was far from the worst of it, either. Now she heard the faint and dreamy ring of Chuckie G.'s bell, swiped by Scott in another lifetime and hung from a tree at the top of the next rise.

Lisey saw brighter light ahead, not reddish-orange now but just a dying pink afterglow. It stole through a thinning of the trees. The path was a bit brighter, too. She could see its gentle upslope. Beyond that next rise, she remembered, it sank again, winding through even thicker forest until it reached the big rock and the pool beyond.

Can't make it, she thought. The breath tearing in and out of her throat was hot and there was the beginning of a stitch in her side. He'll catch me before I'm halfway up that hill.

It was Scott's voice that responded, laughing on top, surprisingly angry beneath. You didn't come all this way for that. Go on, babyluv—SOWISA.

SOWISA, yes. Strapping it on had never seemed more appropriate than right now. Lisey tore up the hill, hair plastered to her skull in sweaty strings, arms pumping. She breathed in huge snatches, exhaled in harsh bursts. She wished for the sweet taste in her mouth, but she'd given her last sip of the pool to the crazy smuck behind her and now what her mouth tasted of was copper and exhaustion. She could hear him closing in again, not yelling now, saving all his breath for the chase. The cramp in her side deepened. A high, sweet singing started up first in her right ear, then in both of them. The laughers cackled closer now, as if they wanted to be in at the kill. She could smell the change in the trees, how the aroma that had been sweet had grown sharp, like the smell of the ancient henna she and Darla had found in Granny D's bathroom after she died, a poison smell, and—

That's not the trees.

All the laughers had fallen silent. Now there was only the sound of Dooley ripping breath from the air as he pounded along behind her, trying to close those last few feet of distance. And what she thought of was Scott's arms sweeping around her, Scott pulling her against his body, Scott whispering Shhhh, Lisey. For your life and mine, now you must be still.

She thought: It's not lying across the path, like it was when he tried to get to the pool in '04. This time it's in its run beside the path. Like it was when I came to him during the winter of the big wind from Yellowknife.

But just as she glimpsed the bell, still hanging from that rotting length of cord, the last light of the day shining on its curve, Jim Dooley put on a final burst of speed and Lisey actually did feel his fingers slipping across the back of her shirt, hunting for purchase there, anything, a bra-strap would do. She managed to hold back the scream that rose in her throat, but it was a near thing. She bolted onward, finding a little more speed of her own, speed that probably would have done her no good if Dooley hadn't tripped again, going down with a cry—"You BITCH!"—that Lisey thought he would live to regret.

But perhaps not for long.

8

That shy tinkle came again, from what had once been

(Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle!)

the Bell Tree and was now the Bell-and-Spade Tree. And there it was, Scott's silver spade. When she had placed it here— following a powerful intuition she now understood—the laughers had been gibbering hysterically. Now the Fairy Forest was silent except for the sounds of her own tortured respiration and Dooley's gasping spew of curses. The long boy had been sleeping—dozing, at least—and Dooley's yelling had awakened it.

Maybe this was how it was supposed to go, but that did not make it easy. It was horrible to feel the awakening whisper of not-quite-alien thoughts from her undermind. They were like restless hands feeling for loose boards or testing the closed cover of a well. She found herself considering too many terrible things that had at one time or another undermined her heart: a pair of bloody teeth she'd once found on the floor of a movie-theater bathroom, two little kids crying in each other's arms outside a convenience store, the smell of her husband as he lay on his deathbed, looking at her with his burning eyes, Granny D lying dying in the chickenyard with her foot going jerk-jerk-jerk.

Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine's gone and the hour is none.

All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.

And now—

In the always perfect, never-ending moment of now

9

Gasping, whining, her heart nothing but bloodthunder in her ears, Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair. Dooley's coming. She hears him. He's quit cursing but she hears the approach of his respiration. It's going to be close, closer than with Blondie, even though this madman doesn't have a gun, because if Dooley manages to grab hold of her before she's able to turn—

But he doesn't. Not quite. Lisey pivots like a hitter going after a fat pitch, swinging the silver spade just as hard as she can. The bowl catches a last bloom of pink light, a fading corsage, and its speeding upper edge ticks the hanging bell on its way by. The bell says a final word—TING!—and goes flying into the gloom, trailing its bit of rotting cord after it. Lisey sees the spade carry on forward and upward, and once more she thinks Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one! Then the flat of the blade connects with Jim Dooley's onrushing face, making not a crunch—the sound she remembers from Nashville—but a kind of muffled gonging. Dooley shrieks in surprise and agony. He is driven sideways, off the path and into the trees, flailing with his arms, trying to keep his balance. She has a moment to see that his nose is laid radically over to one side, just as Cole's was; time to see that his mouth is gushing blood from the bottom and both corners. Then there's movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is vast movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There's the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it's there. Scott's long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of now drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends.

10

Almost before Lisey was aware of what was happening and surely before she was ready—although the idea of ever being ready for such a thing was a joke—suddenly it was there. The piebald thing. The living embodiment of what Scott had been talking about when he talked about the bad-gunky.

What she saw was an enormous plated side like cracked snakeskin. It came bulging through the trees, bending some and snapping others, seeming to pass right through a couple of the biggest. That was impossible, of course, but the impression never faded. There was no smell but there was an unpleasant sound, a chuffing, somehow gutty sound, and then its patchwork head appeared, taller than the trees and blotting out the sky. Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and screamed…lived and screamed…lived and screamed.

She herself could not scream. She was incapable of any noise at all. She took two steps backward, steps that felt weirdly calm to her. The spade, its silver bowl once more dripping with the blood of an insane man, fell from her fingers and landed on the path. She thought, It sees me…and my life will never truly be mine again. It won't let it be mine.

For a moment it reared, a shapeless, endless thing with patches of hair growing in random clumps from its damp and heaving slicks of flesh, its great and dully avid eye upon her. The dying pink of the day and the waxing silver glow of moonlight lit the rest of what still lay snakelike in the shrubbery.

Then its eye turned from Lisey to the screaming, thrashing creature that was trying to back out of the little copse of trees that had entangled him, Jim Dooley with blood gushing from his broken mouth, broken nose, and one swollen eye; Jim Dooley with blood even in his hair. Dooley saw what was looking at him and screamed no more. Lisey saw him trying to cover his good eye, saw his hands fall to his sides, knew he had lost his strength, and felt a moment of pity for him in spite of everything, an instant of empathy that was gruesome in its strength and nearly unendurable in its human harmony. In that moment she might have taken it all back if it had meant only her own dying, but she thought of Amanda and tried to harden her horrified mind and heart.

The huge thing tangled in the trees poked forward almost delicately and gathered Dooley in. The flesh around the hole in its blunt snout seemed to wrinkle briefly, almost to pucker, and Lisey remembered Scott lying on the hot pavement that day in Nashville. As the low snorts and the crunching sounds began and Dooley started to voice his final, seemingly endless cries, she remembered Scott whispering, I hear it taking its meal. She remembered how he had pursed his lips in a tight O, and she recalled with perfect clarity how blood had burst from them when he made that indescribably nasty chuffing sound: fine ruby droplets which seemed to hang in the sweltering air.

She ran then, though she would have sworn she no longer knew how. She bolted back along the path toward the hill of lupin, away from the place near the Bell-and-Spade Tree where the long boy was eating Jim Dooley alive. She knew it was doing her and Amanda a favor, but she knew it was a lefthanded favor at best, because if she survived this night, she would now be free of the long boy no more than Scott had been, no, not a single day since his childhood. Now it had marked her as well, made her a part of its never-ending moment, its terrible world-spanning regard. From now on she would have to be careful, especially if she happened to wake up in the middle of the night…and Lisey had an idea that her nights of sound sleep were over. In the small hours she would have to steer her gaze away from mirrors, and window-glass, and especially from the curved surfaces of waterglasses, God knew why. She would have to protect herself as well as she could.

If she survived this night.

It's very close, honey, Scott had whispered as he lay shivering on the hot pavement. Very close.

Behind her, Dooley screamed as if he would never stop. Lisey thought it would drive her mad. Or that it already had.

11

Just before she emerged from the trees, Dooley's shrieking finally did cease. She didn't see Amanda. This filled Lisey with new terror. Suppose her sister had run away to who knew which point of the compass? Or suppose she was still somewhere close at hand, but curled up in a fetal position, catatonic again and concealed by the shadows?

"Amanda? Amanda?"

There was an endless moment during which she heard nothing. It was followed—God, at last!—by a rustling in the high grass to Lisey's left, and Amanda stood up. Her face, pale to begin with and painted paler by the light of the rising moon, now looked like that of a wraith. Or a harpy. She came stumbling forward, arms out, and Lisey gathered her in. Amanda was shivering. The hands at the nape of Lisey's neck were locked in a chilly knot.

"Oh Lisey, I thought he'd never stop!"

"Me either."

"And so high…I couldn't tell…they were so high…I hoped it was him, but I thought, 'What if it's Little? What if it's Lisey?'" Amanda began to sob against the side of Lisey's neck.

"I'm all right, Amanda. I'm here and I'm all right."

Amanda pulled her face away from Lisey's neck so she could look down into her younger sister's face. "Is he dead?"

"Yes." She would not share her intuition that Dooley might have achieved a kind of hellish immortality within the thing that had eaten him. "Dead."

"Then I want to go back! Can we go back?"

"Yes."

"I don't know if I can make a picture of Scott's study in my mind…I'm so upset…" Amanda looked around fearfully. "This isn't like Southwind at all."

"No," Lisey agreed, gathering Amanda back into her arms. "And I know you're afraid. You just do the best you can."

Lisey was actually not worried about getting back to Scott's study, back to Castle View, back to the world. She thought the problem now might be staying there. She remembered a doctor telling her once she'd have to be especially careful of her ankle after giving it a savage sprain while ice-skating. Because once you stretch those tendons, he'd said, it's ever so much easier to do it next time.

That much easier next time, right. And it had seen her. That eye, as big as a spring sinkhole, both dead and alive, had been on her.

"Lisey, you're so brave," Amanda said in a small voice. She took one final look at the sloping hill of lupin, gilded and strange in the growing light of the moon, then pressed her face against the side of Lisey's neck again.

"Keep talking like that and I'll have you back in Greenlawn tomorrow. Close your eyes."

"They are."

Lisey closed her own. For a moment she saw that blunt head that wasn't a head at all but only a maw, a straw, a funnel into blackness filled with endless swirling bad-gunky. In it she still heard Jim Dooley screaming, but the sound was now thin, and mixed with other screams. With what felt like tremendous effort, she swept the images and sounds away, replacing them with a picture of the red maple desk and the sound of Ole Hank—who else?—singing "Jambalaya." There was time to think of how at first she and Scott hadn't been able to come back when they so badly needed to with the long boy so close, time to think of

(it's the african Lisey I feel it like an anchor)

what he had said, time to wonder why that should make her think again of Amanda looking with such longing at the good ship Hollyhocks (a goodbye look if there ever was one), and then time was up. Once more she felt the air turn, and the moonlight was gone. She knew even with her eyes closed. There was the sense of taking a short, jolting fall. Then they were in the study and the study was dark because Dooley had killed the electricity, but still Hank Williams was singing—My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh—because even with the power cut, Ole Hank meant to have his say.

12

"Lisey? Lisey!"

"Manda, you're crushing me, get off—"

"Lisey, are we back?"

Two women in the dark. Lying tangled together on the carpet.

"Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozens…" Drifting out of the alcove.

"Yes, would you get the smuck off me, I can't breathe!"

"Sorry…Lisey, you're on my arm…"

"Son-of-a-gun, we'll have big fun…on the bayou!"

Lisey managed to roll to her right. Amanda pulled her arm free, and a moment later the weight of her body came off Lisey's midsection. Lisey gasped in a deep—and deeply satisfying—breath. As she let it out, Hank Williams quit singing in mid-phrase.

"Lisey, why is it so dark in here?"

"Because Dooley cut the power, remember?"

"He cut the lights," Amanda said reasonably. "If he'd cut the power, the TV wouldn't have been playing."

Lisey could have asked Amanda why the TV had suddenly stopped playing, but didn't bother. Other matters needed discussing. They had other fish to fry, as the saying was. "Let's go in the house."

"I'm a hundred percent down with that," Amanda said. Her fingers touched Lisey's elbow, groped down her forearm, and seized her hand. The sisters stood up together. Amanda added, in a confiding tone: "No offense, Lisey, but if I ever come here again it'll be too soon."

Lisey understood how Amanda felt, but her own feelings had changed. Scott's study had daunted her, no argument there. It had kept her at arm's length for two long years. But she thought the major chore which had needed doing in here was now done. She and Amanda had cleansed Scott's ghost away, kindly and—time would tell, but she was almost positive—completely.

"Come on," she said. "Let's go in the house. I'll make hot chocolate."

"And maybe a little brandy to start with?" Amanda asked hopefully. "Or don't crazy ladies get brandy?"

"Crazy ladies don't. You do."

Holding hands, they groped toward the stairs. Lisey stopped only once, when she stepped on something. She bent over and picked up a round of glass easily an inch thick. She realized it was one of the lenses from Dooley's night-vision goggles and dropped it with a grimace of disgust.

"What?" Amanda asked.

"Nothing. I'm able to see a little. How about you?"

"A little. But don't let go of my hand."

"I won't, honey."

They descended the stairs to the barn together. It took longer to do it that way, but it felt a lot safer.

13

Lisey set out her smallest juice glasses and poured them each a shot of brandy from a bottle she found at the very back of the dining room drinks cabinet. She held her glass up and clinked it against Amanda's. They were standing at the kitchen counter. Every light in the room was on, even the gooseneck lamp in the corner where Lisey scribbled checks at a child's schooldesk.

"Over the teeth," Lisey said.

"Over the gums," Amanda said.

"Look out guts, here it comes," they said together, and drank.

Amanda bent and blew out a gust of breath. When she

straightened up, there were roses in her formerly pale cheeks, a line of red forming on her brow, and a tiny saddle of scarlet on the bridge of her nose. Tears stood in her eyes.

"Shit-a-goddam! What was that?"

Lisey, whose throat felt as hot as Manda's face looked, took hold of the bottle and read the label. STAR BRANDY, it said. A PRODUCT OF ROMANIA.

"Romanian brandy?" Amanda looked aghast. "Ain't no such animal! Where'd you get it?"

"It was a gift to Scott. He got it for doing something—I forget what—but I think they threw in a pen set, too."

"It's probably poison. You pour it out and I'll pray we don't die."

"You pour it out. I'll make the hot chocolate. Swiss. Not from Romania."

She began to turn away, but Amanda touched her shoulder. "Maybe we should skip the hot chocolate and just get out of here before any of those Sheriff's deputies come back to check on you."

"Do you think so?" Even as she asked the question, Lisey knew Amanda was right.

"Yes. Do you dare to go up in the study again?"

"Of course I do."

"Then get my little gun. Don't forget the lights are out up there."

Lisey opened the top of the little desk where she wrote her checks and pulled out the long-barreled flashlight she kept in there. She turned it on. The light was nice and bright.

Amanda was rinsing their glasses. "If someone found out we were here, that wouldn't be the end of the world. But if your deputies found out we came with a gun…and that man just happened to disappear off the face of the earth around the same time…"

Lisey, who had thought only as far as getting Dooley to the Bell-and-Spade Tree (and the long boy had never been a part of her imaginings), realized she still had work to do and had better get busy doing it. Professor Woodbody wasn't ever going to report his old drinking buddy missing, but the man might have relatives somewhere, and if anybody in the world had a motive for getting rid of the Black Prince of the Incunks, it was Lisey Landon. Of course there was no body (what Scott had sometimes been pleased to refer to as the corpus delicious), but still, she and her sister had spent what some might construe as an extremely suspicious afternoon and evening. Plus the County Sheriff's Department knew Dooley had been harassing her; she'd told them so herself.

"I'll get his shite," she said.

Amanda did not smile. "Good."

14

The flashlight cut a wide swath, and the study wasn't as spooky on her own as Lisey had feared it might be. Having stuff to do no doubt helped. She began by putting the Pathfinder back in its shoebox, then went prospecting along the floor with the light. She found both of the lenses that went with the night-vision goggles, plus half a dozen double-A batteries. She assumed these were from the gadget's powerpack. The pack must have traveled, although she couldn't remember actually seeing it; the batteries obviously hadn't. Then she picked up Dooley's terrible paper bag. Amanda had either forgotten the bag or hadn't even realized Dooley had it, but the stuff in here would look bad for her if it were found. Especially when combined with the gun. Lisey knew they could do tests on the Pathfinder that would show it had been fired recently; she wasn't dumb (and she watched CSI). She also knew the tests wouldn't show it had been fired only once, into the ceiling. She tried to handle the paper bag so it wouldn't clank, and it clanked anyway. She looked around for other signs of Dooley and saw none. There were bloodstains on the rug, but if that were ever tested, both the type and the DNA would match hers. Blood on her rug would look very bad in combination with the stuff in the bag she now held in her hand, but with the bag gone, they'd be all right. Probably all right.

Where's his car? His PT Cruiser? Because I know that car I saw was his.

She couldn't worry about that now. It was dark. This was what she had to worry about, this stuff rah-cheer. And her sisters. Darla and Canty, currently on Mr. Toad's Wild Ride way the hell and gone up to Acadia Mental Health in Derry. So they wouldn't get caught in the Jim Dooley version of Mr. Silver's potato-grader.

But did she really have to worry about those two? No. They'd be royally pissed, of course…and royally curious…but in the end they'd keep quiet if she and Amanda told them they absolutely had to, and why? Because of the sister thing, that was why. She and Amanda would have to be careful with them, and there would have to be some sort of story (what kind could possibly cover this Lisey had no idea, although she was sure Scott could have come up with something). There had to be a story because, unlike Amanda and Lisey, Darla and Cantata had husbands. And husbands were all too often the back door by which secrets escaped into the outside world.

As Lisey turned to go, her eye was caught by the booksnake sleeping against the wall. All those quarterly reviews and scholarly journals, all those year-end annuals, bound reports, and copies of theses done on Scott's work. Many containing pictures of a gone life—call it SCOTT AND LISEY! THE MARRIED YEARS!

She could easily see a couple of college kids dismantling the snake and loading its component parts into cardboard boxes with liquor brands printed on the sides, then stacking the boxes in the back of a truck and driving them away. To Pitt? Bite your tongue, Lisey thought. She didn't consider herself a grudge-holding woman, but after Jim Dooley, it would be a snowy day in hell before she put any more of Scott's stuff where Woodsmucky could look at it without buying a plane ticket. No, the Fogler Library at the University of Maine would do just fine—right down the road from Cleaves Mills. She could see herself standing by and watching the final packingup, maybe bringing out a pitcher of iced tea to the kids when the work was done. And when the tea was finished, they would set their glasses down and thank her. One of them might tell her how much he'd liked her husband's books, and the other might say they were very sorry for her loss. As if he had died two weeks ago. She'd thank them. Then she would watch them drive away with all those frozen images of her life with him locked inside their truck.

You can really let go?

She thought she could. Still, that snake drowsing along the wall drew the eye. So many shut books, sleeping deep—they drew the eye. She looked a moment longer, thinking there had once been a young woman named Lisey Debusher with a young woman's high firm breasts. Lonely? A little, yes, she had been. Scared? Sure, a bit, that went with being twenty-two. And a young man had come into her life. A young man whose hair wouldn't ever stay off his forehead. A young man with a lot to say.

"I always loved you, Scott," she told the empty study. Or perhaps it was the sleeping books she told. "You and your everlasting mouth. I was your gal pal. Wasn't I?"

Then, shining the flashlight's beam ahead of her, she went back down the stairs with the shoebox in one hand and Dooley's awful paper bag in the other.

15

Amanda was standing at the kitchen door when Lisey came back in.

"Good," Amanda said. "I was getting worried. What's in the bag?"

"You don't want to know."

"Oh…kay," Amanda said. "Is he…you know, gone from up there?"

"I think so, yes."

"I hope so." Amanda shivered. "He was a scary guy."

You don't know the half of it, Lisey thought.

"Well," Amanda said, "I guess we better get going."

"Going where?"

"Lisbon Falls," Amanda said. "The old farm."

"What—" Then she stopped. It made a weird kind of sense.

"I came around at Greenlawn, just like you told that Dr. Alberness, and you took me to my house so I could change my clothes. Then I got freaky and started talking about the farm. Come on, Lisey, let's go, let's blow this pop-shop before someone comes." Amanda led her out into the dark.

Lisey, bemused, let herself be led. The old Debusher place still stood on its five acres out at the end of the Sabbatus Road in Lisbon, about sixty miles from Castle View. Willed jointly to five women (and three living husbands), it would probably stand there, rotting in high weeds and fallow fields, for years to come, unless property values rose enough to cause them to drop their differing ideas of what should be done with it. A trust fund set up by Scott Landon in the late nineteeneighties paid the property taxes.

"Why did you want to go to the old farm?" Lisey asked as she slipped behind the BMW's wheel. "I'm not clear on that."

"Because I wasn't," Amanda said as Lisey turned in a circle and started down the long drive. "I just said I had to go there and see the old place if I wasn't going to, you know, slip back into the Twilight Zone, so of course you took me."

"Of course I did," Lisey said. She looked both ways, saw no one coming—especially no County Sheriff's Department cars, praise God—and turned left, the direction that would take her through Mechanic Falls, Poland Springs, and eventually to Gray and Lisbon beyond. "And why did we send Darla and Canty in the wrong direction?"

"I absolutely insisted," Amanda said. "I was afraid if they showed up, they'd take me back to my house or your house or even to Greenlawn before I got a chance to visit with Mom and Dad and then spend some time at the home place." For a moment Lisey had no idea what Manda was talking about—spend time with Mom and Dad? Then she got it. The Debusher family plot was at nearby Sabbatus Vale Cemetery. Both Good Ma and Dandy were buried there, along with Grampy and Granny D and God knew how many others.

She asked, "But weren't you afraid I'd take you back?"

Amanda eyed her indulgently. "Why would you take me back? You were the one who took me out."

"Maybe because you started acting crazy, asking to visit a farm that's been deserted for thirty years or more?"

"Foof!" Amanda waved a dismissive hand. "I could always wrap you around my finger, Lisey—Canty and Darla both know this."

"Bullshit you could!"

Amanda only gave her a maddening smile, her complexion a rather weird green in the glow of the dashboard lights, and said nothing. Lisey opened her mouth to renew the argument, then closed it again. She thought the story would work, because it came down to a pair of easily grasped ideas: Amanda had been acting crazy (nothing new there) and Lisey had been humoring her (understandable, given the circumstances). They could work with it. As for the shoebox with the gun in it…and Dooley's bag…

"We're going to stop in Mechanic Falls," she told Amanda. "Where the bridge goes over the Androscoggin River. I've got a couple of things to get rid of."

"Yes you do," Amanda said. Then she folded her hands in her lap, put her head back against the rest, and closed her eyes.

Lisey turned on the radio, and wasn't a bit surprised to get Ole Hank singing "Honky Tonkin'." She sang along, low. She knew every word. This did not surprise her, either. Some things you never forgot. She had come to believe that the very things the practical world dismissed as ephemera—things like songs and moonlight and kisses—were sometimes the things that lasted the longest. They might be foolish, but they defied forgetting. And that was good.

That was good.