Lisey's Story

XVI. Lisey and The Story Tree

(Scott Has His Say)

1

Once Lisey actually got going on emptying out Scott's study, the job went faster than she ever would have believed. And she never would have believed she'd end up doing it with Darla and Canty as well as Amanda. Canty remained standoffish and suspicious for a time—it felt like a long time to Lisey—but Amanda was completely unfazed. "It's an act. She'll drop it and come around. Just give her time, Lisey. Sisterhood is powerful."

Eventually Cantata did come around, although Lisey had a feeling Canty never entirely rid herself of the idea that Amanda had been faking in order to Get Attention, and that she and Lisey had been Up To Something. Probably Something No Good. Darla was puzzled about Amanda's recovery, and the sisters' odd trip to the old farm in Lisbon, but she, at least, never believed Amanda had been faking.

Darla had seen her, after all.

In any case, the four sisters cleaned and emptied the long, rambling suite over the barn during the week after the Fourth of July, hiring a couple of husky high school boys to help with the heavy lifting. The worst of said heavy lifting turned out to be Dumbo's Big Jumbo, which had to be disassembled (the component parts reminded Lisey of the Exploded Man in high school biology class, only you'd have to call this version the Exploded Desk), and then lowered with a rented winch. The high school boys bawled encouragement to each other as the pieces went down. Lisey stood by with her sisters, praying like mad that neither of the boys would lose a finger or thumb in one of the slings or pulleys. Neither did, and by the end of the week, everything in Scott's study had been taken away, marked either for donation or long-term storage while Lisey figured out what the hell to do with it.

Everything, that was, except for the booksnake. That remained, dozing in the long, empty main room—the hot main room, now that the air conditioners had been removed. Even with the skylights open in the daytime and a couple of fans to keep the air circulating, it was hot. And why wouldn't it be? The place was nothing but a glorified barn loft with a literary pedigree.

Then there were those ugly maroon smudges on the carpet—the oyster-white carpet that couldn't be taken up until the booksnake was gone. She'd dismissed the stains as careless slops of Wood Coat varnish when Canty asked about them, but Amanda knew better, and Lisey had an idea that Darla might have a few suspicions, as well. The carpet had to go, but the books had to go first, and Lisey wasn't quite ready to dispose of them. Just why she wasn't sure. Maybe only because they were the last of Scott's things still up here, the very last of him.

So she waited.

2

On the third day of the sisters' cleaning binge, Deputy Boeckman called to tell Lisey that an abandoned PT Cruiser with Delaware plates had been found in a gravel pit on the Stackpole Church Road, about three miles from her house. Would Lisey come down to the Sheriff's Office and take a look? They had it back in the parking lot, the deputy said, where they kept the impounds and a few "drug-rides" (whatever they were). Lisey went with Amanda. Neither Darla nor Canty was much interested; all they knew was that a kook had been sniffing around, making a pest of himself about Scott's papers. Kooks were nothing new in their sister's life; over the years of Scott's celebrity, any number of them had been drawn to him like moths to a bug-light. The most famous, of course, had been Cole. Neither Lisey nor Amanda had said anything to give Darla and Canty the idea that this one was in Cole's class. Certainly there was no mention of the dead cat in the mailbox, and Lisey had been at some pains to impress discretion on the Sheriff's deputies, as well.

The car in Stall 7 was a PT Cruiser, no more and no less, beige in color, nondescript once you got past the slightly flamboyant body-type. It could have been the one Lisey saw as she drove home from Greenlawn on that long, long Thursday; it could have been one of several thousand others. This was what she told Deputy Boeckman, reminding him that she'd seen it coming almost directly out of the setting sun. He nodded sadly. What she knew in her heart was that it was the one. She could smell Dooley on it. She thought: I am going to hurt you places you didn't let the boys to touch at the junior high dances and had to repress a shiver.

"It's a stolen car, isn't it?" Amanda asked.

"You bet your bippy," Boeckman said.

A deputy Lisey didn't know strolled over. He was tall, probably six and a half feet; it seemed a rule that these men should be tall. Broad-shouldered, too. He introduced himself as Deputy Andy Clutterbuck and shook Lisey's hand.

"Ah," she said, "the acting Sheriff."

His smile was brilliant. "Nope, Norris is back. He's in court this afternoon, but he's back, all right. I'm just plain old Deputy Clutterbuck again."

"Congratulations. This is my sister, Amanda Debusher."

Clutterbuck shook Amanda's hand. "Pleased, Ms. Debusher." Then, to both of them: "That car was stolen out of a shopping mall in Laurel, Maryland." He stared at it, thumbs hooked in his belt. "Did you know that in France, they call PT Cruisers le car Jimmy Cagney?"

Amanda seemed unimpressed by this information. "Were there fingerprints?"

"Nary a one," he said. "Wiped clean. Plus whoever was driving it took the cover off the dome-light and broke the bulb. What do you think of that?"

"I think it sounds beaucoup suspicious," Amanda said.

Clutterbuck laughed. "Yeah. But there's a retired carpenter in Delaware who's going to be very happy to get his car back, busted dome-light and all."

Lisey said, "Have you found out anything about Jim Dooley?"

"That would be John Doolin, Mrs. Landon. Born in Shooter's Knob, Tennessee. Moved to Nashville at age five with his family, then went to live with his aunt and uncle in Moundsville, West Virginia, when his parents and older sister were killed in a fire in the winter of 1974. Doolin was then age nine. The official cause of the deaths was down to defective Christmas tree lights, but I talked to a retired detective who worked that case. He said there was some suspicion the boy might have had something to do with it. No proof."

Lisey saw no reason to pay close attention to the rest, because whatever he called himself, her persecutor was never coming back from the place where she had taken him. Yet she did hear Clutterbuck say that Doolin had spent a good many years in a Tennessee mental institution, and she continued to believe that he had met Gerd Allen Cole there, and caught Cole's obsession

(ding-dong for the freesias)

like a virus. Scott had had a queer saying, one Lisey had never fully understood until the business of

McCool/Dooley/Doolin. Some things just have to be true, Scott said, because they have no other choice.

"In any case, you want to keep your eyes peeled for the guy," Clutterbuck told the two women, "and if it looks like he's still around—"

"Or takes some time off and then decides to come back," Boeckman put in.

Clutterbuck nodded. "Yep, that's a possibility, too. If he shows up again, I think we ought to have a meeting with your family, Mrs. Landon—put them all in the picture. Do you agree?"

"If he shows up, we'll certainly do that," Lisey said. She spoke seriously, almost solemnly, but on their way out of town, she and Amanda indulged in a bout of hysterical laughter at the idea of Jim Dooley ever showing up again.

3

An hour or two before dawn the next morning, shuffling into the bathroom with one eye open, thinking of nothing but peeing and going back to bed, Lisey thought she saw something moving in the bedroom behind her. That brought her awake in a hurry, and turning on her heels. There was nothing there. She took a hand-towel from the rod beside the sink and hung it over the medicine cabinet mirror in which she'd seen the movement, wedging the towel carefully until it would stay on its own. Then and only then did she finish her business.

She was sure Scott would have understood.

4

The summer slipped by, and one day Lisey noticed that SCHOOL SUPPLIES signs had appeared in the windows of several stores on Castle Rock's Main Street. And why not? It was suddenly halfpast August. Scott's study was—except for the booksnake and the stained white carpet upon which it dozed—waiting for the next thing. (If there was a next thing; Lisey had begun to consider the possibility of putting the house up for sale.) Canty and Rich threw their annual Midsummer Night's Dream party on August fourteenth. Lisey set out to get righteously smashed on Rich Lawlor's Long Island Iced Tea, a thing she hadn't done since Scott had died. She asked Rich for a double to get started, then set it down untasted on one of the caterer's tables. She thought she had seen something moving either on the surface of the glass, as if reflected there, or deep within the amber depths, as if swimming there. It was utter shite, of course, but she found her urge to get absolutely stinko was gone. In truth, she wasn't sure she dared to get drunk (or even high). Wasn't sure she dared let her defenses down in such a way. Because if she had attracted the long boy's attention, if it was watching her from time to time…or even just thinking about her…well…

Part of her was sure that was crap.

Part of her was positive it wasn't.

As August waned and the hottest weather of the summer rolled into New England, testing tempers and the northeast powergrid, something even more distressing began happening to Lisey…except, like the things she sometimes thought she might be glimpsing in certain reflective surfaces, she wasn't entirely sure it was happening at all.

Sometimes she'd flounder up from sleep in the mornings an hour or maybe two before her usual time, gasping and covered with sweat even with the air-conditioning on, feeling as she had when coming out of nightmares as a child: that she hadn't really escaped the grip of whatever had been after her, that it was still under the bed and would curl its cold distorted hand around her ankle or reach right up through her pillow and grab her by the neck. During these panicky wakings she would run her hands over the sheets and then up to the head of her bed before opening her eyes, wanting to be sure, absolutely sure, that she wasn't…well, somewhere else. Because once you stretch those tendons, she sometimes thought, opening her eyes and looking at her familiar bedroom with great and

inexpressible relief, it's ever so much easier to do it next

time. And she had stretched a certain set of tendons, hadn't she? Yes. First by yanking Amanda, then by yanking Dooley. She had stretched them but good.

It seemed to her that after she'd awakened half a dozen times and discovered she was right where she belonged, in the bedroom that had once been hers and Scott's and was now hers alone, matters should have improved, but they didn't. They got worse instead. She felt like a loose tooth in a sick socket. And then, on the first day of the big heatwave—a heatwave to match the cold-snap of ten years before, and the ironic balance of this, coincidental though it might have been, was not lost on her—what she feared finally happened.

5

She lay back on the couch in the living room just to rest her eyes for a few moments. The unquestionably idiotic but occasionally entertaining Jerry Springer was babbling away on the idiot box—My Mother Stole My Boyfriend, My Boyfriend Stole My Mother, something like that. Lisey reached out to pick up the remote and shut the damn thing off, or maybe she only dreamed she did, because when she opened her eyes to see where the remote was, she was lying not on the couch but on the hill of lupin in Boo'ya Moon. It was full daylight and there was no sense of danger—certainly no sense that Scott's long boy (for so she thought of it and always would, although she supposed it was her long boy now, Lisey's long boy) was near, but she was terrified nevertheless, almost to the point of screaming helplessly. Instead of doing that she closed her eyes, visualized her living room, and suddenly she could hear the "guests" on the Springer Show yelling at each other and feel the oblong of the remote control in her left hand. A second later she was starting up from the couch, eyes wide and skin all a-prickle. She could almost believe she had dreamed the whole deal (it certainly made sense, given her current level of anxiety on the subject), but the vividness of what she had seen in those few seconds argued against that idea, comforting as it was. So did the smear of purple on the back of the hand holding the TV controller.

6

The next day she called the Fogler Library and spoke to Mr. Bertram Partridge, the head of Special Collections. That gentleman grew steadily more excited as Lisey described the books still remaining in Scott's study. He called them "associational volumes" and said Fogler Special Collections would be very happy to have them, "and to work with her on the tax-credit question." Lisey said that would be very nice, just as though she had been asking herself the tax-credit question for years. Mr. Partridge said he would send "a team of removers" out the very next day to box the volumes up and bring them the hundred and twenty miles to the University of Maine's Orono campus. Lisey reminded him that the weather was supposed to be very hot, and that Scott's study, which was no longer air-conditioned, had reverted to its former loftish nature. Perhaps, she said, Mr. Partridge would like to hold his removers in abeyance until cooler weather.

"Not at all, Mrs. Landon," Partridge said, chuckling expansively, and Lisey knew he was afraid she might change her mind if given too long to think the matter over. "I've got a couple of young folks in mind who'll be perfect for the job. You wait and see."

7

Less than an hour after her conversation with Bertram Partridge, Lisey's phone rang while she was making herself a tuna on rye for her supper: thin commons, but all she wanted. Outside, the heat lay on the land like a blanket. All color had been bleached from the sky; it was a perfect simmering white from horizon to horizon. As she mixed the tuna and mayonnaise with a little chopped onion, she had been thinking of how she'd found Amanda on one of those benches, looking out at the Hollyhocks, and this was strange, because she hardly ever thought of that anymore; it was like a dream to her. She remembered Amanda's asking if she'd have to drink any of that

(bug-juuuuice)

shitty punch if she came back—her way of trying to find out, Lisey supposed, if she'd have to remain incarcerated at Greenlawn—and Lisey had promised her no more punch, no more bug-juice. Amanda had agreed to return, although it had been clear she didn't really want to, that she would have been happy to continue sitting on the bench and looking out at the Hollyhocks until, in Good Ma's words, "eternity was halfway over." Just sitting there among the scary shrouded things and silent gazers, a bench or two above the woman in the caftan. The one who had murdered her child.

Lisey put her sandwich down on the counter, suddenly cold all over. She couldn't know that. There was no way she could know that.

But she did.

Be quiet, the woman had said. Be quiet while I think of why I did it.

And then Amanda had said something totally unexpected, hadn't she? Something about Scott. Although nothing Amanda said then could be important now, not with Scott dead and Jim Dooley also dead (or wishing he were), but still Lisey wished she could remember exactly what it might have been.

"Said she'd come back," Lisey murmured. "Said she'd come back if it would keep Dooley from hurting me."

Yes, and Amanda had kept her word, God bless her, but Lisey wanted to remember something she'd said after that. I don't see what it can have to do with Scott, Amanda had said in that faintly distracted voice of hers. He's been dead such a long time…although…I think he told me something about—

That was when the phone rang, shattering the fragile glass of Lisey's recollection. And as she picked it up, a crazy certainty came to her: it would be Dooley. Hello, Missus, the Black Prince of the Incunks would say. I'm callin from inside the belly of the beast. How y'all doin today?

"Hello?" she said. She knew she was gripping the phone too tightly, but was helpless to do anything about it.

"Danny Boeckman here, Mrs. Landon," the voice at the other end said, and the Mrs. was too close for comfort, but here came out heah, a comfortable Yankee pronunciation, and Deputy Boeckman sounded uncharacteristically excited, almost bubbly, and therefore boyish. "Guess what?"

"Can't guess," Lisey said, but another crazy idea came to her: he was going to say they drew straws down at the Sheriff's Office to see who was going to call up and ask her out on a date and he drew the short one. Except why would he sound excited about that?

"We found the dome-light cover!"

Lisey had no idea what he was talking about. "I beg pardon?"

"Doolin—the guy you knew as Zack McCool and then as Jim Dooley—stole that PT Cruiser and used it while he was stalking you, Mrs. Landon. We were positive of that. And he was keeping it stashed out in that old gravel pit between runs, we were positive of that, too. We just couldn't prove it, because—"

"He wiped off all his fingerprints."

"Ayuh, and got em all. But every now n then me n Plug went out there—"

"Plug?"

"I'm sorry, Joe. Deputy Alston?"

Plug, she thought. Aware for the first time, in a clear-seeing way, that these were real men with real lives. With nicknames. Plug, she thought. Deputy Joe Alston, also known as Plug.

"Mrs. Landon? Are you there?"

"Yes, Dan. May I call you Dan?"

"Sure, you bet. Anyway, every now n then we went sniffin round out there to see if we couldn't find some prizes, because there was plenty of sign that he'd spent time in that pit— candy-wrappers, a couple of RC bottles, things like that."

"RC," she said softly, and thought: Bool, Dan. Bool, Plug. Bool, The End.

"Right, that was the brand he seemed to favor, but not a single print on a single cast-off bottle matched up to one of his. The only match we got was to a fella who stole a car back in the late seventies and now clerks at the Quick-E-Mart over in Oxford. The other prints we got off the bottles, we surmise those were clerk-prints, too. But yest'y noon, Mrs. Landon—"

"Lisey."

There was a pause while he considered this. Then he went on. "Yest'y noon, Lisey, on a little track leadin out of that pit, I found the grand prize—the cover to that dome-light. He'd pulled it off and threw it into the puckies." Boeckman's voice rose, became triumphant—became not the voice of a Deputy Sheriff but perfectly human. "And that was the one thing he forgot to handle with gloves on or wipe off later! A big thumbprint on one side, a big fat old index-finger on the other! Where he gripped it. We got the results back by fax this morning."

"John Doolin?"

"Ayuh. Nine points of comparison. Nine!" There was a pause, and when he spoke again, some of the triumph had gone out of his voice. "Now if we could only find the son-of-a-buck."

"I'm sure he'll turn up in time," she said, and cast a longing glance at her tuna sandwich. She'd lost her train of thought about Amanda, but had regained her appetite. To Lisey that seemed like a fair swap, especially on such a boogery-hot day. "Even if he doesn't, he's stopped harassing me."

"He's left Castle County, I'd stake my reputation on that." A note of unmistakable pride crept into Deputy Sheriff Dan Boeckman's voice. "Got a little too hot for him here, I guess, so he ditched his ride and left. Plug feels the same. Jim Dooley and Elvis have both left the building."

"Plug, is that for chewing tobacco?"

"No, ma'am, not at all. In high school, he and I played the line on the Castle Hills Knights team that won the Class A State Championship. Bangor Rams was favored by three touchdowns, but we shocked em. Only team from our part of the state to win a gold football since the nineteen-fifties. And Joey, no one could stop him, not that whole season. Even with four guys hangin off him, he kept pluggin. So we called him Plug, and I still do."

"If I called him that, do you think he'd swat me?"

Dan Boeckman laughed, delighted. "No! He'd be tickled!"

"Okay, then. I'm Lisey, you're Dan, and he's Plug."

"That's square-john with me."

"And thanks for the call. That was terrific police work."

"Thanks for saying so, ma'am. Lisey." She could hear the glow in his voice, and that made her feel good. "You be in touch, now, if there's anything else we can do. Or if you hear from that lowlife again."

"I will."

Lisey went back to her sandwich with a smile on her face and didn't think about Amanda, or the good ship Hollyhocks, or Boo'ya Moon, for the rest of the day. That night, however, she awoke to the sound of distant thunder and a sense that something vast was—not hunting her, exactly (it wouldn't bother), but musing on her. The idea that she should be in such a thing's unknowable mind made her feel like crying and like screaming. At the same time. It also made her want to sit up watching movies on TCM, smoking cigarettes and drinking high-tension coffee. Or beer. Beer might be better. Beer might call back sleep. Instead of getting up, she turned off the bedside lamp and lay still. I'll never go back to sleep, she thought. I'll just lie here like this until it gets light in the east. Then I can get up and make the coffee I want now. But three minutes after having this thought she was dozing. Ten minutes later she was sleeping deeply. Later still, when the moon rose and she dreamed of floating over a certain exotic beach of fine white sand on the PILLSBURY magic carpet, her bed was for a few moments empty and the room filled with the smells of frangipani and jasmine and night-blooming cereus, scents that were somehow longing and terrible at the same time. But then she was back and in the morning Lisey barely remembered her dream, her dream of flying, her dream of flying across the beach at the edge of the pool in Boo'ya Moon.

8

As it happened, Lisey's vision of dismantling the booksnake varied in only two respects from what she had foreseen, and these were minor variations indeed. First, one half of Mr. Partridge's two-person team turned out to be a girl—a strapping twentysomething with a caramel-colored ponytail threaded through the back of a Red Sox cap. Second, Lisey hadn't guessed how quickly the job would be done. In spite of the study's fearsome heat (not even three fans turning at top speed could do much about it), all the books were packed away in a dark blue UMO van in less than an hour. When Lisey asked the two librarians from Special Collections (who called themselves—only half-jokingly, Lisey thought—the Minions of Partridge) if they'd like iced tea, they agreed

enthusiastically, and put away two large glasses each. The girl was Cory. She was the one who told Lisey how much she had liked Scott's books, especially Relics, which she claimed to have read three times. The boy was Mike, and he was the one who said they were very sorry for her loss. Lisey thanked them both for their kindness, and meant it.

"It must make you sad, seeing it so empty," Cory said, and tipped her glass toward the barn. The ice cubes clinked in it. Lisey was careful not to look directly at the glass, lest she see something besides ice in there.

"It is a little sad, but it's freeing, too," she said. "I put off the job of cleaning it out for too long. My sisters helped me. I'm glad we did it. More tea, Cory?"

"No thanks, but could I use your bathroom before we start back?"

"Of course. Through the living room, first door on the right."

Cory excused herself. Absently—almost absently—Lisey moved the girl's glass behind the brown plastic iced-tea pitcher. "Another glass, Mike?"

"No thanks," he said. "You'll be taking up the carpet, too, I guess."

She laughed self-consciously. "Yes. Pretty bad, isn't it? From Scott's one experiment in wood-staining. It was a disaster." Thinking: Sorry, honey.

"Looks a little like dried blood," Mike said, and finished his iced tea. The sun, hazy and hot, ran across the surface of his glass, and for a moment an eye seemed to peer out of it at Lisey. When he set it down, she had to restrain an urge to snatch it and hide it behind the plastic pitcher with the other one.

"Everybody says that," she agreed.

"World's worst shaving cut," Mike said, and laughed. They both laughed. Lisey thought hers sounded almost as natural as his. She didn't look at his glass. She didn't think about the long boy that was now her long boy. She thought about nothing but the long boy.

"Sure you won't have a little more?" she asked.

"Better not, I'm driving," Mike said, and they had another laugh.

Cory came back and Lisey thought Mike would also ask to use the bathroom, but he didn't—guys had bigger kidneys, bigger bladders, bigger somethings, or so Scott had claimed—and Lisey was glad, because that meant only the girl gave her that funny look before they drove away with the disassembled booksnake in the back of the van. Oh, she undoubtedly told Mike what she saw in the living room and found in the bathroom, told him on the long drive north to the University of Maine at Orono, but Lisey wasn't there to hear it. The girl's look wasn't so bad, come to that, because Lisey hadn't known what it meant at the time, although she had patted the side of her head, thinking maybe her hair had fallen funny across her ear or was standing up or something. Then, later (after popping the iced-tea glasses into the dishwasher without so much as a look at them), she'd gone to use the bathroom herself and saw the towel hanging across the mirror in there. She remembered putting the hand-towel over the medicine cabinet mirror upstairs, remembered blinding that one perfectly well, but when had she done this one?

Lisey didn't know.

She went back to the living room and saw there was a sheet hung in a swag over the mirror above the mantel, as well. She should have noticed that on her way through, she imagined Cory had, it was pretty smucking obvious, but the truth was little Lisey Landon didn't spend much time studying her own reflection these days.

She did a walk-through and discovered all but two of the mirrors on the ground floor had been sheeted, toweled, or (in one case) taken down and turned to the wall; the last two survivors she now covered as well, in the spirit of in for a penny, in for a pound. As she did them, Lisey wondered exactly what the young librarian in the fashionable pink Red Sox baseball cap had thought. That the famous writer's widow was either Jewish or had adopted the Jewish custom of mourning, and that her mourning still continued? That she had decided Kurt Vonnegut was right, that mirrors weren't reflective surfaces but leaks, portholes to another dimension? And really, wasn't that what she did think?

Not portholes, windows. And do I have to care what some librarian from Moo U thinks?

Oh, probably not. But there were so many reflective surfaces in a life, weren't there? Not just mirrors. There were juice glasses to avoid glancing in first thing in the morning and wineglasses not to peer into at sundown. There were so many times when you sat behind the wheel of your car and saw your own face looking back at you from the dashboard instruments. So many long nights when the mind of something…other…might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of something? The mind was a highkicking, kilt-wearing rebel, to quote the late Scott Landon. It could get up to…well, shit fire and save your matches, why not say it? It could get up to such bad-gunky.

And there was something else, too. Something even more frightening. Maybe even if it didn't come to you, you wouldn't be able to help going to it. Because once you stretched those smucking tendons…once your life in the real world started to feel like a loose tooth in a sick socket—

She'd be walking downstairs, or getting into the car, or turning on the shower, or reading a book, or opening a crossword magazine, and there would be a feeling absurdly like an oncoming sneeze or

(mein gott, babyluv, mein gott, leedle Leezy—!)

an approaching orgasm and she would think, Oh smuck, I'm not coming, I'm going, I'm going over. The world would seem to waver and there would be that sense of a whole other world waiting to be born, one where the sweetness curdled and turned to poison after dark. A world that was just a sidestep away, no more than the flick of a hand or the turn of a hip. For a moment she would feel Castle View drop away on every side and she would be Lisey on a tightrope, Lisey walking a knife-edge. Then she'd be back again, a solid (if middle-aged and a little too thin) woman in a solid world, walking down a flight of stairs, slamming a car door, adjusting the hot water, turning the page of a book, or solving eight across: Old-style gift, four-letter word, starts with B, ends with N.

9

Two days after the dismantled booksnake went north, on what the Portland branch of the National Weather Service would record as the hottest day of the year in Maine and New Hampshire, Lisey went up to the empty study with a boombox and a compact disc titled Hank Williams' Greatest Hits. There would be no problem playing the CD, just as there had been no problem running the fans on the day the Minions of Partridge had been up here; all Dooley had done, it turned out, was open the electrical box downstairs and flip off the three breakers that controlled the study's power.

Lisey had no idea how hot it actually was in the study, but knew it had to be a triple-digit number. She could feel her blouse begin sticking to her body and her face dampening as soon as she was at the top of the stairs. Somewhere she had read that women don't sweat, they glow, and what a crock of shit that was. If she stayed up here long, she'd probably pass out with heatstroke, but she didn't intend to stay up here for long. There was a country song she sometimes heard on the radio called "Ain't Livin' Long Like This." She didn't know who had written that song or sang it (not Ole Hank), but she could relate to it. She couldn't spend the rest of her life afraid of her own reflection—or what she might see peeking out from behind it—and she couldn't live it afraid that she might at any moment lose her hold on reality and find herself in Boo'ya Moon.

This shite had to end.

She plugged in the boombox, then sat cross-legged on the floor before it and put in the disc. Sweat ran into her eye, stinging, and she knuckled it away. Scott had played a lot of music up here, really blasting it out. When you had a twelvethousand-dollar stereo system and soundproofing in the alcove where most of the speakers were, you could really let it rip. The first time he played "Rockaway Beach" for her, she'd thought the very roof over their heads might lift off. What she was about to play would sound tinny and small by comparison, but she thought it would be enough.

Old-style gift, four letters, begins with B, ends with N.

Amanda, sitting on one of those benches, looking out at Southwind Harbor, sitting above the child-murdering woman in the caftan, Amanda saying "It was something about a story. Your story, Lisey's story. And the afghan. Only he called it the african. Did he say it was a boop? A beep? A boon?" No, Manda, not a boon, although that is a four-letter word, now rather old-fashioned, beginning with B and ending with N, that means gift. But the word Scott used—

That word had been bool, of course. The sweat ran down Lisey's face like tears. She let it. "As in Bool, The End. And at the end you get a prize. Sometimes a candybar. Sometimes an RC from Mulie's. Sometimes a kiss. And sometimes…sometimes a story. Right, honey?"

Talking to him felt all right. Because he was still here. Even with the computers gone, and the furniture, and the fancy Swedish stereo system, and the file-cabinets full of manuscripts, and the stacks of galleys (his own and those sent to him by friends and admirers), and the booksnake…even with those things gone, she still felt Scott. Of course she did. Because he hadn't finished having his say. He had one more story to tell.

Lisey's story.

She thought she knew which one, because there was only one he had never finished.

She touched one of the dried bloodstains on the carpet and thought about the arguments against insanity, the ones that fell through with a soft shirring sound. She thought how it had been under the yum-yum tree: like being in another world, one of their own. She thought about the Bad-Gunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. She thought about how, when Jim Dooley had seen the long boy, he had stopped screaming and his hands had fallen to his sides. Because the strength had run out of his arms. That was what looking at the bad-gunky did, when the bad-gunky was looking back at you.

"Scott," she said. "Honey, I'm listening."

There was no reply…except Lisey replied to herself. The name of the town was Anarene. Sam the Lion owned the pool-hall. Owned the picture show. And the restaurant, where every tune on the juke seemed to be a Hank Williams tune.

Somewhere something in the empty study seemed to sigh in agreement. Possibly it was just her imagination. In any case, it was time. Lisey still didn't know exactly what she was looking for, but she thought she'd know it when she saw it— surely she'd know it when she saw it, if Scott had left it for her—and it was time to go looking. Because she wasn't living long like this. She couldn't.

She pushed PLAY and Hank Williams's tired, jolly voice began to sing.

"Goodbye Joe, me gotta go,

Me-oh-my-oh,

Me gotta go pole the pirogue

Down the bayou…"

SOWISA, babyluv, she thought, and closed her eyes. For a moment the music was still there but hollow and oh so distant, like music coming down a long corridor, or from the throat of a deep cave. Then sunshine bloomed red on the inside of her eyelids and the temperature dropped twenty or even twenty-five degrees all at a go. A cool breeze, delicious with the smell of flowers, caressed her sweaty skin and blew her sticky hair back from her temples.

Lisey opened her eyes in Boo'ya Moon.

10

She was still sitting cross-legged, but now she was on the edge of the path leading down the purple hill in one direction and under the sweetheart trees in the other. She'd been here before; it was to this exact spot that her husband had brought her before he was her husband, saying there was something he wanted to show her.

Lisey got to her feet, pushing her sweat-dampened hair away from her face, relishing the breeze. The sweetness of the mixed aromas it carried—yes, of course—but even more, the coolness of it. She guessed it was mid-afternoon, the temperature a perfect seventy-five degrees. She could hear birds singing, perfectly ordinary ones by the sound—chickadees and robins for sure, probably finches and maybe a lark for good measure—but no awful laughing things in the woods. It was too early for them, she supposed. No sense of the long boy, either, and that was the best news of all.

She faced the trees and turned on her heels in a slow halfcircle. She wasn't looking for the cross, because Dooley had gotten that stuck in his arm and then thrown it aside. It was the tree she was looking for, the one that stood just a little forward of the two others on the left side of the path—

"No, that's wrong," she murmured. "They were on either side of the path. Like soldiers guarding the way into the woods."

Just like that she saw them. And a third standing a little in front of the one on the left. The third was the biggest, its trunk covered with moss so dense it looked like fur. At its base the ground still looked a little sunken. That was where Scott had buried the brother he had tried so hard to save. And on one side of that sunken place, she saw something with huge hollow eyes staring at her from the high grass.

For a moment she thought it was Dooley, or Dooley's corpse, somehow reanimated and come back to stalk her, but then she remembered how, after clubbing Amanda aside, he'd stripped off the useless, lensless night-vision goggles and thrown them aside. And there they were, lying beside the good brother's grave.

It's another bool hunt, she thought as she walked toward them. From the path to the tree; from the tree to the grave; from the grave to the goggles. Where next? Where now, babyluv?

The next station turned out to be the grave-marker, with the horizontal crosspiece turned askew so it was like clock-hands pointing to five past seven. The top of the vertical was stained to a depth of three inches with Dooley's blood, now dried to the maroon, not-quite-varnish color of the stains on the rug in Scott's study. She could still see PAUL printed on the crosspiece, and as she lifted it (with real reverence) out of the grass for a closer look, she saw something else as well: the length of matted yellow yarn that had been looped repeatedly around the vertical slat of the cross, then tied firmly. Tied, Lisey had absolutely no doubt, with the same sort of knot as the one that had secured Chuckie G.'s bell to the tree in the woods. The yellow yarn—which had once come spinning off Good Ma's knitting needles as she sat watching television at the farm in Lisbon—was wrapped around the vertical just above the place where the wood was stained dark with earth. And looking at it, she remembered seeing it running into the dark just before Dooley pulled the cross out of his arm and flung it away.

It's the african, the one we dropped by the big rock above the pool. He came back later, some time later, got it, and brought it here. Unraveled some of it, tied it to the cross, then paid out more. And expected me to find the rest at the end of it all.

Heart pounding hard and slow in her breast, Lisey dropped the cross and began following the yellow thread away from the path and along the edge of the Fairy Forest, paying it through her hands as the high grass whispered against her thighs and the grasshoppers jumped and the lupin gave up its sweet scent. Somewhere a locust sang its hot summer song and in the woods a crow—was it a crow? it sounded like one, a perfectly ordinary crow—called a rusty hello, but there were no cars, no airplanes, no human voices near or far. She walked through the grass, following the line of unknitted afghan, the one in which her sleepless, frightened, failing husband had swaddled on so many cold nights ten years before. Ahead of her, one sweetheart tree stood out a bit from its fellows, spreading its branches, making a pool of inviting shade. Beneath it she saw a tall metal wastebasket and a much larger pool of yellow. The color was dull now, the wool matted and shapeless, like a large yellow wig that has been left out in the rain, or perhaps the corpse of a big old tomcat, but Lisey knew it for what it was as soon as she saw it, and her chest began to hitch. In her mind she could hear The Swinging Johnsons playing "Too Late to Turn Back Now" and feel Scott's hand as he led her out onto the floor. She followed the line of unraveled yellow yarn under the sweetheart tree and knelt beside what little remained of her mother's wedding present to her youngest daughter and her youngest daughter's husband. She picked it up—it, and whatever lay inside it. She put her face against it. It smelled damp and moldy, an old thing, a forgotten thing, a thing that smelled now more of funerals than of weddings. That was all right. That was just as it should have been. She smelled all the years it had been here, tied to Paul's grave-marker and waiting for her, something like an anchor.

11

A little time later, when her tears had stopped, she put the package (for surely that was what it was) down where it had been and looked at it, touching the place where the yellow yarn unraveled from the shrunken body of the afghan. She marveled that the line hadn't broken, either when Dooley fell on the cross, or when he tore it out of his arm, or when he flung it away—when he slang it forth. Of course it helped that Scott had tied his string to the bottom, but it was still pretty amazing, especially when you considered how long this damned thing had been out here, exposed to the elements. It was a blue-eyed miracle, so to speak.

But of course sometimes lost dogs came home; sometimes old strings held and led you to the prize at the end of the bool hunt. She started to unwrap the faded, matted remains of the afghan, then looked into the wastebasket, instead. What she saw made her laugh ruefully. It was nearly full of liquor bottles. One or two looked relatively new, and she was sure the one on the very top was, because there had been no such thing as Mike's Hard Lemonade ten years ago. But most of the bottles were old. This was where he'd come to do his drinking in '96, but even blind drunk he'd had too much respect for Boo'ya Moon to litter it up with empty bottles. And would she find other caches if she took the time to look? Maybe. Probably. But this was the only cache that mattered to her. It told her that this was where he'd come to do the last of his life's work.

She thought she had all the answers now except for the big ones, the ones she'd actually come for—how she was supposed to live with the long boy, and how she was supposed to keep from slipping over here to where it lived, especially when it was thinking of her. Perhaps Scott had left her some answers. Even if he hadn't, he'd left her something…and it was very beautiful under this tree.

Lisey picked up the african again and felt it the way she'd once felt her Christmas presents as a girl. There was a box inside, but it didn't feel a bit like Good Ma's cedar box; it was softer than that, almost mushy, as if, even wrapped in the african and left under the tree, moisture had seeped in over the years…and for the first time she wondered how many years they were talking about here. The bottle of Hard Lemonade suggested not very many. And the feel of the thing suggested—

"It's a manuscript box," she murmured. "One of his hard cardboard manuscript boxes." Yes. She was sure of it. Only after two years under this tree…or three…or four…it had turned into a soft cardboard box.

Lisey began to unwrap the afghan. Two turns were enough to do the job; that was all that was left. And it was a manuscript box, its light gray color darkened to slate by seeping moisture. Scott always put a sticker on the front of his boxes and wrote the title there. The sticker on this one had pulled loose on both sides and curled upward. She pushed it back with her fingers and saw a single word in Scott's strong, dark printing: LISEY. She opened the box. The pages inside were lined sheets torn from a notebook. There were perhaps thirty in all, packed tight with quick, dark strokes from one of his felt-tip pens. She wasn't surprised to see that Scott had written in the present tense, that what he had written seemed couched in occasionally childish prose, and that the story seemed to start in the middle. The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn't know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn't save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn't know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky. It only started in the middle if you didn't know that

12

In February he starts looking at me funny, out of the corners of his eyes. I keep expecting him to yell at me or even whip out his old pocketknife and carve on me. He hasn't done anything like that in a long time but I think it would almost be a relief. It wouldn't let the bad-gunky out of me because there isn't any—I saw the real bad-gunky when Paul was chained up in the cellar, not Daddy's fantasies of it—and there's nothing like that in me. But there's something bad in him, and cutting doesn't let it out. Not this time, although he's tried plenty. I know. I've seen the bloody shirts and underpants in the wash. In the trash, too. If cutting me would help him, I'd let him, because I still love him. More than ever since it's just the two of us. More than ever since what we went through with Paul. That kind of love is a kind of doom, like the badgunky. "Bad-gunky's strong," he said.

But he won't cut.

One day I'm coming back from the shed where I sat for a little while to think about Paul—to think about all the good times we had rolling around this old place—and Daddy grabs me and he shakes. "You went over there!" he shouts in my face. And I can see that however sick I thought he was, it's worse. He's never been as bad as this. "Why do you go over there? What do you do over there? Who do you talk to? What are you planning?"

All the time shaking me and shaking me, the world tipping up and down. Then my head hits the side of the door and I see stars and I fall down there in the doorway with the heat of the kitchen on my front and the cold of the dooryard on my back.

"No, Daddy," I say, "I didn't go anywhere, I was just—"

He bends over me, his hands on his knees, his face down in my face, his skin pale except for two balls of color high up on his cheeks and I see the way his eyes are going back and forth, back and forth, and I know that he and right aren't even writing letters to each other anymore. And I remember Paul saying Scott you dassn't ever cross Daddy when he's not right.

"Don't you tell me you didn't go nowhere you lying little motherfucker, I been ALL OVER THIS MOTHER-SMOCKING HOUSE!"

I think to tell him I was in the shed, but I know that will make things worse instead of better. I think of Paul saying you dassn't cross him when he's not right, when he's getting in the bad, and since I know where he thinks I was, I say yes, Daddy, yes, I went to Boo'ya Moon, but only to put flowers on Paul's grave. And it works. For then, at least. He relaxes. He even grabs my hand and pulls me up and then brushes me off, as though he sees snow or dirt or something on me. There isn't any, but maybe he does see it. Who knows.

He says: "Is it all right, Scoot? Is his grave all right? Nothing been at it, or at him?"

"Everything's fine, Daddy," I say.

He says, "There are Nazis at work, Scooter, did I tell you? I must've. They worship Hitler in the basement. They have a little ceramic statue of the bastard. They think I don't know."

I'm only ten, but I know Hitler's been one dead dog since the end of the Second World War. I also know that nobody from U.S. Gyppum is worshipping even a statue of him in the basement. I know a third thing, as well, which is never to cross Daddy when he's in the bad-gunky, and so I say, "What will you do about it?"

He leans close to me and I think he's going to hit me this time sure, at least start shaking me again. But instead he fixes his eyes on mine (I've never seen them so big or so dark) and then he grabs hold of his ear. "What's this, Scooter? What's it look like to you, old Scoot?"

"Your ear, Daddy," I say.

He nods, still holding his ear and still holding my eyes with his. All these years later I still see those eyes in my dreams sometimes. "I'm going to keep it to the ground," he says. "And when the time comes…" He cocks his finger and makes shooting motions. "Every smucking one, Scooter. Every sweetmother Nazi in the place." Maybe he would have done it. My father, out in a blaze of rancid glory. Maybe there would have been one of those news stories—PENNSYLVANIA RECLUSE GOES ON RAMPAGE, KILLS NINE CO-WORKERS, SELF, MOTIVE UNCLEAR—but before he can get around to it, the bad-gunky takes him a different way.

February has been clear and cold, but when March comes in, the weather changes and Daddy changes with it. As the temperatures rise and the skies cloud over and the first sleety rains start to fall, he grows morose and silent. He stops shaving, then showering, then cooking our meals. There comes a day, maybe a third of the way through the month, when I realize that the three days off work he sometimes gets because of the swing shift have stretched to four…then five…then six. Finally I ask him when he's going back. I'm scared to ask him, because now he spends most of his days either upstairs in his bedroom or downstairs lying on the sofa listening to country music on WWVA out of Wheeling, West Virginia. He hardly ever says anything to me in either place, and I see his eyes going back and forth all the time now as he looks for them, the Bad-Gunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. So—no, I don't want to ask him but I have to, because if he doesn't go back to work, what will happen to us? Ten is old enough to know that with no money coming in, the world will change.

"You want to know when I'm going back to work," he says in a thoughtful tone of voice. Lying there on the sofa with beardstubble all over his face. Lying there in an old fisherman's sweater and a pair of Dickies and his bare feet poking out. Lying there while Red Sovine sings "Giddyup-Go" out of the radio.

"Yes, Daddy."

He gets up on one elbow and looks at me, and I see then that he is gone. Worse, that something is hiding inside him, growing, getting stronger, biding its time. "You want to know. When. I'm. Going. Back to work."

"I guess that's your business," I say. "I really just came in to ask if I should put on the coffee."

He grabs my arm, and that night I see dark blue bruises where his fingers dug into me. Four dark blue bruises in the shape of his fingers. "Want to know. When. I'm. Going. There." He lets go and sits up. His eyes are bigger than ever, and they won't stay still. They jitter in their sockets. "I ain't never going there no more, Scott. That place is closed. That place is all blowed up. Don't you know anything, you dumb little gluefoot motherfucker?" He looks down at the dirty living room carpet. On the radio, Red Sovine gives way to Ferlin Husky. Then Daddy looks up again and he is Daddy, and he says something that almost breaks my heart. "You may be dumb, Scooter, but you're brave. You're my brave boy. I'm not gonna let it hurt you."

Then he lies back down on the couch again, and turns his face away, and tells me not to bother him any more, he wants to take a nap.

That night I wake up to the sound of sleet ticking off the window and he's sitting on the side of my bed, smiling down at me. Only it's not him smiling. There's almost nothing in his eyes but the bad-gunky. "Daddy?" I say, and he says nothing back. I think: He's going to kill me. Going to put his hands around my neck and choke me, and everything we went through, all that with Paul, it will have been for nothing.

But instead he says, in a kind of strangled voice: "Go back slee'," and gets up off the bed, and walks out in this kind of herky-jerky way, with his chin leading and his ass wagging, like he's pretending to be a drill-sergeant in a parade, or something. A few seconds later I hear this terrible meat crash and I know that he's fallen downstairs, or maybe even threw himself down, and I lie there awhile, not able to get out of bed, hoping he's dead, hoping he's not, wondering what I'll do if he is, who'll take care of me, not caring, not knowing what I hope for the most. Part of me even hopes he'll finish the job, come back and kill me, just finish the job, end the horror of living in that house. Finally I call out, "Daddy? Are you all right?"

For a long time there's no answer. I lie there listening to the sleet, thinking He's dead, he is, my Daddy's dead, I'm here alone, and then he bellows out of the dark, from down below: "Yes, all right! Shut up, you little shit! Shut up unless you want the thing in the wall to hear you and come out and eat us both alive! Or do you want it to get in you like it got into Paul?"

I don't say nothing to that, just lay there shaking.

"Answer me!" he bawls. "Answer, nummie, or I'll come up there and make you sorry!"

But I can't, I'm too scared to answer, my tongue is nothing but this tiny huck of dried-up beef jerky lying on the bottom of my mouth. I don't cry, either. I'm even too scared to do that. I just lie there and wait for him to come upstairs and hurt me. Or dead-dog kill me.

Then, after what seems like a very long time—at least an hour, although it couldn't have been more than a minute or two—I hear him mutter something that might have been My fuckin head's bleedin or It won't ever stop sleetin. Whatever it is, it's going away from the stairs and toward the living room, and I know he'll climb on the sofa and go to sleep there. In the morning he'll either wake up or he won't, but either way he's done with me for tonight. But I'm still scared. I'm scared because there is a thing. I don't think it's in the wall, but there is a thing. It got Paul, and it's probably going to get my Daddy and then there's me. I've thought about that a lot, Lisey,

13

From her place under the tree—actually sitting with her back against the tree's trunk—Lisey looked up, almost as startled as she would have been if Scott's ghost had hailed her by name. In a way she supposed that was just what had happened, and really, why should she be surprised? Of course he was talking to her, her and no one else. This was her story, Lisey's story, and even though she was a slow reader, she had already worked her way through a third of the handwritten notebook pages. She thought she'd finish long before dark. That was good. Boo'ya Moon was a sweet place, but only in the daylight.

She looked back down at his last manuscript and was again amazed that he had lived through his childhood. She noted that Scott had lapsed into the past tense only when addressing her, here in her present. She smiled at that and resumed reading, thinking if she had one wish it would be to fly to that lonely kid on her highly hypothetical flour-sack magic carpet and comfort him, if only by whispering in his ear that in time the nightmare would end. Or at least that part of it.

14

I've thought about that a lot, Lisey, and I've come to two conclusions. First, that whatever got Paul was real, and that it was a kind of possessing being that might have had some perfectly mundane basis, maybe even viral or bacteriological. Second, it was not the long boy. Because that thing isn't like anything we can understand. It's its own thing, and better not thought of at all. Ever.

In any case, our hero, little Scott Landon, finally goes back to sleep, and in that farmhouse out in the Pennsylvania countryside, things go on as they had been for yet a few days longer, with Daddy lying on the couch like a ripe and smelly cheese and Scott cooking the meals and washing the dishes (only he says "warshing the dishees") and the sleet ticking off the windows and the country sounds of WWVA filling the house—Donna Fargo, Waylon Jennings, Johnny Cash, Conway Twitty, "Country" Charlie Pride, and—of course—Ole Hank. Then one afternoon around three o'clock a brown Chevrolet sedan with U.S. GYPSUM printed on the sides comes up the long driveway, sending out fans of slush on either side. Andrew Landon spends most of his time on the living room couch now, sleeps on it at night and has been lying on it all day, and Scott would never have guessed the old man could still move as fast as he does when he hears that car, which is clearly not the postman's old Ford truck or the meter-reader's van. Daddy is up in a flash and at the window that looks out on the left side of the front porch. He's bending over with the dirty white curtain twitched a little to one side. His hair is standing up in the back and Scott, who is standing in the kitchen doorway with a plate in one hand and a dishtowel over his shoulder, can see the big puffy purple place on the side of Daddy's face where he fell down the stairs that time, and he can see how one leg of Daddy's Dickies is hoicked up almost to the knee. He can hear Dick Curless on the radio singing "Tombstone Every Mile" and he can see the murder in Daddy's eyes and in the way his lips are pulled down so his lower teeth show. Daddy whirls from the window and the leg of his pants falls back down into place and he strides across to the closet like a crazy scissors and opens it just as the engine of the Chevrolet stops and Scott hears the car door open out there, somebody coming to death's door and not knowing it, not having the slightest sweetmother idea, and Daddy takes the .30-06 out of the closet, the very one he used to end Paul's life. Or the life of the thing inside of him. Shoes clomp up the porch steps. There are three steps, and the middle one squeaks as it has forever, world without end, amen.

"Daddy, no," I say in a low, pleading voice as Andrew "Sparky" Landon goes toward the closed door in his new and oddly graceful scissors walk, the rifle held up to high port in front of him. I'm still holding the plate but now my fingers feel numb and I think, I'm going to drop it. Mothersmuck'll fall to the floor and break, and that man out there, the last sounds he's ever going to hear in his life are a breaking plate and Dick Curless on the radio singing about the Hainesville Woods in this stinking forgotten farmhouse. "Daddy, no," I say again, pleading with all my heart and trying to put that plea into my eyes.

Sparky Landon hesitates, then stands against the wall so that if the door opens (when the door opens), it will hide him. And a series of knuckle-raps comes on that door even as he does so. I have no trouble reading the words that form silently on my father's whisker-framed lips: Then get rid of him, Scoot.

I go to the door. I switch the plate I meant to dry from my right hand to my left one and open the door. I see the man standing there with terrible clarity. The U.S. Gypsum man isn't very tall—at five-foot-seven or -eight, he isn't really that much taller than I am—but he looks like the very apotheosis of authority in his black billed cap, his khaki pants with their razor-sharp creases and his khaki shirt showing beneath his heavy black car-coat, which is halfunzipped. He's wearing a black tie and carrying some sort of little case, not quite a briefcase (it will be another few years before I learn the word portfolio). He's kind of fat and clean-shaven, with pink and shining cheeks. There are galoshes on his feet, the kind that have zippers rather than buckles. I look at the whole picture and think that if ever there was a man who looked meant to be shot on a porch in the country, it's this man. Even the single hair curling from one of his nostrils proclaims that yes, this is the guy, all right, the very one sent to take a bullet from the scissors-man's gun. Even his name, I think, is the kind you read in the paper under a headline screaming MURDERED.

"Hello, son," he says, "you must be one of Sparky's boys. I'm Frank Halsey, from the plant. Head of Personnel." And he holds out his hand.

I think I won't be able to take it, but I do. And I think I won't be able to talk, but I can do that, too. And my voice sounds normal. I'm all that stands between this man and a bullet in the heart or the head, so it better. "Yes, sir, I am. I'm Scott."

"Good to know you, Scott," he says, looking past me into the living room, and I try to see what he's seeing. I tried to pick it up the day before, but God knows what kind of job I did; I'm just a smucking kid, after all. "We've kind of been missing your father."

Well, I think, you're awful close to missing everything, Mr. Halsey. Your job, your wife; your kids, if you got em.

"He didn't call you from Philly?" I ask. I have absolutely no idea where this is coming from, or where it's going, but I'm not afraid. Not of this part. I can make shit up all day long. What I'm afraid of is that Daddy will lose control and just start blazing away through the door. Hit Halsey, maybe; hit both of us, probably.

"No, son, he sure didn't." The sleet keeps ticking down on the porch roof, but at least he's under cover, so I don't absolutely have to invite him in, but what if he invites himself in? How can I stop him? I'm just a kid, standing here in my slippers with a plate in my hand and a dishtowel slung over my shoulder.

"Well, he's been awful worried about his sister," I say, and think of the baseball biography I've been reading. It's on my bed upstairs. I also think of Daddy's car, which is parked around back, under the shed overhang. If Mr. Halsey walked to the far end of the porch, he'd see it. "She's got the disease that killed that famous ballplayer from the Yankees."

"Sparky's sister's got Lou Gehrig's? Aw, shit—I mean shoot. I didn't even know he had a sister."

Neither did I, I think.

"Son—Scott—that's a shame. Who's watching out for you boys while he's gone?"

"Mrs. Cole from down the road." Jackson Cole is the name of the guy who wrote Iron Man of the Yankees. "She comes in every day. And besides, Paul knows four different ways to make meatloaf."

Mr. Halsey chuckles. "Four ways, huh? When's Sparky gonna be back?"

"Well, she can't walk anymore, and she breathes like this." I take a big, whooping gasp of air. It's easy, because all at once my heart is beating like crazy. It was going slow when I was pretty sure Daddy was going to kill Mr. Halsey, but now that I see a chance we might get out of it, it's going six licks to the minute.

"Aw, sugar," says Mr. Halsey. Now he thinks he understands everything. "Well, that's just about the worst thing I ever heard of." He reaches under his coat and drags out his wallet. He opens it and takes out a one-dollar bill. Then he remembers that I supposedly have a brother and takes out another one. And all at once, Lisey, the strangest thing happened. All at once I wished my father would kill him.

"Here, son," he says, and also all at once I know, like reading his mind, that he's forgotten my name, and I hate him even more. "Take it. One for you and one for your brother. Treat yourselves at that little store down the road."

I don't want his smucking dollar (and Paul has no more use for his), but I take them and say thank you, sir, and he says you're welcome, son, and he ruffles my hair, and while he's doing that I glance over to my left and see one of my father's eyes peering through the crack in the door. I see the muzzle of the rifle, too. Then Mr. Halsey finally goes back down the steps. I close the door and my father and I watch as he gets into his company car and starts backing down the long driveway. It comes to me that if he gets stuck he'll walk up again and ask to use the phone and end up dying anyway, but he doesn't get stuck and will kiss his wife hello that night after all, and tell her he gave two poor boys a couple of dollars to treat themselves with. I look down and see I'm still holding the two bills and I give them to my father. He tucks them away into his pants pocket without so much as a look.

"He'll be back," Daddy says. "Him or some other. You did a good job, Scott, but tape will only hold a wet package for so long."

I take a hard stare at him and see that he is my Daddy. At some point while I was talking to Mr. Halsey, my Daddy came back. It's the last time I'll ever really see him.

He sees me looking at him and kind of nods. Then he looks at the .30-06. "I'm going to get rid of this," he says. "I'm going down, that can't be—"

"No, Daddy—"

"—can't be helped, but I'll be sweetfucked if I'll take a bunch of people like that Halsey with me, so they can put me on the six o'clock news for the gomers to drool over. They'd put you and Paul there too. Of course they would. Alive or dead, you'd be the lunatic's boys."

"Daddy, you'll be okay," I tell him, and try to hug him. "You're okay right now!"

He pushes me away, kind of laughing. "Yah, and sometimes people with malaria can quote Shakespeare," he says. "You stay here, Scotty, I got a chore to do. It won't take long." He walks off down the hall, past the bench I finally jumped off of all those years ago, and into the kitchen. Head down, the deer-gun in one hand. Once he's out the kitchen door I follow him and l'm looking out the window over the sink when he crosses the backyard, coatless in the sleet, head still down, still holding the .30-06. He puts it on the icy ground only long enough to push the cover off the dry well. He needs both hands to do that because the sleet has bound the cover to the brick. Then he picks the gun up again, looks at it for a second—almost like he's saying goodbye—and slides it into the gap he's made. After that he comes back to the house with his head still down and ice-drops darkening the shoulders of his shirt. It's only then that I notice his feet are bare. I don't think he ever realizes at all.

He doesn't seem surprised to see me in the kitchen. He takes out the two dollar bills Mr. Halsey gave me, looks at them, then looks at me. "You sure you don't want these?" he asks.

I shake my head. "Not if they were the last two dollar bills on earth."

I can see he likes that answer. "Good," he says. "But now let me tell you something, Scott. You know your nana's china breakfront in the dining room?"

"Sure."

"If you look in the blue pitcher on the top shelf, you're going to find a roll of money. My money, not Halsey's—do you understand the difference?"

"Yes," I say.

"Yeah, I bet you do. You're a lot of things, but dumb hasn't ever been one of them. If I were you, Scotty, I'd take that roll of bills—it's around seven hundred dollars—and put my act on the road. Stick five in my pocket and the rest in my boot. Ten's too young to be on the road, even for a little while, and I think the chances are probably ninety-five in a hundred somebody'll rob you of your roll even before you make it over the bridge into Pittsburgh, but if you stay here, something bad's going to happen. Do you know what I'm talking about?"

"Yes, but I can't go," I say.

"There's a lot of things people think they can't do and then discover they can when they find themselves tight-wired," Daddy says. He looks down at his feet, which are all pink and raw-looking. "If you were to make it to the Burg, I believe a boy bright enough to get rid of Mr. Halsey with a story about Lou Gehrig's Disease and a sister I don't have might be bright enough to look under the C's in the telephone book and find Child Welfare. Or you might could knock around a little bit and maybe find an even better situation, if you wasn't to get separated from that roll of cash. Seven hundred parceled out five or ten bucks at a time will last a kid awhile, if he's smart enough not to get picked up by the cops and lucky enough not to get robbed of any more of it than what happens to be in his pocket."

I tell him again: "I can't go."

"Why not?"

But I can't explain. Some of it is having lived almost my whole life in that farmhouse, with almost no one for company but Daddy and Paul. What I know of other places I have gotten mostly from three sources: the television, the radio, and my imagination. Yes, I've been to the movies, and I've been to the Burg half a dozen times, but always with my father and big brother. The thought of going out into that roaring

strangeness alone scares the living Jesus out of me. And, more to the point, I love him. Not in the simple and uncomplicated (until the last few weeks, at least) way I loved Paul, but yes, I love him. He has cut me and hit me and called me smuckhead and nummie and gluefoot mothersmucker, he has terrorized many of my childhood days and sent me to bed on many nights feeling small and stupid and worthless, but those bad times have yielded their own perverse treasures; they have turned each kiss to gold, each of his compliments, even the most offhand, into things to be treasured. And even at ten— because I'm his son, his blood? maybe—I understand that his kisses and compliments are always sincere; they are always true things. He is a monster, but the monster is not incapable of love. That was the horror of my father, little Lisey: he loved his boys.

"I just can't," I say.

He thinks about this—about whether or not to press me, I suppose—and then just nods again. "All right. But listen to me, Scott. What I did to your brother I did to save your life. Do you know that?"

"Yes, Daddy."

"But if I were to do something to you, it would be different. It would be so bad I might go to hell for it, even if there was something else inside making me do it." His eyes shift away from mine then, and I know he's seeing them again, them, and that pretty soon it won't be him I'm talking to anymore. Then he looks back at me and I see him clearly for the last time. "You won't let me go to hell, will you?" he asks me. "You wouldn't let your Daddy go to hell and burn there forever, mean as I've been to you some of the time?" "No, Daddy," I say, and I can hardly talk.

"You promise? On your brother's name?"

"On Paul's name."

He looks away, back into the corner. "I'm going to lie down," he says. "Fix yourself something to eat if you want, but don't leave this smucking kitchen all beshitted."

That night I wake up—or something wakes me up—and I hear the sleet coming down on the house harder than ever. I hear a crash out back and know it's a tree falling over from the weight of ice on it. Maybe it was another tree falling over that woke me up, but I don't think so. I think I heard him on the stairs, even though he's trying to be quiet. There's no time to do anything but slide out of bed and hide underneath it, so that's what I do even though I know it's hopeless, under the bed is where kids always hide, and it'll be the first place he looks.

I see his feet come in the door. They're still bare. He never says a word, just walks over to the bed and stands beside it. I think he'll stand beside it like he did before, then maybe sit down on it, but he never. Instead I hear him make a kind of grunting sound, like he does when he's lifting something heavy, a box or something, and he goes up on the balls of his feet, and there's a whistling in the air, and then a terrific SPUH-RUNNGGG noise, and the mattress and the box-spring both bow down in the middle, and dust puffs along the floor, and the point of the pickaxe from out in the shed comes shooting through the bottom of my bed. It stops in front of my face, not an inch from my mouth. It seems like I can see every flake of rust on it, and the shiny place where it scraped on one of the bedsprings. It stays still for a second or two, then there's more grunting and a terrific pig-squealing as he tries to pull it out. He tries hard, but it's good and stuck. The point wiggles and waggles back and forth in front of my face, and then he leaves off. I see his fingers appear below the edge of the bed then, and know that he's rested his palms on the balls of his knees. He's bending down, means to look under the bed and make sure I'm there before working that pickaxe free.

I don't think. I just close my eyes and go. It's the first time since I buried Paul and it's the first time from the second floor. I have just a second to think I'll fall, but I don't care, anything's better than hiding under the bed and seeing the stranger wearing my Daddy's face look under and see me looking back, cornered; anything's better than seeing the bad-gunky stranger who owns him now.

And I do fall, but only a little, only a couple of feet, and only, I think, because I believed I would. So much about Boo'ya Moon is about simple belief; there, seeing really is believing, at least some of the time…and as long as you don't wander too far into the woods and get lost.

It was night there, Lisey, and I remember it well because it was the only time I went there at night on purpose.

15

"Oh, Scott," Lisey said, wiping at her cheeks. Each time he broke from the present tense and spoke to her directly was like a blow, but sweet. "Oh, I'm so sorry." She checked to see how many pages were left—not many. Eight? No, ten. She bent to them again, turning each into the growing pile in her lap as she read it.

16

I leave a cold room where a thing wearing my father's skin is trying to kill me and sit up beside my brother's grave on a summer night softer than velvet. The moon rides the sky like a tarnished silver dollar, and the laughers are having a party deep in the Fairy Forest. Every now and then something else— something deeper in, I think—lets out a roar. Then the laughers are quiet for awhile, but I guess whatever amuses them is eventually more than they can bear in silence, because up they start all over again—first one, then two, then half a dozen, then the whole damn Institute of Risibility. Something too big to be a hawk or an owl sails voicelessly across the moon, some kind of night-hunting bird special to this place, I guess, special to Boo'ya Moon. I can smell all the perfumes that Paul and I loved so much, but now they smell sour and curdled and somehow bed-pissy; like if you breathed too deep of them they'd sprout claws way up in your nose and dig in there. Down Purple Hill I see drifting jellyfish globes of light. I don't know what they are, but I don't like them. I think that if they touch me, they might latch on, or maybe burst and leave a itchy-sore place that would spread like poison ivy if you touched it.

It's creepy by Paul's grave. I don't want to be afraid of him, and I'm not, not really, but I keep thinking of the thing inside him, and wondering if maybe it's in him still. And if things over here that are nice in daylight turn to poison at night, maybe a sleeping bad thing, even one hibernating way down in dead and rotting flesh, could come back to life. What if it shot Paul's arms out of the ground? What if it made his dirty dead hands grab me? What if his grinning face came rising up to my own, with dirt running from the corners of his eyes like tears?

I don't want to cry, ten is too old to cry (especially if you've been through the things I have), but I'm starting to blubber, I can't help it. Then I see one sweetheart tree standing a little bit apart from all the others, with its branches spread out in what looks like a low cloud.

And to me, Lisey, that tree looked…kind. I didn't know why then, but I think that now, all these years later, I do. Writing this has brought it back. The night-lights, those scary cold balloons drifting just above the ground, wouldn't go under it. And as I got closer to it, I realized that this one tree, at least, smelled as sweet—or almost as sweet—at night as it did in the daytime. That's the tree you're sitting under now, little Lisey, if you're reading this last story. And I'm very tired. I don't think I can do the rest of it the justice it deserves, although I know I must try. It's my last chance to talk to you, after all.

Let us say that there's a little boy who sits in the shelter of that tree for—well, who knows, really? Not all that long night, but until the moon (which always seems to be full here, have you noticed?) is down and he has dozed in and out of half a dozen strange and sometimes lovely dreams, at least one of which will later become the basis of a novel. Long enough for him to name that wonderful shelter the Story Tree.

And long enough for him to know that something awful—something far worse than the paltry evil which has seized his father—has turned its casual gaze toward him…and marked him for later notice (perhaps)…and then turned its obscene and unknowable mind once more away. That was the first time I sensed the fellow who has lurked behind so much of my life, Lisey, the thing that has been the darkness to your light, and who also feels—as I know you always have—that everything is the same. That is a wonderful concept, but it has its dark side. I wonder if you know? I wonder if you ever will?

17

"I know," Lisey said. "I do now. God help me, I do."

She looked at the pages again. Six left. Only six, and that was good. Afternoons in Boo'ya Moon were long, but she thought that this one had finally begun to fade. It was really time to be getting back. Back to her house. Her sisters. Her life.

She had begun to understand how it was to be done.

18

There comes a time when I hear the laughers beginning to draw closer to the edge of the Fairy Forest, and I think their amusement has taken on a sardonic, perhaps stealthy undertone. I peer around the trunk of my sheltering tree and think I see dark shapes slipping from the darker mass of the trees at the edge of the woods. This may only be my overactive imagination, but I don't think so. I think my imagination, febrile as it is, has been exhausted by the many shocks of the long day and longer night, and that I have been reduced to seeing exactly what is there. As if to confirm this, there comes a slobbering chuckle from the high grass not twenty yards from where I am crouching. Once more I don't think about what I'm doing; I simply close my eyes and feel the chill of my bedroom fold itself around me once more. A moment later I'm sneezing from the disturbed dust under my bed. I rear up, face contorted in a nearly gruesome effort to sneeze as quietly as possible, and I thump my forehead on the broken box-spring. If the pick had still been sticking through I might have gashed myself badly or even put out one of my eyes, but it's gone.

I drag myself out from under my bed on my elbows and my knees, conscious that a sickly five o'clock light is soaking in through the window. It's sleeting harder than ever, by the sound, but I hardly notice. I swivel my head from my floorlevel position, peering stupidly around at the shambles that used to be my bedroom. The closet door has been pulled off the top hinge and leans drunkenly into the room from the lower one. My clothes have been scattered and many of them—most of them, it looks like—have been torn apart, as if the thing inside of Daddy has taken out on them what it couldn't take out on the boy who should have been inside them. Far worse, it has torn my few treasured paperback books—sports biographies and science fiction novels, mostly—to shreds. Their flimsy covers lie in pieces everywhere. My bureau has been

overturned, the drawers slung to the corners of the room. The hole where the pickaxe went through my bed looks as big as a moon crater, and I think: That's where my belly would have been, if I'd been lying there. And there's a faint sour smell. It reminds me of how Boo'ya Moon smelled at night, but it's more familiar. I try to put a name on it and can't. All I can think of is bad fruit, and although that's not quite right, it turns out to be very close.

I don't want to leave the room, but I know I can't stay there because eventually he'll be back. I find a pair of jeans that aren't ripped and put them on. My sneakers are gone, I don't know where, but maybe my boots will still be in the mudroom. And my coat. I'll put them on and run out into the sleet. Down the driveway, following Mr. Halsey's half-frozen slushy car tracks, to the road. Then down the road to Mulie's Store. I'll run for my life, into some future I can't even imagine. Unless, that is, he catches me first and kills me.

I have to climb over the bureau, which is blocking the door, to get into the hall. Once I'm out there I see the thing has knocked down all the pictures and knocked holes in the walls, and I know I'm looking at more of its anger at not being able to get at me.

Out here the sour fruit smell is strong enough to recognize. There was a Christmas party at U.S. Gyppum last year. Daddy went because he said it would "look funny" if he didn't. The man who drew his name gave him a jug of homemade blackberry wine for a present. Now, Andrew Landon has got a lot of problems (and he'd probably be the first to admit it, if caught in an honest moment), but alcohol isn't one of them. He poured himself a jelly-glass of that wine before dinner one night—between Christmas and New Year's, this was, with Paul chained in the cellar—took one sip, grimaced, started to pour it down the sink, then saw me looking and held it out.

You want to try this, Scott? he asked. See what all the shouting's about? Hey, if you like it, you can have the whole sweetmother gallon.

I'm as curious about booze as any kid, I guess, but that smell was too fruity-rancid. Maybe the stuff makes you happy like I've seen on TV, but I could never lick that gone-dead fruit smell. I shook my head.

You're a wise child, Scooter ole Scoot, he said, and poured the stuff in the jelly-glass down the sink. But he must have saved the rest of the jug (or just forgot about it) because that's what I smell now, sure as God made little fishes, and strong. By the time I get to the foot of the stairs it's a stench, and now I hear something besides the steady rattle of the sleet on the boards and the tinny tick-tock of it on the windows: George Jones. It's Daddy's radio, tuned to WWVA like always, playing very soft. And I also hear snoring. The relief is so great that tears go spilling down my cheeks. The thing I've been most afraid of is that he's laid up, waiting for me to show myself. Now, listening to those long, ragged snores, I know that he's not.

Nevertheless, I'm careful. I detour through the dining room so I can come into the living room from behind the sofa. The dining room is also a shambles. Nana's breakfront has been overturned, and it looks to me like he made a pretty good effort to turn it into kindling. All the dishes are broken. So's the blue pitcher, and the money inside it has been torn to pieces. Green shreds have been flung every whichever. Some even hang from the central light fixture like New Year's Eve confetti. Apparently the thing inside Daddy has no more use for money than it does for books.

In spite of those snores, in spite of being on the couch's blind side, I peer into the living room like a soldier peering over the lip of a foxhole after an artillery barrage. It's a needless precaution. His head's hanging off one end of the couch and his hair, which he hasn't taken the scissors to since before Paul went bad, is so long it's almost touching the rug. I could have marched through there crashing a pair of cymbals and he wouldn't have stirred. Daddy isn't just asleep in the jumbled wreckage of that room; he is un-smuckingconscious.

A little further in and I see there's a cut running up one cheek, and his closed eyes have a purplish, exhausted look. His lips have slid back from his teeth, making him look like an old dog that fell asleep trying to snarl. He covers the couch with an old Navajo blanket to keep off grease and spilled food, and he's wrapped part of it over him. He must have been tired of busting things up by the time he got in here, because he's poked out the eye of the television and smashed the glass over his dead wife's studio portrait and called it good. The radio's in its usual place on the endtable and that gallon jug is on the floor beside it. I look at the jug and can't hardly believe what I'm seeing: there's not but an inch or so left. It's almost impossible for me to believe he's drunk so much—he who isn't used to drinking at all—but the stink hanging around him, so thick I can almost see it, is very persuasive.

The pickaxe leans against the head of the sofa, and there's a piece of paper stuck on the end that came down through my bed. I know it's a note he's left for me, and I don't want to read it, but I have to. He's written on three lines, but there are only eight words. Too few to ever forget.

KILL ME

THEN PUT ME WITH PAUL

PLEASE

19

Lisey, crying harder than ever, turned this page into her lap along with the others. Now there were only two left. The printing had grown loose, a little wandering, not always sticking to the lines, quite clearly tired. She knew what came next—I put a pickaxe in his head while he was a-sleepun, he had told her under the yum-yum tree—and did she have to read the details here? Was there anything in the marriage vows about having to subject yourself to your dead husband's confession of patricide?

And yet those pages called to her, cried to her like some lonely thing that has lost everything but its voice. She dropped her eyes to the final pages, determined that if she must finish, she would do so as quickly as she could.

20

I don't want to, but I take up the pickaxe anyway and stand there with it in my hands, looking at him, the lord of my life, the tyrant of all my days. I have hated him often and he has never given me cause to love him enough, I know that now, but he has given me some, especially during those nightmare weeks after Paul went bad. And in that five o'clock living room with the day's first gray light creeping in and the sleet ticking like a clock and the sound of his wheezing snores below me and an ad on the radio for some discount furniture store in Wheeling, West Virginia, I will never visit, I know it comes down to a bald choice between those two, love and hate. Now I'll find out which one rules my child's heart. I can let him live and run down the road to Mulie's, run into some unknown new life, and that will condemn him to the hell he fears and in many ways deserves. Richly deserves. First hell on earth, the hell of a cell in some looneybin, and then maybe hell forever after, which is what he really fears. Or I can kill him and set him free. This choice is mine to make, and there is no God to help me make it, for I believe in none.

Instead I pray to my brother, who loved me until the bad-gunky stole his heart and mind. I ask him to tell me what to do, if he's there. And I get an answer—although whether it is really from Paul or just from my own imagination masquerading as Paul I suppose I'll never know. In the end, I don't see that it matters; I need an answer and I get one. In my ear, just as clearly as he ever spoke when he was alive, Paul says: "Daddy's prize is a kiss."

I take hold on the pickaxe then. The ad on the radio finishes and Hank Williams comes on, singing "Why don't you love me like you used to do, How come you treat me like a worn-out shoe?" And

21

Here three lines were blank before the words took up again, this time in the past tense and addressing her directly. The rest was crammed together with almost no regard for the blueruled notebook lines, and Lisey was sure he had written the final passage in a single rush. She read it the same way. Turning over to the last page as she did and continuing on, continually wiping away her tears so she could see clearly enough to get the sense of what he was saying. The mental seeing part, she found, was hellishly easy. The little boy, barefooted, wearing perhaps his only pair of untorn jeans, raising the pickaxe over his sleeping father in the gray predawn light while the radio plays, and for a moment it only hangs there in the air that reeks of blackberry wine and everything is the same. Then

22

I brought it down. Lisey, I brought it down in love—I swear— and I killed my father. I thought I might have to hit him with it again but that single blow was enough and all my life it's been on my mind, all my life it's been the thought inside every thought, I get up thinking I killed my father and go to bed thinking it. It has moved like a ghost behind every line I ever wrote in every novel, any story: I killed my father. I told you that day under the yum-yum tree, and I think that gave me just enough relief to keep me from exploding completely five years or ten or fifteen down the line. But a statement isn't the same as telling.

Lisey, if you're reading this, I've gone on. I think my time is short, but such time as I had (and it was very good time) is all down to you. You have given me so much. Just give me this much more—your eye on these last few words, the hardest I've ever written.

No tale can tell how ugly such dying is, even if it's instantaneous. Thank God I didn't hit him a glancing blow and have to do it again; thank God there was no squealing or crawling. I hit him dead center, right where I meant to, but even mercy is ugly in the living memory; that's a lesson I learned well when I was just ten. His skull exploded. Hair and blood and brains showered up, all over that blanket he'd spread on the back of the couch. Snot flew out of his nose and his tongue fell out of his mouth. His head went over to the side and I heard soft puttering noises as the blood and brains leaked out of his head. Some of it splashed on my feet and it was warm. Hank Williams was still on the radio. One of Daddy's hands made a fist, then opened again. I smelled shit and knew he'd left a load in his pants. And I knew that was the last of him.

The pickax was still stick out his head.

I crep away into the corn of the room and curl up and I cried. I cried and cried. I guess maybe I slep some too, I don't kno, but there came a time when it was brighter and the sun was almost out and I think it might have been noonish. If so, I guess 7 hours or so wen by. That was when I first tried to take my Daddy to Boo'ya Moon and couldn't. I thought if I got something to eat, so I did but still I couldn't. Then I thought if I took a bath and got the blut off me, his blood, and clean up some of the mess around wehre he was but still I coulnt. I tried and tried. Off and on quite a bit. Two days, I guess. Sometime I'd look at his wrap in the blanket and make believe he was say You keep on pluggin Scoot you old sumbitch, you'll make it like in a story. I'd try, then I'd clean, try and clean, eet somethig and try summore. I cleen that hole house! Top to bottom! Once I went to Boo'ya by myself prove I still had the nack and I dit but I coulnt take my daddy. I trite so hard Lisey.

23

Several blank lines here. At the bottom of the last page he had written: Some things are like an ANCHOR Lisey do you remember?

"I do, Scott," she murmured. "I do. And your father was one of them, wasn't he?" Wondering how many days and nights in all. How many days and nights alone with the corpse of Andrew "Sparky" Landon before Scott finally gave up plugging and invited the world in. Wondering how in God's name he had stood up to it without going completely insane.

There was a little more on the other side of the sheet. She flipped it over and saw that he had answered one of her questions.

Five days I tride. Finaly gave up and warped him in that blanket and put him down the dry well. The next time the sleet stoped I went to Mulie's and said "My Daddy's took my big brother and I guess they up and left me." They took me to the County Sheriff, a fat old man named Gosling and he took me to the Child Welfare and I was "on the County" as they say. So far as I know Gosling was the only cop who ever went up there to the home place, and big deal. My own Daddy once said "Sheriff Gosling couldn't find his own ass after he took a shit."

Below this was another space of three lines, and when the printing resumed—the last four lines of communication from her husband—she could see the effort he had made to get hold of himself, to find his adult self. He had made the effort for her, she thought. No, knew.

Babyluv: If you need an anchor to hold your place in the world—not Boo'ya Moon but the one we shared, use the african. You know how to get it back. Kisses—at least a thousand,

Scott

P.S. Everything the same. I love you.

24

Lisey could have sat there with his letter for a long time, but the afternoon was fleeting. The sun was still yellow, but it was now approaching the horizon and would soon begin to take on that thundering orange cast she remembered so well. She didn't want to be on the path even close to sunset, and that meant she had better get moving now. She decided to leave Scott's final manuscript here, but not under the Story Tree. She would leave it at the head of the faint hollow that marked Paul Landon's final resting-place, instead.

She walked back to the sweetheart tree with the moss-shaggy trunk, the one that looked weirdly like a palm tree, carrying the remains of the yellow afghan and the damp and mushy manuscript box. She put them down, then picked up the marker with PAUL printed on the horizontal arm. It was splintered and bloody and all askew, but not really broken. Lisey was able to straighten the horizontal arm and slip the marker back into its former place. When she did, she spied something lying nearby, something almost hidden in the high grass. She knew what it was even before she picked it up: the hypodermic that had never been used, now rustier than ever, its cap still on.

Playin with fire there, Scoot, his father had said when Scott had suggested that maybe they could drug Paul…and his father had been right.

Damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it! Scott had said to Lisey when he had taken her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers. That'd be a joke on me, all right— after all those years!—but the cap's still on!

It was still on now. And the nighty-night stuff was still inside, as if all the years between hadn't existed.

Lisey kissed the dull glass of the hypodermic's barrel—why she could not have said—and put it into the box with Scott's last story. Then, bundling the wasted remains of Good Ma's wedding afghan in her arms, Lisey went to the path. She glanced briefly at the board lying in the high grass to one side of it, the words on it more faded and ghost-like than ever but still discernible, still reading TO THE POOL, and then passed under the trees. At first she stalked rather than walked, her gait made awkward by her fear that a certain something might be lurking nearby, that its strange and terrible mind would sense her. Then, little by little, she relaxed. The long boy was somewhere else. It crossed her mind that it might not even be in Boo'ya Moon at all. If it was, it had gone deep into the forest. Lisey Landon was only a small part of its business in any case, and if what she was about to do worked, she would become a smaller part of it still, because her latest intrusions in this exotic but frightening world had been involuntary, and were about to cease. With Dooley out of her life, she couldn't think why she would ever need to come back on purpose.

Some things are like an anchor Lisey do you remember?

Lisey walked faster, and when she came to where the silver spade lay on the path, its bowl still dark with Jim Dooley's blood, she stepped over it with no more than a single absent look.

By then she was nearly running.

25

When she came back to the empty study, the top of the barn was hotter than ever but Lisey was cool enough, because for the second time she had come back soaked to the skin. This time wrapped around her middle like some strange wide belt was the remains of the yellow afghan, also sopping wet.

Use the african, Scott had written, and had told her she knew how to get it back—not to Boo'ya Moon but to this world. And of course she did. She'd waded into the pool with it wrapped around her, then waded out again. And then, standing on the firm white sand of that beach for what was almost certainly the last time, facing not toward the sad and silent spectators on the benches but away from them, looking at the waters above which the eternally full moon would eventually rise, she had closed her eyes and had simply—what? Wished herself back? No, it was more active than that, less wistful…but not without sadness, for all that.

"I hollered myself home," she told the long and empty room— empty now of his desks and word-processors, his books and his music, empty of his life. "That's what it was. Wasn't it, Scott?"

But there was no answer. It seemed he had finally finished having his say. And maybe that was good. Maybe that was for the best.

Now, while the african was still wet from the pool, she could go back to Boo'ya Moon with it wrapped around her, if she wanted; wrapped in such damp magic she might be able to go even further, to other worlds beyond Boo'ya Moon…for she had no doubt such worlds existed, and that the folks who rested on the benches eventually tired of sitting and rose from their seats and found some of them. Wrapped in the soaking african she might even be able to fly, as she had in her dreams. But she wouldn't. Scott had dreamed awake, sometimes brilliantly— but that had been his talent and his job. For Lisey Landon, one world was more than enough, although she suspected she might always harbor a bone-lonely place in her heart for that other one, where she had seen the sun setting in its house of thunder while the moon rose in its house of silver silence. But hey, what the smuck. She had a place to hang her hat and a good car to drive; she had rags for the bod and shoes for the feet. She also had four sisters, one of whom was going to need plenty of help and understanding in order to get through the years ahead. It would be best to let the african dry, to let its beautiful, lethal weight of dreams and magic evaporate, to let it become an anchor again. She would eventually scissor it into pieces and always keep one with her, a bit of anti-magic, a thing to keep her feet on the earth, a ward against wandering.

In the meantime, she wanted to dry her hair and get out of her wet clothes.

Lisey walked to the stairs, dripping dark drops on some of the places where she'd bled. The wrap of the african slipped down to her hips and became skirtlike, exotic, even a little sexy. She turned and looked back over her shoulder at the long empty room, which seemed to dream in the dusty shafts of late August sunlight. She was golden in that light herself and looked young again, although she didn't know it.

"I guess I'm done up here," she said, feeling suddenly hesitant. "I'll be going. Bye."

She waited. For what, she didn't know. There was nothing. There was a sense of something.

She lifted a hand as if to wave, then dropped it again, as if embarrassed. She smiled a little and one tear fell down her cheek, unnoticed. "I love you, honey. Everything the same."

Lisey went down the stairs. For a moment her shadow stayed, and then it was gone, too.

The room sighed. Then it was silent.

Center Lovell, Maine August 4, 2005