Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

“Yeah. At least I guess so.” He turned up the exit ramp, the Humvee shouldering its way through the snow. The clock built into the dashboard had gone as dead as Henry’s wristwatch, but he thought he could see the faintest lightening in the air. “Right or left at the top of the ramp? Tell me now, because I don’t want to risk stopping.”

“Left, left.”

Owen swung the Hummer left under a dancing blinker-light, rode it through another skid, and then moved south on Kansas Street. It had been plowed, and not that long ago, but it was drifting in again already.

“Snow’s letting up,” Henry said.

“Yeah, but the wind’s a bitch. You’re looking forward to seeing him, aren’t you? Duddits.”

Henry grinned. “A little nervous about it, but yeah.” He shook his head. “Duddits, man… Duddits just makes you feel good. He’s a tribble. You’ll see for yourself I just wish we weren’t busting in like this at the crack of dawn.” Owen shrugged. Can’t do anything about it, the gesture said. “They’ve been over here on the west side for four years, I guess, and I’ve never even been to the new place.” And, without even realizing, went on in mindspeak: They moved after Alfie died. Did you- And then, instead of words, a picture: people in black under black umbrellas. A graveyard in the rain. A coffin on trestles with R.I.P. ALFIE carved on top. No, Henry said, feeling ashamed. None of us did.

But Henry didn’t know why they hadn’t gone, although a phrase occurred to him: The moving finger writes; and having writ, moves on. Duddits had been an important (he guessed the word he actually wanted was vital) part of their childhood. And once that link was broken, going back would have been painful. Painful was one thing, uselessly painful another. He understood something now. The images he associated with his depression and his growing certainty of suicide-the trickle of milk on his father’s chin, Barry Newman hustling his doublewide butt out of the office-had been hiding another, more potent, image all along: the dreamcatcher. Hadn’t that been the real source of his despair? The grandiosity of the dreamcatcher concept coupled to the banality of the uses to which the concept had been put? Using Duddits to find Josie Rinkenhauer had been like discovering quantum physics and then using it to build a video game. Worse, discovering that was really all quantum physics was good for. Of course they had done a good thing-without them, Josie Rinkenhauer would have died in that pipe like a rat in a rainbarrel. But-come on-it wasn’t as if they’d rescued a future Nobel Peace Prize winner-

I can’t follow everything that just went through your head, Owen said, suddenly deep in Henry’s mind, but it sounds pretty goddam arrogant. Which street? Stung, Henry glared at him. “We haven’t been back to see him lately, okay? Could we just leave it at that?” “Yes,” Owen said. “But we all sent him Christmas cards, okay? Every year, which is how I know they moved to

Dearborn Street, 41 Dearborn Street, West Side Derry, make your right three streets up.”

“Okay. Calm down.”

“Fuck your mother and die.”

“Henry-”

“We just fell out of touch. It happens. Probably never happened to a Mr Perfection like your honored self, but to the rest of us… the rest of us…” Henri looked down, saw that his fists were clenched, and forced them to roll open.

“Okay, I said.”

“Probably Mr Perfection stays in touch with all his junior-high-school friends, right? You guys probably get together once a year to snap bras, play your Motley Crue records, and eat Tuna Surprise just like they used to serve in the cafeteria.”

“I’m sorry if I upset you.”

“Oh, bite me. You act like we fucking abandoned him.” Which, of course, was pretty much what they had done.

Owen said nothing. He was squinting through the swirling snow, looking for the Dearborn Street sign in the pallid gray light of early morning… and there it was, just up ahead. A plow passing along Kansas Street had plugged the end of Dearborn, but Owen thought the Humvee could beat its way past.

“It’s not like I stopped thinking about him,” Henry said. He started to continue by thought, then switched back to words again. Thinking about Duddits was too revealing. “We all thought about him. In fact, Jonesy and I were going to go see him this spring. Then Jonesy had his accident, and I forgot all about it. Is that so surprising?”

“Not at all,” Owen said mildly. He swung the wheel hard to the right, flicked it back the other way to control the skid, then floored the accelerator. The Hummer hit the packed and crusty wall of snow hard enough to throw both of them forward against their seatbelts. Then they were through, Owen jockeying the wheel to keep from hitting the drifted-in cars parked on either side of the street.

“I don’t need a guilt-trip from someone who was planning to barbecue a few hundred civilians,” Henry grumbled. Owen stamped on the brake with both feet, throwing them forward into their harnesses again, this time hard enough to lock them. The Humvee skidded to a diagonal stop in the street. “Shut the fuck up.”

Don’t be talking shit you don’t understand.

“ I’m likely going to be a”

dead man because of

“ you, so why don’t you just keep all your fucking”

self-indulgent

(picture of a spoiled-looking kid with his lower lip stuck out)

“rationalizing bullshit”

to yourself.

Henry stared at him, shocked and stunned. When was the last time someone had talked to him that way? The answer was probably never.

“I only care about one thing,” Owen said. His face was pale and strained and exhausted. “I want to find your Typhoid Jonesy and stop him. All right? Fuck your precious tender feelings, fuck how tired you are, and fuck you. I’m here.”

“All right,” Henry said.

“I don’t need lessons in morality from a guy planning to blow his overeducated, self-indulgent brains out.”

“Okay.”

“So fuck your mother and die.”

Silence inside the Humvee. Nothing from outside but the monotonous vacuum-cleaner shriek of the wind.

At last Henry said, “Here’s what we’ll do. I’ll fuck your mother, then die; you fuck my mother, then die. At least we’ll avoid the incest taboo.”

Owen began to smile. Henry smiled back.

Mat’re Jonesy and Mr Gray doing? Owen asked Henry. Can you tell?

Henry licked at his lips. The itching in his leg had largely stopped, but his tongue tasted like an old piece of shag rug. “No. They’re cut off. Gray’s responsible for that, probably. And your fearless leader? Kurtz? He’s getting closer, isn’t he?”

“Yeah. If we’re going to maintain any kind of lead on him at all, we better make this quick.” “Then we will.” Owen scratched the red stuff on the side of his face, looked at the bits of red that came off on his fingers, then got moving again.

Number 41, you said?

Yeah. Owen?

What?

I’m scared.

Of Duddits?

Sort of, yeah.

Why?

I don’t know.”

Henry looked at Owen bleakly.

I feel like there’s something wrong with him.

It was her after-midnight fantasy made real, and when the knock came at the door, Roberta was unable to get up. Her legs felt like water. The night was gone, but it had been replaced by a pallid, creepy morning light that wasn’t much better, and they were out there, Pete and Beav, the dead ones had come for her son.