Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

Jonesy sat moodily behind his desk for quite awhile, sometimes looking at the phone which no longer worked, sometimes at the dreamcatcher which hung from the ceiling (it wafted in some barely felt air-current), sometimes at the new steel shutters with which that bastard Gray had blocked his vision. And always that low rumble, both in his ears and shivering his buttocks as he sat in his chair. It could have been a rather noisy furnace, one in need of servicing, but it wasn’t. It was the plow, beating its way south and south and south. Mr Gray behind the wheel, likely wearing a DPW cap stolen from his most recent victim, horsing the plow along, working the wheel with Jonesy’s muscles, listening to developments on the plow’s CB with Jonesy’s ears.

So, Jonesy, how long you going to sit here feeling sorry for yourself?

Jonesy, who had been slumping in his seat-almost dozing, in fact-straightened up at that. Henry’s voice. Not arriving telepathically-there were no voices now, Mr Gray had blocked all but his own-but, rather, coining from his own mind. Nonetheless, it stung him.

I’m not feeling sorry for myself, I’m blocked off! Not liking the sulky, defensive quality of the thought; vocalized, it would no doubt have come out as a whine. Can’t fall out, can’t see out, can’t go out, I don’t know where you are, Henry, but I’m in a goddam isolation booth.

Did he steal your brains?

“Shut up.” Jonesy rubbed at his temple.

Did he take your memories?

No. Of course not. Even in here, with a double-locked door between him and those billions of labeled cartons, he could recall wiping a booger on the end of Bonnie Deal’s braid in first grade (and then asking that same Bonnie to dance at the seventh-grade Harvest Hop six years later), watching carefully as Lamar Clarendon taught them to play the game (known as cribbage to the low and the uninitiated), seeing Rick McCarthy come out of the woods and thinking he was a deer. He could remember all those things. There might be an advantage in that, but Jonesy was damned if he knew what it was. Maybe because it was too big, too obvious.

To be stuck like this after all the mysteries you’ve read, his mind’s version of Henry taunted him. Not to mention all those science-fiction movies where the aliens arrive, everything from The Day the Earth Stood Still to The Attack of the Killer Tomatoes. All of that and you still can’t figure this guy out? Can’t follow his smoke down from the sky and see where he’s camped?

Jonesy rubbed harder at his temple. This wasn’t ESP, it was his own mind, and why couldn’t he shut it up? He was fucking trapped, so what difference did it make, anyway? He was a motor without a transmission, a cart without a horse; he was Donovan’s Brain, kept alive in a tank of cloudy fluid and dreaming useless dreams.

What does he want? Start there.

Jonesy looked up at the dreamcatcher, dancing in the vague currents of warm air. Felt the rumble of the plow, strong enough to vibrate the pictures on the walls. Tina Jean Schlossinger, that had been her name, and supposedly there had been a picture of her in here, a picture of her holding her skirt up so you could see her pussy, and how many adolescent boys had been caught by such a dream?

Jonesy got up-almost leaped up-and began to pace around the office, limping only a little. The storm was over, and his hip hurt a bit less now.

Think like Hercule Poirot, he told himself Exercise those little gray cells. Never mind your memories for the time being, think about Mr Gray. Think logically. What does he want?

Jonesy stopped. What Gray wanted was obvious, really. He had gone to the Standpipe-where the Standpipe had been, anyway because he wanted water. Not just any water; drinking water. But the Standpipe was gone, destroyed in the big blow of “85-ha, ha, Mr Gray, gotcha last-and Derry’s current water supply was north and east, probably not reachable because of the storm, and not concentrated in one place, anyway. So Mr Gray had, after consulting Jonesy’s available store of knowledge, turned south again. Toward-

Suddenly it was all clear. The strength ran out of his legs and he collapsed to the carpeted floor, ignoring the flare of pain in his hip. The dog. Lad. Did he still have the dog? “Of course he does,” Jonesy whispered. “Of course the son of a bitch does, I can smell him even in here. Fartin just like McCarthy.”

This world was inimical to the byrus, and this world’s inhabitants fought with a surprising vigor which arose from deep wells of emotion. Bad luck. But now the last surviving grayboy had had an unbroken chain of good luck; he was like some daffy in-the-zone Vegas crapshooter rolling a string of sevens: four, six, eight, oh goddam, a dozen in a row. He had found Jonesy, his Typhoid Mary, had invaded him and conquered him. He had found Pete, who had gotten him where he wanted to go after the flashlight the kim-had given out. Next, Andy Janas, the Minnesota boy. He had been hauling the corpses of two deer killed by the Ripley. The deer had been useless to Mr Gray… but Janas had also been hauling the decomposing body of one of the aliens.

Fruiting bodies, Jonesy thought randomly. Fruiting bodies, what’s that from?

No matter. Because Mr Gray’s next seven had been the Dodge Ram, old Mr I ? MY BORDER COLLIE. What had Gray done? Fed some of the gray’s dead body to the dog? Put the dog’s nose to the corpse and forced him to inhale of that fruiting body? No, eating was much more likely; c’mon, boy, chow time. Whatever process started the weasels, it began in the gut, not the lungs. Jonesy had a momentary image of McCarthy lost in the woods. Beaver had asked What the hell have you been eating? Woodchuck turds? And what had McCarthy replied? Bushes and things … I don’t know just what… I was just so hungry, you know …

Sure. Hungry. Lost, scared, and hungry. Not noticing the red splotches of byrus on the leaves of some of the bushes, the red speckles on the green moss he crammed into his mouth, gagging it down because somewhere back there in his tame oh-gosh oh-dear lawyer’s life, he had read that you could eat moss if you were lost in the woods, that moss wouldn’t hurt you. Did everyone who swallowed some of the byrus (grains of it, almost too small to be seen, floating in the air) incubate one of the vicious little monsters that had torn McCarthy apart and then killed the Beav? Probably not, no more than every woman who had unprotected sex got pregnant. But McCarthy had caught and so had Lad.

“He knows about the cottage,” Jonesy said.

Of course. The cottage in Ware, some sixty miles west of Boston. And he’d know the story of the Russian woman, everyone knew it; Jonesy had passed it on himself. It was too gruesomely good not to pass on. They knew it in Ware, in New Salem, in Cooleyville and Belchertown, Hardwick and Packardsville and Pelham. All the surrounding towns. And what, pray tell, did those towns surround?

Why, the Quabbin, that was what they surrounded. Quabbin Reservoir. The water supply for Boston and the adjacent metropolitan area. How many people drank their daily water from the Quabbin? Two million? Three? Jonesy didn’t know for sure, but a lot more than had ever drunk from the supply stored in the Derry Standpipe. Mr Gray, rolling seven after seven, a run for the ages and now only one away from breaking the bank.

Two or three million people. Mr Gray wanted to introduce them to Lad the border collie, and to Lad’s new friend. And delivered in this new medium, the byrus would take.