Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

They were in the dreamcatcher.

He noted that the one swaying in the air above the ruins of his desk had four central spokes radiating out from the center. Many connecting threads were held together by those spokes, but what held the spokes together was the center-the core where they merged.

Run along the dreamcatcher and meet me! There’s still time!

Jonesy turned and sprinted for the door.

Mr Gray was also at a door-the one into the shaft house. It was locked. Considering what had happened with the Russian woman, this didn’t surprise him much. Locking the barn door after the horse had been stolen was Jonesy’s phrase for it. If he’d had one of the kim, this would have been easy. As it was, he wasn’t too perturbed. One of the interesting side effects of having emotions, he had discovered, was that they caused you to think ahead, plan ahead, so that you wouldn’t trigger an all-out emotional attack if things went wrong.

It might be one reason these creatures had survived as long as they had.

Jonesy’s suggestion that he give in to all this- go native had been his phrase for it, one that struck Mr Gray as both mysterious and exotic-wouldn’t quite leave his mind, but Mr Gray pushed it aside. He would accomplish his mission here, satisfy the imperative. After that, who knew? Bacon sandwiches, perhaps. And what Jonesy’s mind identified as a “cocktail”. This was a cool and refreshing drink, slightly intoxicating-

A gust of wind rolled off the Reservoir, slapping wet snow into his face, momentarily blinding him. It was like the snap of a. wet towel, returning him to the here and now, where he had a job to finish.

He sidled to the left on the rectangular granite stoop, slipped, then dropped to his knees, ignoring the howl from Jonesy’s hip. He hadn’t come all this way-black light-years and white miles-either to fall back down the steps and break his neck or to tumble into the Quabbin and die of hypothermia in that chilly water.

The stoop had been placed atop a mound of crushed stone. Leaning over the left side of the stoop, he brushed snow away and began feeling for a loose chunk. There were windows flanking the locked door, narrow but not too narrow.

Sound was tamped down and flattened by the heavy fall of wet snow, but he could hear the sound of an approaching motor. There had been another, as well, but that one had already stopped, probably at the end of East Street. They were coming, but they were too late. It was a mile along the path, which was densely overgrown and slippery underfoot. By the time they got here the dog would be down the shaft, drowning and delivering the byrum into the aqueduct at the same time.

He found a loose rock and pulled it free, working carefully so as not to dislodge the pulsing body of the dog around his shoulders. He backed away from the edge on his knees, then tried to get to his feet. At first he couldn’t. The ball of Jonesy’s hip had swelled tight again. He finally lurched upright, although the pain was incredible, seeming to go all the way up to his teeth and his temples.

He stood for a moment, holding Jonesy’s bad right leg a little off the ground like a horse with a stone in its hoof, bracing himself against the locked shaft-house door. When the pain had abated somewhat, he used the rock to beat the glass out of the window to the left of the door. He cut Jonesy’s hand in several places, once deeply, and several cracked panes in the upper half of the window hung over the lower half like a cut-rate guillotine, but he paid no attention to these things. Nor did he sense that Jonesy had finally left his bolt-hole,

Mr Gray squirmed in through the window, landed on the cold concrete floor, and looked around.

He was in a rectangular room about thirty feet long. At the far end, a window which no doubt would have given a spectacular view of the Reservoir on a clear day showed only white, as if a sheet had been tacked over it. To one side of it was what looked like a gigantic steel pail, its sides speckled with red-not byrus, but an oxide Jonesy identified as “rust”. Mr Gray didn’t know for sure but guessed that men could be lowered down the shaft in the bucket, should some emergency require it.

The iron cover, four feet across, was in place, seated dead center in the middle of the floor. He could see the square notch on one side of it and looked around. A few tools leaned against the wall. One of them, in a scatter of glass from the broken window, was a crowbar. Quite possibly the same one the Russian woman had used as she prepared for her suicide.

Way I heard it, Mr Gray thought, the folks in Boston’ll be drinking that last byrum in their morning coffee right around Valentine’s Day.

He seized the crowbar, limped painfully to the center of the room with his breath puffing cold and white before him, then seated the spatulate end of the tool in the slot of the cover. The fit was perfect.

Henry racks the telephone, takes in a deep breath, holds it… and then runs for the door which is marked both OFFICE and PRIVATE.

“Hey!” old Reenie Gosselin squawks from her place at the cash-register. “Come back here, kid! You can’t go in there!”

Henry doesn’t stop, doesn’t even slow, but as he goes through the door he realizes that yeah, he is a kid, at least a foot shy of his final height, and although he’s wearing specs, they’re nowhere near as heavy as they will be later on. He’s a kid, but under all that flopping hair (which will have thinned a bit by the time he hits his thirties) there is an adult’s brain. I’m two, two, two mints in one, he thinks, and as he bursts into Old Man Gosselin’s office he is cackling madly-laughing like they did in the old days, when the strands of the dreamcatcher were all close to the center and Duddits was running their pegs. I almost busted a gut, they used to say; I almost busted a gut, what a fuckin pisser.

Into the office he goes, but it’s not Old Man Gosselin’s office where a man named Owen Underhill once played a man whose name was not Abraham Kurtz a tape of the grayboys talking in famous voices; it is a corridor, a hospital corridor, and Henry is not in the least surprised. It’s Mass General. He’s made it.

The place is dank, colder than any hospital corridor should be, and the walls are splotched with byrus. Somewhere a voice is groaning I don’t want you, I don’t want a shot, I want Jonesy. Jonesy knew Duddits, Jonesy died, died in the ambulance, Jonesy’s the only one who will do. Stay away, kiss my bender, I want Jonesy.

But he will not stay away. He is crafty old Mr Death and he will not stay away. He has business here.

He walks unseen down the corridor, where it’s cold enough for him to see his breath puffing out in front of him, a boy in an orange coat he will soon outgrow. He wishes he had his rifle, the one Pete’s Dad loaned him, but that rifle is gone, left behind, buried in the years along with Jonesy’s phone with the Star Wars sticker on it (how they had all envied that phone), and Beaver’s jacket of many zippers, and Pete’s sweater with the NASA logo on the breast. Buried in the years. Some dreams die and fall free, that is another of the world’s bitter truths. How many bitter truths there are.

He walks past a pair of laughing, talking nurses-one of them is Josie Rinkenhauer, all grown up, and the other is the woman in the Polaroid photograph they saw that day through the Tracker Brothers office window. They don’t see him because he’s not here for them; he is in the dreamcatcher now, running back along his strand, running toward the center. I am the eggman, he thinks. Time slowed, reality bent, on and on the eggman went.