Stephen King - Dreamcatcher

“What did you mean, “Sure we knew"?” Jonesy asked.

“Ah, Jonesy, come on. Maybe we left him, or tried, but do you think Duddits ever left us? After all that happened, do you really believe that?”

Very slowly, Jonesy shook his head.

“Some of it was growing up-growing apart-but some of it was the Richie Grenadeau thing. That worked on us the way the business of the Rapeloews” serving platter worked on Owen Underhill.” Jonesy didn’t need to ask what this meant; in Wyoming, they’d had all the time they needed to catch up on each other’s story.

“There’s an old poem about a man trying to outrun God,” Henry said. “'The Hound of Heaven", it’s called. Duddits wasn’t God-God forbid-but he was our hound. We ran as fast and as far as we could, but-”

“We could never run off the dreamcatcher, could we?” Jonesy said. “None of us could do that. And then they came. The byrum. Stupid spores in spaceships built by some other race. Is that what they were? All they were?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know. Only one question got answered last fall. For centuries we’ve looked up at the stars and asked ourselves if we’re alone in the universe. Well, now we know we’re not. Big whoop, huh? Gerritsen… do you remember Gerritsen?”

Jonesy nodded. Of course he remembered Terry Gerritsen. Navy psychologist, in charge of the Wyoming debriefing team, always joking about how typical it was that Uncle Sammy would post him to a place where the nearest water was Lars Kilborn’s cow-wallow. Gerritsen and Henry had become close-if not quite friends, only because the situation didn’t quite allow it. Jonesy and Henry had been well-treated in Wyoming, but they hadn’t been guests. Still, Henry Devlin and Terry Gerritsen were professional colleagues, and such things made a difference.

“Gerritsen started by assuming two questions had been answered: that we’re not alone in the universe and that we’re not the only intelligent beings in the universe. I labored hard to convince him that the second postulate was based on faulty logic, a house built on sand. I don’t think I entirely succeeded in getting through, but I may have planted a seed of doubt, at least. Whatever else the byrum may be, they’re not shipbuilders, and the race that built the ships may be gone. May in fact be byrum themselves by now.”

“Mr Gray wasn’t stupid.” “Not once he got inside your head, that much I agree with. Mr Gray was you , Jonesy. He stole your emotions, your memories, your taste for bacon-” “I don’t eat it anymore.”

“I’m not surprised. He also stole your basic personality. That included the subconscious kinks. Whatever there is in you that liked the Mario Bava horror movies and the Sergio Leone westerns, whatever it is that got off on the fear and the violence… man, Mr Gray loved that shit. And why wouldn’t he? Those things are primitive survival tools. As the last of his kind in a hostile environment, he grabbed every damned tool he could lay his hands on.”

“Bullshit.” Jonesy’s dislike of this idea was plain on his face.

“It’s not. At Hole in the Wall, you saw what you expected to see, which was an X-Files -slash- Close Encounters of the Third Kind alien. You inhaled the byrus… I have no doubt there was at least that much physical contact… but you were completely immune to it. As, we now know, at least fifty per cent of the human race seems to be. What you caught was an intention… a kind of blind imperative. Fuck, there’s no word for it, because there’s no word for them. But I think it got in because you believed it was there.”

“You are telling me,” Jonesy said, looking at Henry over the top of his sleeping son’s head, “that I almost destroyed the human race because I had a hysterical pregnancy?”

“Oh, no,” Henry said. “If that had been all, it would have passed off. Would have amounted to no more than a… a fugue. But in you, the idea of Mr Gray stuck like a fly in a spiderweb.”

“It stuck in the dreamcatcher.”

“Yes.”

They fell quiet. Soon Carla would call them and they would eat hot dogs and hamburgers, potato salad and watermelon, beneath the blue shield of the infinitely permeable sky.

“And will you say it was all coincidence?” Jonesy asked. “That they just happened to come down in the Jefferson Tract and I just happened to be there? And not just me, either. You and Peter and Beav. Plus Duddits, Just a couple of hundred miles to the south, don’t forget that. Because it was Duddits who held us together.”

“Duddits was always a sword with two edges,” Henry said, “Josie Rinkenhauer on one-Duddits the finder, Duddits the savior. Richie Grenadeau on the other-Duddits the killer. Only Duddits needed us to help him kin. I’m sure of that. We were the ones with the deeper subconscious layer. We supplied the hate and the fear-the fear that Richie really would get us, the way he promised he would. We always had more of the dark stuff than Duds. His idea of being mean was counting your crib backward, and that was more in the spirit of fun than anything else. Still… do you remember the time Pete pulled Duddits’s hat over his eyes and Duds walked into the wall?”

Jonesy did, vaguely. Out at the mall, that had been. When they had been young and the mall had been the place to go. Same shit, different day.

“For quite awhile after that, Pete lost whenever we played the Duddits game. Duddits always counted him backward, and none of us tipped to it. We probably thought it was just coincidence, but in light of everything I know now, I tend to doubt that.”

“You think even Duddits knew payback’s a bitch?”

“He learned it from us, Jonesy.”

“Duddits gave Mr Gray his foothold. His mindhold.”

“Yeah, but he also gave you a stronghold-a place where you could hide from Mr Gray. Don’t forget that.”

No, Jonesy thought, he would never forget that.

“All of it on our end started with Duddits,” Henry said. “We’ve been odd, Jonesy, ever since we knew him. You know it’s true. The things with Richie Grenadeau were only the big things, the ones that stood out. If you look back over your life, you’ll see other things. I’m sure of it.”

“Defuniak,” Jonesy murmured. “Who’s that?''The kid I caught cheating just before my accident. I caught him even though I wasn’t there on the day the test was given.”

“You see? But in the end, it was Duddits who broke the little gray son of a bitch. I’ll tell you something else: I think Duddits saved my life at the end of East Street. I think it’s entirely possible that when Kurtz’s sidekick looked into the back of the Humvee at us-the first time, I’m talking about-he had a little Duddits in his head saying “Don’t worry, old hoss, go on about your business, they dead."”

But Jonesy had not left his earlier thought. “And are we supposed to believe that the byrum connecting with us-us, of all the people in the world-was just random coincidence? Because that’s what Gerritsen believed. He never said it in so many words, but his take on it was clear enough.”

“Why not? There are scientists, brilliant men like Stephen Jay Gould, who believe that our own species exists thanks to an even longer and more improbable chain of coincidences. “'Is that what you believe?”

Henry lifted his hands. He hardly knew how to reply without invoking God, who had crept back into his life over these last few months. By the back door, as it were, and in the dead of many sleepless nights. But did one have to invoke that old deus ex machina to make sense of this?

“What I believe is that Duddits is us, Jonesy. L'enfant c'est moi… toi… tout le monde. Race, species, genus; game, set, and match. We are, in our sum, Duddits, and all our noblest aspirations come down to no more than keeping track of the yellow lunchbox and learning to put our shoes on the right way-fit wha, fit neek. Our wickedest motions, in a cosmic sense, come down to no more than counting someone’s crib, pegging it backward, then playing dumb about it.”