Lisey’s Story (53 page)

She nodded as if the frowning woman had requested clarification. “My husband called my name, tried to stop me. God knows what it cost him to do that, but he did.”

The woman on the beach—her hair was blond but dark at the roots, as if it needed touching up—said, “Be . . . quiet, please. I need . . . to think.”

Lisey nodded—fine by her, although she doubted the blond woman was doing as much thinking as she might believe—and waded into the water. She thought it would be cool, but in fact it was almost hot. The heat coursed up her legs and made her sex tingle in a way it hadn't in a
long time. She waded out farther but got no deeper than her waist. She took another half a dozen steps, looked around, and saw she was at least ten yards beyond the farthest of the other waders, and remembered that good food turned bad after dark in Boo'ya Moon. Might the water also turn bad? Even if it didn't, might not dangerous things come out here as well as in the woods? Pool-sharks, so to speak? And if that was the case, might she not find herself too far out to get back before one of them decided dinner was served?

This is safe ground
.

Only it
wasn't
ground, it was water, and she felt a panicky urge to flounder back to the beach before some killer U-boat with teeth took off one of her legs. Lisey fought the fear down. She had come a long way, not just once but twice, her breast hurt like hell, and by God she would get what she'd come for.

She took in a deep breath, and then, not knowing what to expect, lowered herself slowly to her knees on the sandy bottom, letting the water cover her breasts—the one that was unhurt and the one that was badly wounded. For a moment her left breast hurt more than ever; she thought the pain would tear the top of her head off. But then

He calls her name again, loud and panicky—
“Lisey!”

It cuts through the dreamy silence of this place like an arrow with fire at its tip. She almost looks back because there's agony as well as panic in that cry, but something deep inside tells her she must not. If she is to have any chance at all of rescuing him, she must not look back. She has made her wager. She passes the graveyard, its crosses gleaming in the light of the rising moon, with hardly a glance and climbs the steps with her back straight and her head up, still holding Good Ma's african bundled high in her arms so she won't trip on it, and she feels a crazy exhilaration, the kind she reckons you only experience when you've put everything you own—the house the car the bank account the family dog—on one throw of the dice. Above her (and not far) is the vast gray
rock marking the head of the path that leads back to Sweetheart Hill. The sky is filled with strange stars and foreign constellations. Somewhere the northern lights are burning in long curtains of color. Lisey may never see them again, but she thinks she's okay with that. She reaches the top of the steps and with no hesitation walks around the rock and that is when Scott pulls her backward against him. His familiar odor has never smelled so good to her. At the same moment, she becomes aware that something is moving on her left, moving fast, not on the path leading to the hill of lupins but just beside it.

“Shhhh, Lisey,” Scott whispers. His lips are so close they tickle the cup of her ear. “For your life and mine, now you must be still.”

It's Scott's long boy. She doesn't need him to tell her. For years she has sensed its presence at the back of her life, like something glimpsed in a mirror from the corner of the eye. Or, say, a nasty secret hidden in the cellar. Now the secret is out. In gaps between the trees to her left, sliding at what seems like express-train speed, is a great high river of meat. It is mostly smooth, but in places there are dark spots or craters that might be moles or even, she supposes (she does not want to suppose and cannot help it) skin cancers. Her mind starts to visualize some sort of gigantic worm, then freezes. The thing over there behind those trees is no worm, and whatever it is, it's sentient,
because she can feel it thinking
. Its thoughts aren't human, aren't in the least comprehensible, but there is a terrible fascination in their very alienness . . .

It's the bad-gunky
, she thinks, cold all the way to the bone.
Its thoughts are the bad-gunky and nothing else
.

The idea is awful but also
right
. A sound escapes her, something between a squeal and a moan. It's just a little sound, but she sees or senses that the thing's endless express-train progress has suddenly slowed, that it may have heard her.

Scott knows, too. The arm around her, just below her breasts, tightens a bit more. Once again his lips move against the cup of her ear. “If we're going home, we have to go right now,” he murmurs. He's totally with her again, totally
here
. She doesn't know if it's because he's no longer looking at the pool or because he's terrified. Maybe it's both. “Do you understand?”

Lisey nods. Her own fear is so great it's incapacitating, and any sense of exhilaration at having him back is gone. Has he lived with this all his life? If so,
how
has he lived with it? But even now, in the extremity of her terror, she supposes she knows. Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

“Concentrate, Lisey. Do it now. Bust your brains.”

She closes her eyes and sees the guest room of their house on Sugar Top Hill. Sees Scott sitting in the rocker. Sees herself sitting on the chilly floor beside him, holding his hand. He is gripping her hand as hard as she is gripping his. Behind them, the frost-filled panes of the window are filled with fantastic shifting light. The TV is on and
The Last Picture Show
is once more playing. The boys are in Sam the Lion's black-and-white poolroom and Hank Williams is on the juke singing “Jambalaya.”

For a moment she feels Boo'ya Moon shimmer, but then the music in her mind—music that was for a moment so clear and happy—fades. Lisey opens her eyes. She's desperate to see home, but the big gray rock and the path leading away through the sweetheart trees are both still there. Those strange stars still blaze down, only now the laughers are silent and the harsh whispering of the bushes has stilled and even Chuckie G.'s bell has quit its fitful tinkling because the long boy has stopped to listen and the whole world seems to hold its breath and listen with it. It's over there, not fifty feet away on their left; Lisey can now actually
smell
it. It smells like old farts in turnpike rest area bathrooms, or the poison whiff of bourbon and cigarette smoke you sometimes get when you turn the key and walk into a cheap motel room, or Good Ma's pissy diapers when she was old and raving senile; it's stopped behind the nearest rank of sweetheart trees, has paused in its tunnelish run through the woods, and dear God they aren't
going
, they aren't
going back
, they are for some reason stuck here.

Scott's whisper is now so low he hardly seems to be speaking at all. If not for the faint sensation of his lips moving against the sensitive skin of her ear, she could almost believe
this
was telepathy. “It's the african, Lisey—sometimes things will go one way but not the other. Usually
things that can
double
. I don't know why, but that's it. I feel it like an anchor. Drop the african.”

Lisey opens her arms and lets it fall. The sound it makes is only the softest sigh (like the arguments against insanity falling into some ultimate basement), but the long boy hears it. She feels a shift in the rowing direction of its unknowable thoughts; feels the hideous pressure of its insane regard. One of the trees snaps with an explosive rending noise as the thing over there begins to turn, and she closes her eyes again and sees the guest room as clearly as she has ever seen anything in her life, sees it with desperate intensity, and through a perfect magnifying lens of terror.

“Now,” Scott murmurs, and the most amazing thing happens. She feels the air turn inside out. Suddenly Hank Williams is singing “Jambalaya.” He's singing

He was singing because the TV was on. She could now remember this as clearly as anything in her life, and she wondered how she ever could have forgotten it.

Time to get off Memory Lane, Lisey—time to go home
.

Everybody out of the pool, as the saying was. Lisey had gotten what she'd come here for, had gotten it while caught up in that last terrible memory of the long boy. Her breast still hurt, but the fierce throbbing was down to a dull ache. She had felt worse as a teenager, after spending a long hot day in a bra that was too small for her. From where she knelt chin-deep in the water she could see that the moon, now smaller and almost pure silver, had risen above all but the highest of the trees in the graveyard. And now a new fear rose to trouble her: what if the long boy came back? What if it heard her thinking about it and came back? This was supposed to be a safe place and Lisey thought it probably was—from the laughers and the other nasty things that might live in the Fairy Forest, at least—but she had an idea that the long boy might not be bound by any rules that held the other things away from
here. She had an idea the long boy was . . . different. The title of some old horror story first occurred to her, then clanged in her mind like an iron bell: “Oh Whistle and I'll Come to You, My Lad.” This was followed by the title of the only Scott Landon book she had ever hated:
Empty Devils
.

But before she could start back to the sand, before she could even get to her feet again, Lisey was struck by yet another memory, this one far more recent. It was of waking in bed with her sister Amanda just before dawn and finding that past and present had gotten all tangled together. Worse still, Lisey had come to believe that she wasn't in bed with her sister at all, but with her dead husband. And in a way, that had been true. Because although the thing in bed with her had been wearing Manda's nightgown and had spoken in Manda's voice, it had used the interior language of their marriage and phrases only Scott could have known.

You have a blood-bool coming
, the thing in bed with her had said, and along had come the Black Prince of the Incunks with her own Oxo can opener in his nasty bag of tricks.

It goes behind the purple. You've already found the first three stations. A few more and you'll get your prize
.

And what prize had the thing in bed with her promised? A drink. She had guessed a Coke or an RC Cola because those had been Paul's prizes, but now she knew better.

Lisey lowered her head, buried her battered face in the pool, and then, without allowing herself to think about what she was doing, took two quick swallows. The water in which she stood was almost hot, but what she took in her mouth was cool and sweet and refreshing. She could have drunk a good deal more, but some intuition told her to stop at two sips. Two was just the right number. She touched her lips and found that the swelling there was almost gone. She wasn't surprised.

Not trying to be quiet (and not bothering to be grateful, at least not yet), Lisey floundered back to the beach. It seemed to take forever. No one was wading near shore now, and the beach was empty. Lisey thought she saw the woman she'd spoken to sitting on one of the stone benches with her companion, but couldn't be sure because the moon
hadn't risen quite enough. She looked a bit higher, and her gaze fixed on one of the wrapped figures a dozen or so benches up from the water. Moonlight had coated one side of this creature's gauzy head with thin silver gilt, and a queer certainty came to her: that was Scott, and he was watching her. Didn't the idea make a kind of crazy sense? Didn't it, if he had held onto enough consciousness and will to come to her in the moments before dawn, as she lay in bed with her catatonic sister? Didn't it, if he was determined to have his say just one more time?

She felt the urge to call his name, even though to do so would surely be dangerous madness. She opened her mouth and water from her wet hair ran into her eyes, stinging them. Faintly, she heard the wind tinkling Chuckie G.'s bell.

It was then that Scott spoke to her, and for the last time.

—
Lisey
.

Infinitely tender, that voice. Calling her name, calling her home.

—
Little

“Lisey,” he says. “Babyluv.”

He's in the rocking chair and she's sitting on the cold floor, but he's the one doing the shivering. Lisey has a sudden brilliant memory of Granny D saying
Afeard and shidderin in the dark
and it hits her that he's cold because now all of the african is in Boo'ya Moon. But that's not all—the whole frigging
room
is cold. It was chilly before but now it's
cold
, and the lights are out, as well.

The constant whooshy whisper of the furnace has ceased, and when she looks out the frosty window she can see only the extravagant colors of the northern lights. The Galloways' pole-light next door has gone dark.
Power outage
, she thinks, but no—the television is still on and that damned movie is still playing. The boys from Anarene, Texas, are hanging out in the pool-hall, soon they'll go to Mexico and when they come back Sam the Lion will be dead, he'll be wrapped in gauze and sitting on one of those stone benches overlooking the p—

“That's not right,” Scott says. His teeth are chattering slightly, but she can still hear the perplexity in his voice. “I never turned the goddam movie on because I thought it would wake you up, Lisey. Also—”

She knows that's true, when she came in here this time and found him the TV was off, but right now she's got something far more important on her mind. “Scott, will it follow us?”