Lisey’s Story (67 page)

She thought:
It's not lying across the path, like it was when he tried to get to the pool in '04. This time it's in its run beside the path. Like it was when I came to him during the winter of the big wind from Yellowknife
.

But just as she glimpsed the bell, still hanging from that rotting length of cord, the last light of the day shining on its curve, Jim Dooley put on a final burst of speed and Lisey actually
did
feel his fingers slipping across the back of her shirt, hunting for purchase there, anything, a bra-strap would do. She managed to hold back the scream that rose in her throat, but it was a near thing. She bolted onward, finding a little more speed of her own, speed that probably would have done her no good if Dooley hadn't tripped again, going down with a cry—
“You BITCH!”
—that Lisey thought he would live to regret.

But perhaps not for long.

That shy tinkle came again, from what had once been

(
Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle!
)

the Bell Tree and was now the Bell-and-Spade Tree. And there it was, Scott's silver spade. When she had placed it here—following a powerful intuition she now understood—the laughers had been gibbering hysterically. Now the Fairy Forest was silent except for the sounds of her own tortured respiration and Dooley's gasping spew of curses. The long
boy had been sleeping—dozing, at least—and Dooley's yelling had awakened it.

Maybe this was how it was supposed to go, but that did not make it easy. It was horrible to feel the awakening whisper of not-quite-alien thoughts from her undermind. They were like restless hands feeling for loose boards or testing the closed cover of a well. She found herself considering too many terrible things that had at one time or another undermined her heart: a pair of bloody teeth she'd once found on the floor of a movie-theater bathroom, two little kids crying in each other's arms outside a convenience store, the smell of her husband as he lay on his deathbed, looking at her with his burning eyes, Granny D lying dying in the chickenyard with her foot going jerk-jerk-jerk.

Terrible thoughts. Terrible images, the kind that come back to haunt you in the middle of the night when the moon is down and the medicine's gone and the hour is none.

All the bad-gunky, in other words. Just beyond those few trees.

And
now
—

In the always perfect, never-ending moment of
now

Gasping, whining, her heart nothing but bloodthunder in her ears, Lisey bends to lay hold of the silver spade. Her hands, which knew their business eighteen years ago, know it as well now, even while her head fills with images of loss, pain, and heartsick despair. Dooley's coming. She hears him. He's quit cursing but she hears the approach of his respiration. It's going to be close, closer than with Blondie, even though
this
madman doesn't have a gun, because if Dooley manages to grab hold of her before she's able to turn—

But he doesn't. Not quite. Lisey pivots like a hitter going after a fat pitch, swinging the silver spade just as hard as she can. The bowl catches a last bloom of pink light, a fading corsage, and its speeding upper edge ticks the hanging bell on its way by. The bell says a final word—
TING!
—and goes flying into the gloom, trailing its bit of rotting
cord after it. Lisey sees the spade carry on forward and upward, and once more she thinks
Holy smuck! I really put a charge into this one!
Then the flat of the blade connects with Jim Dooley's onrushing face, making not a crunch—the sound she remembers from Nashville—but a kind of muffled
gonging
. Dooley shrieks in surprise and agony. He is driven sideways, off the path and into the trees, flailing with his arms, trying to keep his balance. She has a moment to see that his nose is laid radically over to one side, just as Cole's was; time to see that his mouth is gushing blood from the bottom and both corners. Then there's movement from her right, not far from where Dooley is thrashing about and trying to haul himself upward. It is
vast
movement. For a moment the dark and fearsomely sad thoughts which inhabit her mind grow even sadder and darker; Lisey thinks they will either kill her or drive her insane. Then they shift in a slightly different direction, and as they do, the thing over there just beyond the trees also shifts. There's the complicated sound of breaking foliage, the snapping and tearing of trees and underbrush. Then, and suddenly, it's
there
. Scott's long boy. And she understands that once you have seen the long boy, past and future become only dreams. Once you have seen the long boy, there is only, oh dear Jesus, there is only a single moment of
now
drawn out like an agonizing note that never ends.

Almost before Lisey was aware of what was happening and surely before she was ready—although the idea of ever being
ready
for such a thing was a joke—suddenly it was there. The piebald thing. The living embodiment of what Scott had been talking about when he talked about the bad-gunky.

What she saw was an enormous plated side like cracked snakeskin. It came bulging through the trees, bending some and snapping others, seeming to pass right through a couple of the biggest. That was impossible, of course, but the impression never faded. There was no smell but there was an unpleasant sound, a chuffing, somehow
gutty
sound, and
then its patchwork head appeared, taller than the trees and blotting out the sky. Lisey saw an eye, dead yet aware, black as wellwater and as wide as a sinkhole, peering through the foliage. She saw an opening in the meat of its vast questing blunt head and intuited that the things it took in through that vast straw of flesh did not precisely die but lived and
screamed
 . . . lived and
screamed
 . . . lived and
screamed
.

She herself could not scream. She was incapable of any noise at all. She took two steps backward, steps that felt weirdly calm to her. The spade, its silver bowl once more dripping with the blood of an insane man, fell from her fingers and landed on the path. She thought,
It sees me . . . and my life will never truly be mine again. It won't
let
it be mine
.

For a moment it reared, a shapeless, endless thing with patches of hair growing in random clumps from its damp and heaving slicks of flesh, its great and dully avid eye upon her. The dying pink of the day and the waxing silver glow of moonlight lit the rest of what still lay snakelike in the shrubbery.

Then its eye turned from Lisey to the screaming, thrashing creature that was trying to back out of the little copse of trees that had entangled him, Jim Dooley with blood gushing from his broken mouth, broken nose, and one swollen eye; Jim Dooley with blood even in his hair. Dooley saw what was looking at him and screamed no more. Lisey saw him trying to cover his good eye, saw his hands fall to his sides, knew he had lost his strength, and felt a moment of pity for him in spite of everything, an instant of empathy that was gruesome in its strength and nearly unendurable in its human harmony. In that moment she might have taken it all back if it had meant only her own dying, but she thought of Amanda and tried to harden her horrified mind and heart.

The huge thing tangled in the trees poked forward almost delicately and gathered Dooley in. The flesh around the hole in its blunt snout seemed to wrinkle briefly, almost to pucker, and Lisey remembered Scott lying on the hot pavement that day in Nashville. As the low snorts and the crunching sounds began and Dooley started to voice his final, seemingly endless cries, she remembered Scott whispering,
I hear it taking its meal
. She remembered how he had pursed his lips in a tight O, and she recalled with perfect clarity how blood had burst from
them when he made that indescribably nasty chuffing sound: fine ruby droplets which seemed to hang in the sweltering air.

She ran then, though she would have sworn she no longer knew how. She bolted back along the path toward the hill of lupin, away from the place near the Bell-and-Spade Tree where the long boy was eating Jim Dooley alive. She knew it was doing her and Amanda a favor, but she knew it was a lefthanded favor at best, because if she survived this night, she would now be free of the long boy no more than Scott had been, no, not a single day since his childhood. Now it had marked her as well, made her a part of its never-ending moment, its terrible world-spanning regard. From now on she would have to be careful, especially if she happened to wake up in the middle of the night . . . and Lisey had an idea that her nights of sound sleep were over. In the small hours she would have to steer her gaze away from mirrors, and window-glass, and especially from the curved surfaces of waterglasses, God knew why. She would have to protect herself as well as she could.

If she survived this night.

It's very close, honey
, Scott had whispered as he lay shivering on the hot pavement.
Very close
.

Behind her, Dooley screamed as if he would never stop. Lisey thought it would drive her mad. Or that it already had.

Just before she emerged from the trees, Dooley's shrieking finally did cease. She didn't see Amanda. This filled Lisey with new terror. Suppose her sister had run away to who knew which point of the compass? Or suppose she was still somewhere close at hand, but curled up in a fetal position, catatonic again and concealed by the shadows?

“Amanda?
Amanda?
”

There was an endless moment during which she heard nothing. It was followed—God, at last!—by a rustling in the high grass to Lisey's left, and Amanda stood up. Her face, pale to begin with and painted paler by the light of the rising moon, now looked like that of a wraith. Or a
harpy. She came stumbling forward, arms out, and Lisey gathered her in. Amanda was shivering. The hands at the nape of Lisey's neck were locked in a chilly knot.

“Oh Lisey, I thought he'd never stop!”

“Me either.”

“And so high . . . I couldn't tell . . . they were so
high
 . . . I hoped it was him, but I thought, ‘What if it's Little? What if it's Lisey?'” Amanda began to sob against the side of Lisey's neck.

“I'm all right, Amanda. I'm here and I'm all right.”

Amanda pulled her face away from Lisey's neck so she could look down into her younger sister's face. “Is he dead?”

“Yes.” She would not share her intuition that Dooley might have achieved a kind of hellish immortality within the thing that had eaten him. “Dead.”

“Then I want to go back! Can we go back?”

“Yes.”

“I don't know if I can make a picture of Scott's study in my mind . . . I'm so upset . . .” Amanda looked around fearfully. “This isn't like Southwind at
all
.”

“No,” Lisey agreed, gathering Amanda back into her arms. “And I know you're afraid. You just do the best you can.”

Lisey was actually not worried about getting back to Scott's study, back to Castle View, back to the world. She thought the problem now might be
staying
there. She remembered a doctor telling her once she'd have to be especially careful of her ankle after giving it a savage sprain while ice-skating.
Because once you stretch those tendons
, he'd said,
it's ever so much easier to do it next time
.

That much easier next time, right. And it had seen her. That eye, as big as a spring sinkhole, both dead and alive, had been on her.

“Lisey, you're so brave,” Amanda said in a small voice. She took one final look at the sloping hill of lupin, gilded and strange in the growing light of the moon, then pressed her face against the side of Lisey's neck again.

“Keep talking like that and I'll have you back in Greenlawn tomorrow. Close your eyes.”

“They are.”

Lisey closed her own. For a moment she saw that blunt head that wasn't a head at all but only a maw, a straw, a funnel into blackness filled with endless swirling bad-gunky. In it she still heard Jim Dooley screaming, but the sound was now thin, and mixed with other screams. With what felt like tremendous effort, she swept the images and sounds away, replacing them with a picture of the red maple desk and the sound of Ole Hank—who else?—singing “Jambalaya.” There was time to think of how at first she and Scott hadn't been able to come back when they so badly needed to with the long boy so close, time to think of

(
it's the african Lisey I feel it like an anchor
)

what he had said, time to wonder why that should make her think again of Amanda looking with such longing at the good ship
Hollyhocks
(a goodbye look if there ever was one), and then time was up. Once more she felt the air
turn
, and the moonlight was gone. She knew even with her eyes closed. There was the sense of taking a short, jolting fall. Then they were in the study and the study was dark because Dooley had killed the electricity, but still Hank Williams was singing—
My Yvonne, sweetest one, me-oh-my-oh
—because even with the power cut, Ole Hank meant to have his say.

“Lisey?
Lisey!
”

“Manda, you're
crushing
me, get
off
—”

“Lisey, are we back?”

Two women in the dark. Lying tangled together on the carpet.

“Kinfolk come to see Yvonne by the dozens . . .”
Drifting out of the alcove.

“Yes, would you get the smuck off me, I can't
breathe!
”

“Sorry . . . Lisey, you're on my arm . . .”

“Son-of-a-gun, we'll have big fun . . . on the bayou!”