by Stephen King
Not portholes, windows. And do I have to care what some librarian from Moo U thinks?
Oh, probably not. But there were so many reflective surfaces in a life, weren’t there? Not just mirrors. There were juice glasses to avoid glancing in first thing in the morning and wineglasses not to peer into at sundown. There were so many times when you sat behind the wheel of your car and saw your own face looking back at you from the dashboard instruments. So many long nights when the mind of something…other…might turn to a person, if that person could not keep her mind from turning to it. And how, exactly, did you keep from doing that? How did you not think of something? The mind was a high-kicking, kilt-wearing rebel, to quote the late Scott Landon. It could get up to…well, shit fire and save your matches, why not say it? It could get up to such bad-gunky.
And there was something else, too. Something even more frightening. Maybe even if it didn’t come to you, you wouldn’t be able to help going to it. Because once you stretched those smucking tendons…once your life in the real world started to feel like a loose tooth in a sick socket—
She’d be walking downstairs, or getting into the car, or turning on the shower, or reading a book, or opening a crossword magazine, and there would be a feeling absurdly like an oncoming sneeze or
(mein gott, babyluv, mein gott, leedle Leezy—!)
an approaching orgasm and she would think, Oh smuck, I’m not coming, I’m going, I’m going over. The world would seem to waver and there would be that sense of a whole other world waiting to be born, one where the sweetness curdled and turned to poison after dark. A world that was just a sidestep away, no more than the flick of a hand or the turn of a hip. For a moment she would feel Castle View drop away on every side and she would be Lisey on a tightrope, Lisey walking a knife-edge. Then she’d be back again, a solid (if middle-aged and a little too thin) woman in a solid world, walking down a flight of stairs, slamming a car door, adjusting the hot water, turning the page of a book, or solving eight across: Old-style gift, four-letter word, starts with B, ends with N.
9
Two days after the dismantled booksnake went north, on what the Portland branch of the National Weather Service would record as the hottest day of the year in Maine and New Hampshire, Lisey went up to the empty study with a boombox and a compact disc titled Hank Williams’ Greatest Hits. There would be no problem playing the CD, just as there had been no problem running the fans on the day the Minions of Partridge had been up here; all Dooley had done, it turned out, was open the electrical box downstairs and flip off the three breakers that controlled the study’s power.
Lisey had no idea how hot it actually was in the study, but knew it had to be a triple-digit number. She could feel her blouse begin sticking to her body and her face dampening as soon as she was at the top of the stairs. Somewhere she had read that women don’t sweat, they glow, and what a crock of shit that was. If she stayed up here long, she’d probably pass out with heatstroke, but she didn’t intend to stay up here for long. There was a country song she sometimes heard on the radio called “Ain’t Livin’ Long Like This.” She didn’t know who had written that song or sang it (not Ole Hank), but she could relate to it. She couldn’t spend the rest of her life afraid of her own reflection—or what she might see peeking out from behind it—and she couldn’t live it afraid that she might at any moment lose her hold on reality and find herself in Boo’ya Moon.
This shite had to end.
She plugged in the boombox, then sat cross-legged on the floor before it and put in the disc. Sweat ran into her eye, stinging, and she knuckled it away. Scott had played a lot of music up here, really blasting it out. When you had a twelve-thousand-dollar stereo system and soundproofing in the alcove where most of the speakers were, you could really let it rip. The first time he played “Rockaway Beach” for her, she’d thought the very roof over their heads might lift off. What she was about to play would sound tinny and small by comparison, but she thought it would be enough.
Old-style gift, four letters, begins with B, ends with N.
Amanda, sitting on one of those benches, looking out at Southwind Harbor, sitting above the child-murdering woman in the caftan, Amanda saying “It was something about a story. Your story, Lisey’s story. And the afghan. Only he called it the african. Did he say it was a boop? A beep? A boon?”
No, Manda, not a boon, although that is a four-letter word, now rather old-fashioned, beginning with B and ending with N, that means gift. But the word Scott used—
That word had been bool, of course. The sweat ran down Lisey’s face like tears. She let it. “As in Bool, The End. And at the end you get a prize. Sometimes a candybar. Sometimes an RC from Mulie’s. Sometimes a kiss. And sometimes…sometimes a story. Right, honey?”
Talking to him felt all right. Because he was still here. Even with the computers gone, and the furniture, and the fancy Swedish stereo system, and the file-cabinets full of manuscripts, and the stacks of galleys (his own and those sent to him by friends and admirers), and the booksnake…even with those things gone, she still felt Scott. Of course she did. Because he hadn’t finished having his say. He had one more story to tell.
Lisey’s story.
She thought she knew which one, because there was only one he had never finished.
She touched one of the dried bloodstains on the carpet and thought about the arguments against insanity, the ones that fell through with a soft shirring sound. She thought how it had been under the yum-yum tree: like being in another world, one of their own. She thought about the Bad-Gunky Folks, the Bloody Bool Folks. She thought about how, when Jim Dooley had seen the long boy, he had stopped screaming and his hands had fallen to his sides. Because the strength had run out of his arms. That was what looking at the bad-gunky did, when the bad-gunky was looking back at you.
“Scott,” she said. “Honey, I’m listening.”
There was no reply…except Lisey replied to herself. The name of the town was Anarene. Sam the Lion owned the pool-hall. Owned the picture show. And the restaurant, where every tune on the juke seemed to be a Hank Williams tune.
Somewhere something in the empty study seemed to sigh in agreement. Possibly it was just her imagination. In any case, it was time. Lisey still didn’t know exactly what she was looking for, but she thought she’d know it when she saw it—surely she’d know it when she saw it, if Scott had left it for her—and it was time to go looking. Because she wasn’t living long like this. She couldn’t.
She pushed PLAY and Hank Williams’s tired, jolly voice began to sing.
“Goodbye Joe, me gotta go,
Me-oh-my-oh,
Me gotta go pole the pirogue
Down the bayou…”
SOWISA, babyluv, she thought, and closed her eyes. For a moment the music was still there but hollow and oh so distant, like music coming down a long corridor, or from the throat of a deep cave. Then sunshine bloomed red on the inside of her eyelids and the temperature dropped twenty or even twenty-five degrees all at a go. A cool breeze, delicious with the smell of flowers, caressed her sweaty skin and blew her sticky hair back from her temples.
Lisey opened her eyes in Boo’ya Moon.
10
She was still sitting cross-legged, but now she was on the edge of the path leading down the purple hill in one direction and under the sweetheart trees in the other. She’d been here before; it was to this exact spot that her husband had brought her before he was her husband, saying there was something he wanted to show her.
Lisey got to her feet, pushing her sweat-dampened hair away from her face, relishing the breeze. The sweetness of the mixed aromas it carried—yes, of course—but even more, the coolness of it. She guessed it was mid-afternoon, the temperature a perfect seventy-five degrees. She could hear birds singing, perfectly ordinary ones by the sound—chickadees and robins for sure, probably finches and maybe a lark for good measure—but no awful laughing things in the woods. It was too early for them, she supposed. No sense o
f the long boy, either, and that was the best news of all.
She faced the trees and turned on her heels in a slow half-circle. She wasn’t looking for the cross, because Dooley had gotten that stuck in his arm and then thrown it aside. It was the tree she was looking for, the one that stood just a little forward of the two others on the left side of the path—
“No, that’s wrong,” she murmured. “They were on either side of the path. Like soldiers guarding the way into the woods.”
Just like that she saw them. And a third standing a little in front of the one on the left. The third was the biggest, its trunk covered with moss so dense it looked like fur. At its base the ground still looked a little sunken. That was where Scott had buried the brother he had tried so hard to save. And on one side of that sunken place, she saw something with huge hollow eyes staring at her from the high grass.
For a moment she thought it was Dooley, or Dooley’s corpse, somehow reanimated and come back to stalk her, but then she remembered how, after clubbing Amanda aside, he’d stripped off the useless, lensless night-vision goggles and thrown them aside. And there they were, lying beside the good brother’s grave.
It’s another bool hunt, she thought as she walked toward them. From the path to the tree; from the tree to the grave; from the grave to the goggles. Where next? Where now, babyluv?
The next station turned out to be the grave-marker, with the horizontal crosspiece turned askew so it was like clock-hands pointing to five past seven. The top of the vertical was stained to a depth of three inches with Dooley’s blood, now dried to the maroon, not-quite-varnish color of the stains on the rug in Scott’s study. She could still see PAUL printed on the crosspiece, and as she lifted it (with real reverence) out of the grass for a closer look, she saw something else as well: the length of matted yellow yarn that had been looped repeatedly around the vertical slat of the cross, then tied firmly. Tied, Lisey had absolutely no doubt, with the same sort of knot as the one that had secured Chuckie G.’s bell to the tree in the woods. The yellow yarn—which had once come spinning off Good Ma’s knitting needles as she sat watching television at the farm in Lisbon—was wrapped around the vertical just above the place where the wood was stained dark with earth. And looking at it, she remembered seeing it running into the dark just before Dooley pulled the cross out of his arm and flung it away.
It’s the african, the one we dropped by the big rock above the pool. He came back later, some time later, got it, and brought it here. Unraveled some of it, tied it to the cross, then paid out more. And expected me to find the rest at the end of it all.
Heart pounding hard and slow in her breast, Lisey dropped the cross and began following the yellow thread away from the path and along the edge of the Fairy Forest, paying it through her hands as the high grass whispered against her thighs and the grasshoppers jumped and the lupin gave up its sweet scent. Somewhere a locust sang its hot summer song and in the woods a crow—was it a crow? it sounded like one, a perfectly ordinary crow—called a rusty hello, but there were no cars, no airplanes, no human voices near or far. She walked through the grass, following the line of unknitted afghan, the one in which her sleepless, frightened, failing husband had swaddled on so many cold nights ten years before. Ahead of her, one sweetheart tree stood out a bit from its fellows, spreading its branches, making a pool of inviting shade. Beneath it she saw a tall metal wastebasket and a much larger pool of yellow. The color was dull now, the wool matted and shapeless, like a large yellow wig that has been left out in the rain, or perhaps the corpse of a big old tomcat, but Lisey knew it for what it was as soon as she saw it, and her chest began to hitch. In her mind she could hear The Swinging Johnsons playing “Too Late to Turn Back Now” and feel Scott’s hand as he led her out onto the floor. She followed the line of unraveled yellow yarn under the sweetheart tree and knelt beside what little remained of her mother’s wedding present to her youngest daughter and her youngest daughter’s husband. She picked it up—it, and whatever lay inside it. She put her face against it. It smelled damp and moldy, an old thing, a forgotten thing, a thing that smelled now more of funerals than of weddings. That was all right. That was just as it should have been. She smelled all the years it had been here, tied to Paul’s grave-marker and waiting for her, something like an anchor.
11
A little time later, when her tears had stopped, she put the package (for surely that was what it was) down where it had been and looked at it, touching the place where the yellow yarn unraveled from the shrunken body of the afghan. She marveled that the line hadn’t broken, either when Dooley fell on the cross, or when he tore it out of his arm, or when he flung it away—when he slang it forth. Of course it helped that Scott had tied his string to the bottom, but it was still pretty amazing, especially when you considered how long this damned thing had been out here, exposed to the elements. It was a blue-eyed miracle, so to speak.
But of course sometimes lost dogs came home; sometimes old strings held and led you to the prize at the end of the bool hunt. She started to unwrap the faded, matted remains of the afghan, then looked into the wastebasket, instead. What she saw made her laugh ruefully. It was nearly full of liquor bottles. One or two looked relatively new, and she was sure the one on the very top was, because there had been no such thing as Mike’s Hard Lemonade ten years ago. But most of the bottles were old. This was where he’d come to do his drinking in ’96, but even blind drunk he’d had too much respect for Boo’ya Moon to litter it up with empty bottles. And would she find other caches if she took the time to look? Maybe. Probably. But this was the only cache that mattered to her. It told her that this was where he’d come to do the last of his life’s work.
She thought she had all the answers now except for the big ones, the ones she’d actually come for—how she was supposed to live with the long boy, and how she was supposed to keep from slipping over here to where it lived, especially when it was thinking of her. Perhaps Scott had left her some answers. Even if he hadn’t, he’d left her something…and it was very beautiful under this tree.
Lisey picked up the african again and felt it the way she’d once felt her Christmas presents as a girl. There was a box inside, but it didn’t feel a bit like Good Ma’s cedar box; it was softer than that, almost mushy, as if, even wrapped in the african and left under the tree, moisture had seeped in over the years…and for the first time she wondered how many years they were talking about here. The bottle of Hard Lemonade suggested not very many. And the feel of the thing suggested—
“It’s a manuscript box,” she murmured. “One of his hard cardboard manuscript boxes.” Yes. She was sure of it. Only after two years under this tree…or three…or four…it had turned into a soft cardboard box.
Lisey began to unwrap the afghan. Two turns were enough to do the job; that was all that was left. And it was a manuscript box, its light gray color darkened to slate by seeping moisture. Scott always put a sticker on the front of his boxes and wrote the title there. The sticker on this one had pulled loose on both sides and curled upward. She pushed it back with her fingers and saw a single word in Scott’s strong, dark printing: LISEY. She opened the box. The pages inside were lined sheets torn from a notebook. There were perhaps thirty in all, packed tight with quick, dark strokes from one of his felt-tip pens. She wasn’t surprised to see that Scott had written in the present tense, that what he had written seemed couched in occasionally childish prose, and that the story seemed to start in the middle. The last was true, she reflected, only if you didn’t know how two brothers had survived their crazy father and what happened to one of them and how the other couldn’t save him. The story only seemed to start in the middle if you didn’t know about gomers and goners and the bad-gunky. It only started in the middle if you didn’t know that
12
In February he starts looking at me funny, out of the corners of his eyes. I keep expecting him to yell at me or even whip out his old pocketknife and carve on me. He hasn’t done anything
like that in a long time but I think it would almost be a relief. It wouldn’t let the bad-gunky out of me because there isn’t any—I saw the real bad-gunky when Paul was chained up in the cellar, not Daddy’s fantasies of it—and there’s nothing like that in me. But there’s something bad in him, and cutting doesn’t let it out. Not this time, although he’s tried plenty. I know. I’ve seen the bloody shirts and underpants in the wash. In the trash, too. If cutting me would help him, I’d let him, because I still love him. More than ever since it’s just the two of us. More than ever since what we went through with Paul. That kind of love is a kind of doom, like the bad-gunky. “Bad-gunky’s strong,” he said.
But he won’t cut.
One day I’m coming back from the shed where I sat for a little while to think about Paul—to think about all the good times we had rolling around this old place—and Daddy grabs me and he shakes. “You went over there!” he shouts in my face. And I can see that however sick I thought he was, it’s worse. He’s never been as bad as this. “Why do you go over there? What do you do over there? Who do you talk to? What are you planning?”
All the time shaking me and shaking me, the world tipping up and down. Then my head hits the side of the door and I see stars and I fall down there in the doorway with the heat of the kitchen on my front and the cold of the dooryard on my back.
