Dreamcatcher

by Stephen King

Dreams age faster than dreamers, that is a fact of life Pete has discovered as the years pass. Yet the last ones often die surprisingly hard, screaming in low, miserable voices at the back of the brain.

“I had some time to kill, so I also went into the little store next to the pharmacy for a coffee . . . the caffeine, you know, when you have a headache the caffeine can help . . .”

You grew up, became a man, had to adjust to taking less than you hoped for; you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

Along the way they will pick up Pete in Bridgton, and then the Beav, who still lives close to Derry. By evening they will be at Hole in the Wall up in the Jefferson Tract, playing cards in the living room and listening to the wind hoot around the eaves.

We don’t know the days that will change our lives. Probably just as well.

He circles the words going to Derry on his desk calendar, then grabs his briefcase. As he does, a new thought comes to him, sudden and meaningless but very powerful: Watch out for Mr. Gray.

This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.

Take care of yourself, Henry said, but Jonesy isn’t thinking about taking care of himself. He is thinking about March sunlight. He’s thinking about eating his sandwich. He’s thinking he might watch a few girls over on the Cambridge side—skirts are short, and March winds are frisky. He’s thinking about all sorts of things, but watching out for Mr. Gray isn’t one of them. Neither is taking care of himself. This is a mistake. This is also how lives change forever.

Killing Richard McCarthy couldn’t have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.

Jonesy almost shot the guy when he came out of the woods. How close? Another pound on the Garand’s trigger, maybe just a half. Later, hyped on the clarity that sometimes comes to the horrified mind, he wished he had shot before he saw the orange cap and the orange flagman’s vest. Killing Richard McCarthy couldn’t have hurt, and it might have helped. Killing McCarthy might have saved them all.

In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught.

In mid-March of 2001, Jonesy had been struck by a car while crossing a street in Cambridge, not far from John Jay College, where he taught. He had fractured his skull, broken two ribs, and suffered a shattered hip, which had been replaced with some exotic combination of Teflon and metal. The man who’d struck him was a retired BU history professor who was—according to his lawyer, anyway—in the early stages of Alzheimer’s, more to be pitied than punished. So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared. And even if there was, what good did it do? You still had to live with what was left, and console yourself with the fact that, as people told him every day (until they forgot the whole thing, that was), it could have been worse.

Death had brushed by him on a sunny day in March, and Jonesy had no desire to call it back, even if he was dealing rather than receiving.

Things changed, but only a fool believed they only changed for the worse.

Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn’t next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

Well, he thought, it isn’t as if I took a vow, or anything. No, he hadn’t taken a vow. Next November he might be up here with a Nikon instead of a Garand, but it wasn’t next year yet, and the rifle was at hand. He had no intention of looking a gift deer in the mouth.

He thought of it as death’s voice—death had missed him in the street and had then come to the hospital to finish the job, death masquerading as a man (or perhaps it had been a woman, it was hard to tell) in pain, someone who said Marcy but meant Jonesy.

maybe death was out there, and maybe sometimes it called your name.

Eye-fever, Kilroy claimed, was a form of buck-fever, and was probably the second most common cause of hunting accidents.

victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fence-post, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner

Kilroy said that victims of eye-fever were uniformly astounded to discover they had shot a fence-post, or a passing car, or the broad side of a barn, or their own hunting partner (in many cases the partner was a spouse, a sib, or a child). “But I saw it,” they would protest, and most of them, according to Kilroy, could pass a lie-detector test on the subject. They had seen the deer or the bear or the wolf, or just the grouse flip-flapping through the high autumn grass. They had seen it. What happened, according to Kilroy, was that these hunters were afflicted by an anxiety to make the shot, to get it over with, one way or the other. This anxiety became so strong that the brain persuaded the eye that it saw what was not yet visible, in order to end the tension. This was eye-fever. And although Jonesy was aware of no particular anxiety—his fingers had been perfectly steady as he screwed the red stopper back into the throat of the Thermos—he admitted later to himself that yes, he might have fallen prey to the malady.

The hat brought everything into horrible oh-God focus: the brown he had mistaken for a buck’s head was the front of a man’s wool jacket, the black jeweler’s velvet of the buck’s eye was a button, and the antlers were only more branches—branches belonging to the very tree in which he was standing.

The man was— —was a pound of finger-pressure from death. Maybe less.

For that moment he was some other Jonesy, an invisible presence looking at a gunman standing on a platform in a tree.

For a terrible, brilliant moment he never forgot, he was neither Jonesy Number One, the confident pre-accident Jonesy, nor Jonesy Number Two, the more tentative survivor who spent so much of his time in a tiresome state of physical discomfort and mental confusion. For that moment he was some other Jonesy, an invisible presence looking at a gunman standing on a platform in a tree.

He later came to accept that that at least had been an illusion, something akin to the feeling you get of rolling backward in your stopped car when you glimpse a slowly moving car beside you, out of the corner of your eye.

Death, a hurrying figure like something escaped from an early Ingmar Bergman film,

What broke his paralysis was both simple and unexpected: about ten paces from the base of Jonesy’s tree, the man in the brown coat fell down.

What broke his paralysis was both simple and unexpected: about ten paces from the base of Jonesy’s tree, the man in the brown coat fell down. Jonesy heard the pained, surprised sound he made—mrof! was what it sounded like—and his finger released the trigger without his even thinking about it.

“Snow. Now it’s snow. Please God, oh God, now it’s snow, oh dear.”

(the thought that the man might present some sort of danger did not occur to him, not then; he simply didn’t want to leave the Garand, which was a fine gun, out in the snow).

Style and taste didn’t matter much at Hole in the Wall.

“You know I can’t call anyone, don’t you?” Jonesy said. “The phone lines don’t come anywhere near here. There’s a genny for the electric, but that’s all.”

Some of the prognosticators hedged their bets, saying the snow could change over to rain, but the fellow on the Castle Rock radio station that morning (WCAS was the only radio they could get up here, and even that was thin and jumbled with static) had been talking about a fast-moving Alberta Clipper, six or eight inches, and maybe a nor’easter to follow, if the temperatures stayed down and the low didn’t go out to sea.

Better get those teeth fixed before you step in front of another jury, Rick.

I think it’s probably an unincorporated township, just another part of the Jefferson Tract, but Kineo’s what they call it, the few people who live there.

He was just bringing the chow over to the couch when he heard feet stamping on the stone outside the door. A moment later the door opened and Beaver came in. Snow swirled around his legs in a dancing mist.

“Rick McCarthy,” he said, and got to his feet. The comforter tumbled off him and Jonesy saw he had a pretty good potbelly pooching out the front of his sweater. Well, he thought, nothing strange about that, at least, it’s the middle-aged man’s disease, and it’s going to kill us in our millions during the next twenty years or so.

Jonesy could have sworn that what he had taken for a middle-aged potbelly was almost gone.

“Well, he thinks it’s November eleventh, for one thing.”

Now, as he followed the Scout’s headlights through the thickening snow, burrowing as if through a tunnel along the Deep Cut Road toward Hole in the Wall, Henry was down to thinking about ways to do it.

Pete was calling his name again and again, with increasing panic.

Pete was calling his name again and again, with increasing panic. Henry rolled over, got to his knees, and when that went all right he lurched to his feet. He only stood for a moment, swaying in the wind and waiting to see if his bleeding left leg would buckle and spill him into the snow again. It didn’t, and he limped around the back of the overturned Scout to see what he could do about Pete. He spared one glance at the woman who had caused all this fuckarow. She sat as she had, cross-legged in the middle of the road, her thighs and the front of her parka frosted with snow. Her vest snapped and billowed. So did the ribbons attached to her cap. She had not turned to look at them but stared back in the direction of Gosselin’s Market just as she had when they came over the rise and saw her. One swooping, curving tire-track in the snow came within a foot of her cocked left leg, and he had no idea, absolutely none at all, how he could have missed her.

“Why you sittin out here in the middle of the motherfuckin road in the middle of a motherfuckin snowstorm? You drunk? High on drugs? What kind of dumb doodlyfuck are you? Hey, talk to me! You almost got me n my buddy killed, the least you can do is . . .

The woman burped. The sound was startlingly loud even with the wind in the trees, and before it was snatched away by the moving air, he got a whiff of something both bitter and pungent—it smelled like medicinal alcohol. The woman shifted and grimaced, then broke wind—a long, purring fart that sounded like ripping cloth. Maybe, Henry thought, it’s how the locals say hello. The idea got him laughing again.

Had he been alone, he might have considered sitting down next to the woman and putting his arm around her—a much more interesting and unique answer to the final problem than the Hemingway Solution.

He was staring up at the sky, jaw loose and mouth gaping. Henry followed his gaze and could hardly believe what he was seeing. Bright circles of light, nine or ten of them, cruised slowly across the low-hanging clouds.

He was staring up at the sky, jaw loose and mouth gaping. Henry followed his gaze and could hardly believe what he was seeing. Bright circles of light, nine or ten of them, cruised slowly across the low-hanging clouds. Henry had to squint to look at them. He thought briefly of spotlights stabbing the night sky at Hollywood film premieres, but of course there were no such lights out here in the woods, and if there had been he would have seen the beams themselves, rising in the snowy air. Whatever was projecting those lights was above or in the clouds, not below them. They ran back and forth, seemingly at random, and Henry felt a sudden atavistic terror invade him . . . except it actually seemed to rise up from inside, somewhere deep inside. All at once his spinal cord felt like a column of ice.

The woman looked up, saw the dancing lights, and began to shriek.

The woman looked up, saw the dancing lights, and began to shriek. They were amazingly loud, those shrieks, and so full of terror they made Henry feel like shrieking himself. “They’re back!” she screamed. “They’re back! They’re back!” Then she covered her eyes and put her head against the front tire of the overturned Scout. She quit screaming and only moaned, like something caught in a trap with no hope of getting free.

“They’re fucking UFOs, just like on The X-Files.

It meant no more than anything else in the end, but it did not hurt to remember, especially when your soul was dark, that once you had confounded the odds and behaved decently.

(he kept thinking of some story they’d had to read in the eighth grade, he couldn’t remember who wrote it, only that the guy in the story had killed this old man because he couldn’t stand the old man’s eye, and at the time Pete hadn’t understood that but now he did, yessir),

Down’s syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and soon he would die in Never-Never Land.

Beaver’s dead! Beaver’s dead! Oh, Mamma, Beaver’s dead!

Pete lay screaming in the snow-covered rut where he had landed until he could scream no more and then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it.

Perlmutter had arrived with both a laptop computer and a PalmPilot only to discover that electronic gear was currently FUBAR in the Jefferson Tract:

Fuck the phooka horse. If they were going to do this, he wanted Kurtz’s boys (Skyhook in Bosnia, Blue Group this time, some other name next time, but it always came back to the same hard young faces) to hear the grayboys one last time. Travellers from another star system, perhaps even another universe or time-stream, knowers of things their hosts would never know (not that Kurtz would care).

Once you’ve got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it’s Katie bar the door and Homer run for home.”

“But fellows, I’m here to tell you that the grayboys have been messing with us since the late nineteen-for-ties, and I have been messing with them since the late nineteen-seventies, and I can tell you that just because a fellow comes walking toward you with his hands raised saying I surrender, that doesn’t mean, praise Jesus, that he doesn’t have a pint of nitroglycerine shoved up his ass. Now the big old smart goldfish who go swimming around in the think-tanks, most of those guys say the grayboys came when we started lighting off atomic and hydrogen bombs, that they came to that the way bugs come to a buglight. I don’t know about that, I am not a thinker, I leave the thinking to others, leave it to the cabbage, cabbage got the head on him, as the saying goes, but there’s nothing wrong with my eyes, fellows, and I tell you those grayboy sons of bitches are as harmless as a wolf in a henhouse. We have taken a good many of them over the years, but not one has lived. When they die, their corpses decompose rapidly and turn into exactly the sort of stuff you see down there, what you lads call Ripley fungus. Sometimes they explode. Got that? They explode. The fungus they carry—or maybe it’s the fungus that’s in charge, some of the think-tank goldfish believe that might be the case—dies easily enough unless it gets on a living host, I say again living host, and the host it seems to like the best, fellows, praise Jesus, is good old homo sap. Once you’ve got it so much as under the nail of your little finger, it’s Katie bar the door and Homer run for home.”

“Boys, our little gray buddies are telepathic, and they seem to pass this ability on to us through the air.

“Boys, our little gray buddies are telepathic, and they seem to pass this ability on to us through the air. We catch it even when we don’t catch the fungus, and while you might think a little mind-reading could be fun, the sort of thing that would make you the life of the party, I can tell you what lies a little farther down that road: schizophrenia, paranoia, separation from reality, and total I say again TOTAL FUCKING INSANITY. The think-tank boys, God bless em, believe that this telepathy is relatively short-acting right now, but I don’t have to tell you what could happen in that regard if the grayboys are allowed to settle in and be comfortable. I want you fellows to listen to what I’m going to say now very carefully. I want you to listen as if your lives depended on it, all right? When they take us, boys—say again, when they take us—and you all know there have been abductions, most people who claim to have been abducted by aliens are lying through their asshole neurotic teeth, but not all—those who are let go have often undergone implants. Some are nothing but instruments—transmitters, perhaps, or monitors of some sort—but some are living things which eat their hosts, grow fat, and then tear them apart. These implants have been put in place by the very creatures you see down there, milling around all naked and innocent. They claim there’s no infection among them even though we know they are infected right up the ying-yang and the old wazoo and everywhere else. I have seen these things at work for twenty-five years or more, and I tell you this is it, this is the invasion, this is the Super Bowl of Super Bowls, and you fellows are on defense. They are not helpless little ETs, boys, waiting around for someone to give them a New England Tel phone card so they can phone home, they are a disease. They are cancer, praise Jesus, and boys, we’re one big hot radioactive shot of chemotherapy. Do you hear me, boys?”