Dreamcatcher

by Stephen King

And sometimes you believe in nothing but the darkness. And then how do you go along?

The Beav is basically a happy guy, any of his hangout buddies would tell you that, but this is his dark time. He doesn’t see any of his old friends (the ones he thinks of as his real friends) except for the one week in November when they are together every year, and last November he and Laurie Sue had still been hanging on. By a thread, granted, but

No bounce, no play.

And most of that time he spent looking at the moon rocks and thinking, Those rocks came from a place where the skies are always black and the silence is everlasting. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took twenty kilograms of another world and now here it is.

No bounce, no play, he thinks. I know that much, ma’am.

Keeping up the fiction. You have to keep it up, sometimes, no matter how you feel.

And although some of the joy has gone out of the afternoon, some is still there; he has seen the line, and that always makes him feel good.

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but now the joy is gone and the sadness is back, the sadness that feels like something deserved, the price of some not-quite-forgotten betrayal.

you discovered the dream-machine had a big OUT OF ORDER sign on it.

As the neurosis deepens, so does the interior darkness.

Across the room is an easy chair and a couch. Henry is always interested to see which one a new patient will choose.

A darkness has come into his own life—that polarizing filter—and Henry finds he has no objection to this. Less glare.

Barry’s blood pressure (he has told Henry this with some pride) is one-ninety over one-forty.

I’m a walking stroke, I’m a walking heart attack, he has told Henry, speaking with the gleeful solemnity of one who can state the hard, cold truth because he knows in his soul that such ends are not meant for him, not for him, no, not for him.

Together they are still good. Together they still defeat time.

Henry is now struggling with a depression that seems to him every bit as seductive as it does unpleasant.

He can know nothing about that because he hasn’t been told, but he does know.

This is Henry’s version of the line. Seeing the line. Henry hasn’t seen it for maybe five years now (unless he sometimes sees it in dreams), thought all that was over, and now here it is again.

But Henry can’t. Henry can’t. He sees the line and when you see it, you can’t unsee it.

“If we know the truth, Henry, does it not set us free? “No,” he replies to himself, looking up at the ceiling. “Not in the slightest.

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

Same shit, different day, he thinks, but this will be different shit indeed.

Jonesy thinks he does. “Was it the line?”

The answer is this: he knew because . . . sometimes he does.

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.

I wake to sleep, and take my waking slow. I learn by going where I have to go.

So often, Jonesy thought, there was no one to blame when the dust cleared.

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.

The idea passed—all of the funny ideas he’d had in the hospital eventually passed—but it left a residue.

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

It came home to him in a visceral way then, knocking him clean out of his own body.

He felt a sick little chill rush through his gut, a telephone call from nowhere.

He was getting another of those telephone calls from nowhere.

‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.’

Gray fades to black; hello darkness, my old friend.

Henry felt called to from that other universe, the one where the living actually wanted to live. As always these days, that made him feel impatient.

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.

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.

Please stop, I can’t stand it, give me a shot, where’s Marcy?

And oh man, why was the world so hard? Why were there so many spokes hungry for your fingers, so many gears eager to grab for your guts?

Speech all at once seemed hard; he felt a debilitating fear grip him, something feverish and constant, like a low-grade flu.

It was like walking in a nightmare where you seem to cover ground at the same dreamy, underwater pace no matter how fast you move your legs.

He can add, subtract, multiply, and divide; he can do fractions, too, although it takes him too much time. But now there is something new, now there is the x. Pete does not understand the x, and fears it.

It’s the smell of the body eating itself, because that’s all cancer is when you take the diagnostic masks off: auto-cannibalism.

he was suicidal but by no means dysthymic.

How Duddits had screamed and changed all their lives. For the better, they had always assumed, but now Henry wondered.

The wild look has gone out of Jonesy’s eyes, he’s frowning slightly, and Henry has an idea Jonesy is also wishing they’d just gone on and played some two-on-two.

It’s full of hurt, that scream, but what starts Henry running before he can even think about it is the surprise in it, the awful surprise of someone who has been hurt or scared (or both) for the very first time.

The boy in the underpants is behind them now, but Henry can still hear the pulsing drone of his sobs, it’s in his head, beating in his head and driving him fucking crazy.