Dreamcatcher

by Stephen King

He shoots Henry a look which Henry finds, even at the age of fourteen, grotesque. It is a reproachful look. As if Henry and his friends were the ones doing something wrong.

And oh that crying is so freaky.

Gonna see you fellas again, he had told them, and Henry guessed he had meant it, but the threatened confrontation had never happened, no, never happened. Something else had happened instead.

“Baby’s boat’s a silver dream, sailing near and far

“It sails from here in Baby’s room and to the nearest star; Sail, Baby, sail, sail on home to me, sail the seas and sail the stars, sail on home to me . . .”

Even aside from the crying, which was like no crying Henry had ever heard before, why would you want to be so mean?

Henry was pulled from recall by an amazing and totally unexpected realization: he was terrified, had been terrified for some time.

I have to get off the road. I have to get away from it. Get away from the movie. There’s a movie in the cloud. The kind Jonesy likes. A scary one.

Those things were in the redblack cloud rushing down on him like that pale horse in the Bible, those things and more.

Every bad thing he had ever suspected was now coming toward him, not on a pale horse but on an old snowmobile with a rusty cowling. Not death but worse than death.

It was Mr...

It was Mr. Gray, the cloud was Mr. Gray, and what if it heard?

For a moment his understanding of the world seemed to turn inside out like a pocket and he realized that everything was infected . . . or could be. Everything.

One of his friends was dead, one was dying, and one, God help him, had become a movie star.

Growing in the blurred fingerprints were little clumps of reddish golden mold, like mildew. There was more of it on the floor, not in the fat blood-snake, but in the narrow angles of the grout.

Behold, I stand at the door and knock. This was one knock Jonesy wished he had never answered.

Years later, after the thing with the Rinkenhauer girl, he will consider what Mrs. Cavell said. They all will. He sees the line.

He had been special, all right, their present from a fucked-up world that usually didn’t give you jack-shit. Duddits had been their own special thing, and they had loved him.

Roberta Cavell looks at him sadly. “Older boys don’t hear him the same way,” she says. “I hope you never understand.”

Death looking for me that day, Jonesy thought. Missed me in the street, missed me in the hospital—if only by a room or two—been looking ever since. Finally found me.

Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times.

Roberta listened, afraid of what might be happening up north but fascinated, too. The scariest part was that no one seemed to know exactly what was happening or just what the story was or how big it was.

The super beneath him read simply ABRAHAM KURTZ.

There was something in his eyes, which were very large and fringed with white lashes, that Roberta didn’t much like. They looked to her like liar’s eyes.

There was laughter from most of the other reporters as well, and no one except Roberta, watching the clip here in her West Derry Acres apartment, seemed to realize that was not an answer at all.

There was a radio transmission, so blurry that Roberta needed to read the transcript printed in yellow at the bottom of the TV screen: “This area is interdicted. You are ordered to turn back to your point of flight origination. Repeat, this area is interdicted. Turn back.”

its name wasn’t Dracula but leukemia, and there was no stake you could put through its heart.

“Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!”

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

then just lay there for awhile, trying to cope with the pain, to find some way to compromise with it. He couldn’t.

His watch was running backward, the second hand moving counterclockwise in irregular, spasmodic jerks.

That creepy jackalope look had gone out of it. Everything had.

Good old Henry. Still wearing his dorky horn-rims, even in this age of soft contacts and laser surgery, but you could count on him.

No more ghost-cologne, no more memories of Duddits. No more no bounce, no more no play. He had enough on his plate already.

Once they had done something heroic—twice, if you counted the Rinkenhauer girl.

Pete sensed he could know if he wanted to, the line was that bright.

It looked like mildew or some kind of fungus. Red-gold, or maybe that was just reflected firelight.

Something had come out of her. Something— Yes. Something. And it’s watching me right now.

But, lie or the truth, it was too late.

The idea that there could be any of Jonesy left inside that terrible cloud was so much dream-work.

It was the voice, Henry thought, of a lunatic.

The bastards were slaughtering them.

Approaching from the east was the buzz of a snowmobile engine. Jonesy . . . or whatever was left of him. The cloud.

Pete suddenly felt that he couldn’t die soon enough.

The store was designated Blue Base. The barn, the adjacent stable (dilapidated but still standing), and the corral had been designated Blue Holding. The first detainees had already been deposited there.

Some of it was his new boss’s eyes—the cataclysmic absence in those eyes, as if there were really no brain behind them at all.

I have been asked to run a phooka operation here.

Tall and stoop-shouldered, Kurtz had the build of a bureaucrat. Yet something about him was terrible.

Kurtz smiled thinly. This one was no more real than his shark’s grin.

Behind the man’s patented game-face, thoughts came and went at near light-speed, agendas were constantly being rewritten, and emotions were turning on a dime.