He smiled at her. "It's not, honey."

"How do you know?"

He shook his head, still smiling. "I just do. The way a kid's dog knows it's time to go sit by the mailbox because the schoolbus will be right along. It's almost sunset over there. It often is."

She didn't understand that, but didn't ask-one question always led on to another, that had been her experience, and the time for questions was done. If she meant to trust him, the time for questions was done. So she had taken a deep breath and said, "All right. It's our frontloaded honeymoon. Take me someplace that isn't New Hampshire. This time I want a good look."

He crushed his half-smoked cigarette in the ashtray and took her lightly by her upper arms, his eyes dancing with excitement and good humor-how well she remembers the feel of his fingers on her flesh that night. "You've got a yard of guts, little Lisey-I'll tell the world that. Hold on and let's see what happens."

And he took me, Lisey thinks as she sits in the guest room, now holding the waxy-cool hand of the breathing man-doll in the rocker. But she feels the smile on her face-little Lisey, big smile-and wonders how long it's been there. He took me, I know he did. But that was seventeen years ago, when we were both young and brave and he was all present and accounted for. Now he's gone.

Except his body is still here. Does that mean he can no longer go physically, as he did when he was a child? As she knows he has from time to time since she herself has known him? As he did from the hospital in Nashville, for example, when the nurse couldn't find him?

It is then that Lisey feels the faint tightening of his hand on hers. It's almost imperceptible, but he is her love and she feels it. His eyes still stare off toward the blank face of the TV from above the folds of the yellow african, but yes, his hand is squeezing hers. It is a kind of long-distance squeeze, and why not? He's plenty far away, even if his body is here, and where he is, he might be squeezing with all his might.

Lisey has a sudden brilliant intuition: Scott is holding a conduit open for her. G.o.d knows what it's costing him to do it, or how long he can keep it up, but that's what he's doing. Lisey lets go of his hand and gets up on her knees, ignoring the tingling burst of pins and needles in her legs, which have almost gone to sleep, likewise ignoring another great cold gust of wind that shakes the house. She tears away enough of the african so she can slide her arms between Scott's sides and his unresisting arms, so she can clasp her hands at the middle of his back and hug him. She puts her urgent face in the path of his blank stare.

"Pull me," she whispers to him, and gives his limp body a shake. "Pull me to where you are, Scott."

There's nothing, and she raises her voice to a shout.

"Pull me, G.o.ddam you! Pull me to where you are so I can bring you home! Do it! IF YOU WANT TO COME HOME, TAKE ME TO WHERE YOU ARE!"

24.

"And you did," Lisey muttered. "You did and I did. I'll be smucked if I know how this thing is supposed to work now that you're dead and gone instead of just gomered out in the guest room, but that's what it's all been about, hasn't it? All of this."

And she did have an idea of how it was supposed to work. It was far back in her mind, just a shape behind that curtain of hers, but it was there.

Meantime, the Excedrin had kicked in. Not a lot, but maybe enough so she could get down to the floor of the barn without pa.s.sing out and breaking her neck. If she could get there, she could get into the house where the really good dope was stashed...a.s.suming it still worked. It better work, because she had things to do and places to go. Some of them far places, indeed.

"Journey of a thousand miles begin with single step, Liseysan," she said, and got up from the booksnake.

Once more walking in slow, shuffling steps, Lisey set sail for the stairs. It took her almost three minutes to negotiate them, clinging to the banister every step of the way and pausing twice when she felt faint, but she made it without falling, sat for a little while on the sheeted mein gott bed to catch her breath, and then began the long expedition to the back door of her house.

XI. Lisey and The Pool

(Shhhh-Now You Must Be Still)

1.

Lisey's greatest fear, that the late-morning heat would overcome her and she'd pa.s.s out halfway between the barn and the house, came to nothing. The sun obliged her by ducking behind a cloud, and a cap of cool breeze materialized to briefly soothe her overheated skin and flushed, swollen face. By the time she got to the back stoop, the deep laceration in her breast was pounding again, but the dark wings stayed away. There was a bad moment when she couldn't find her housekey, but eventually her fumbling fingers touched the fob-a little silver elf-beneath the wad of Kleenex she usually carried in her right front pocket, so that was all right. And the house was cool. Cool and silent and blessedly hers. Now if it would only remain hers while she tended herself. No calls, no visitors, no six-foot deputies lumbering up to the back door to check on her. Also, please G.o.d (pretty please) no return visit from the Black Prince of the Incunks.

She crossed the kitchen and got the white plastic basin out from under the sink. It hurt to bend, hurt a lot, and once more she felt the warmth of flowing blood on her skin and soaking the remains of her shredded top.

He got off on doing it-you know that, don't you?

Of course she did.

And he'll be back. No matter what you promise-no matter what you deliver-he'll be back. Do you know that, too?

Yes, she knew that, too.

Because to Jim Dooley, his deal with Woodbody and Scott's ma.n.u.scripts are all just so much ding-dong for the freesias. There's a reason why he went for your b.o.o.b instead of your earlobe or maybe a finger.

"Sure," she told her empty kitchen-shady, then suddenly bright as the sun sailed out from behind a cloud. "It's the Jim Dooley version of great s.e.x. And next time it will be my p.u.s.s.y, if the cops don't stop him."

You stop him, Lisey. You.

"Don't be silly, dollink," she told the empty kitchen in her best Zsa Zsa Gabor voice. Once again using her right hand, she opened the cupboard over the toaster, took out a box of Lipton teabags, and put them into the white basin. She added the b.l.o.o.d.y square of the african from Good Ma's cedar box, although she had absolutely no idea why she was still carrying it. Then she began trudging toward the stairs.

What's silly about it? You stopped Blondie, didn't you? Maybe you didn't get the credit, but you were the one who did it.

"That was different." She stood looking up the stairs with the white plastic basin under her right arm, held against her hip so the box of tea and the piece of knitting wouldn't fall out. The stairs looked approximately eight miles high. Lisey thought there really ought to be clouds swirling around the top.

If it was different, why are you going upstairs?

"Because that's where the Vicodin is!" she cried to the empty house. "The d.a.m.ned old feel-better pills!"

The voice said one more thing and fell silent.

"SOWISA, babyluv is right," Lisey agreed. "You better believe it." And she began the long, slow trek up the stairs.

2.

Halfway up the wings came back, darker than ever, and for a moment Lisey was sure she was going to black out. She was telling herself to fall forward, onto the stairs, rather than backward into s.p.a.ce, when her vision cleared again. She sat down with the basin drawn across her legs and stayed that way, head hung over, until she had counted to a hundred with a Mississippi between each number. Then she got up again and finished her climb. The second floor was cross-drafted and even cooler than the kitchen, but by the time Lisey got there she was sweating profusely again. The sweat ran into the laceration across her breast, and soon there was a maddening salt-sting on top of the deeper ache. And she was thirsty again. Thirsty all the way down her throat and into her stomach, it seemed. That, at least, could be remedied, and the sooner the better.

She glanced into the guest room as she made her slow way by. It had been redone since 1996-twice, actually-but she found it was all too easy to see the black rocking chair with the University of Maine seal on the back...and the blank eye of the television...and the windows filled with frost that changed color as the lights in the sky changed...

Let it go, little Lisey, it's in the past.

"It's all in the past but none of it's done!" she cried irritably. "That's the smucking trouble!"

To that there was no answer, but here, at long last, was the master bedroom and its adjacent bathroom-what Scott, never known for his delicacy, had been wont to call Il Grande p.o.o.patorium. She set down the basin, dumped out the toothgla.s.s (still two brushes, now both of them hers, alas), and filled the tumbler to the brim with cold water. This she drank off greedily, then she did take a moment to look at herself. At her face, anyway.

What she saw was not encouraging. Her eyes were glittering blue sparks peering out of dark caves. The skin beneath them had gone a dark blackish brown. Her nose was canted to the left. Lisey didn't think it was broken, but who knew? At least she could breathe through it. Below her nose was a great crust of dried blood that had broken both right and left around her mouth, giving her a grotesque Fu Manchu mustache. Look, Ma, I'm a biker, she tried to say, but the words wouldn't quite come out. It was a s.h.i.tty joke, anyway.

Her lips were so severely swollen they actually turned out from the inside, giving her battered face a grotesquely exaggerated come-and-kiss-me pout.

Was I thinking of going up to Greenlawn, home of the famous Hugh Alberness, in this condish? Was I really? Pretty funny- they'd get one look and then call for an ambulance to take me to a real hospital, the kind where they've got an ICU.

That isn't what you were thinking. What you were thinking- But she closed that off, remembering something Scott used to say: Ninety-eight percent of what goes on in people's heads is none of their smucking business. Maybe it was true, maybe it wasn't, but for the time being she'd do well to take this as she had the stairs: head down and one step at a time.

Lisey had another bad moment when she couldn't find the Vicodin. She almost gave up, thinking one of the three springcleaning girls might have walked away with the bottle, before finding it hiding behind Scott's multi-vitamins. And, wonder of wonders, the expiration on these babies was this very month.

"Waste not, want not," Lisey said, and washed down three of them. Then she filled the plastic basin with lukewarm water and threw in a handful of teabags. She watched the clear water begin to stain amber for a moment or two, then shrugged and dumped in the rest of the teabags. They settled to the bottom of the darkening water and she thought of a young man saying It stings a little but it works really really good. In another life, that had been. Now she would see for herself.

She took a clean washcloth from the rod beside the sink, dropped it into the basin, and wrung it out gently. What are you doing, Lisey? she asked herself...but the answer was obvious, wasn't it? She was still following the trail her dead husband had left her. The one that led into the past.

She let the tatters of her blouse slip to the bathroom floor, and, with a grimace of antic.i.p.ation, applied the tea-soaked washcloth to her breast. It did hurt, but compared to the nettlesome sting of her own sweat, it was almost pleasant, in an astringent mouthwash-on-the-canker kind of way.

It works. It really really works, Lisey.

Once she had believed that-sort of-but once she had been twenty-two and willing to believe lots of things. What she believed in now was Scott. And Boo'ya Moon? Yes, she guessed she believed in that, too. A world that was waiting right next door, and behind the purple curtain in her mind. The question was whether or not it might be in reach for the celebrated writer's gal pal now that he was dead and she was on her own.

Lisey wrung blood and tea out of the washcloth, dipped it again, replaced it on her wounded breast. This time the sting was even less. But it's no cure, she thought. Just another marker on the road into the past. Out loud she said, "Another bool."

Holding the washcloth gently against her and taking the b.l.o.o.d.y square of african-Good Ma's delight-in the hand folded beneath her breast, Lisey went slowly into the bedroom and sat down on the bed, looking at the silver spade with COMMENCEMENT, SHIPMAN LIBRARY incised on the scoop. Yes, she really could see a small dent where she'd connected first with Blondie's gun and then with Blondie's face. She had the spade, and although the yellow african in which Scott had wrapped himself on those cold nights in 1996 was long gone, she did have this remnant, this delight.

Bool, the end.

"I wish it was the end," Lisey said, and lay back with the washcloth still on her breast. The pain was funneling away, but that was just Amanda's Vicodin taking hold, doing what neither Paul's tea-cure nor Scott's out-of-date aspirin could. When the Vicodin wore off, the pain would be back. So would Jim Dooley, author of the pain. The question was, what was she going to do in the meantime? Could she do something?

The one thing you absolutely cannot do is drift off to sleep.

No, that would be bad.

I'd better hear from the Prof by eight tonight, or next time the hurtin will be a lot worse, Dooley had told her, and Dooley had set things up so she was in a lose-lose situation. He had also told her to tend herself and not tell anyone he'd been here. So far she'd done that, but not because she was afraid of being killed. In a way, knowing that he meant to kill her anyway gave her a leg up. She didn't have to worry anymore about trying to reason with him, at least. But if she called the Sheriff's Department...well...

"You can't go on a bool hunt when the house is full of great big clutter-bugging deputies," she said. "Also..."

Also, I believe that Scott's still having his say. Or trying to.

"Honey," she told the empty room, "I only wish I knew what it was."

3.She looked over at the digital clock on the bedside table and was astounded to see it was only twenty to eleven. Already this day seemed a thousand years long, but she suspected that was because she had spent so much of it re-living the past. Memories screwed up perspective, and the most vivid ones could annihilate time completely while they held sway.

But enough about the past; what was happening right now?

Well, Lisey thought, let's see. In the Kingdom of Pittsburgh, the former King of the Incunks is no doubt suffering the sort of terror my late husband used to call Stinky t.e.s.t.i.c.l.e Syndrome. Deputy Alston's over in Cash Corners, inspecting a little house-fiah. Aaaason suspected, deah. Jim Dooley? Maybe laid up in the woods near here, whittling on a stick with my Oxo can opener in his pocket, waiting for the day to pa.s.s. His PT Cruiser could be tucked away in any one of a dozen deserted barns or sheds on the View, or in the Deep Cut, across the Harlow town line. Darla's probably on her way to the Portland Jetport to pick up Canty. Good Ma would say she's gone tooting. And Amanda? Oh, Amanda's gone, babyluv. Just as Scott knew she would, sooner or later. Didn't he do everything but reserve her a smucking room? Because it takes one to know one. As the saying is.

Out loud she said: "Am I supposed to go to Boo'ya Moon? Is that the next station of the bool? It is, isn't it? Scott, you goon, how do I do that with you dead?"

You're getting ahead of yourself again, aren't you?

Sure-carrying on about her inability to reach a place she had as yet not given herself permission to fully remember.

You've got to do a lot more than lift that curtain and peep under the hem.

"I've got to rip it down," she said dismally. "Don't I?"

No answer. Lisey took that for a yes. She rolled over on her side and picked up the silver spade. The inscription winked in the morning sunlight. She wrapped the b.l.o.o.d.y piece of african around the handle, then took hold of it that way.

"All right," she said, "I'll rip it down. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said all right. I said Geronimo."

Lisey paused, thinking.

"No. I didn't. I said it his way. I said Geromino. And what happened? What happened then?"

She closed her eyes, saw only brilliant purple, and could have cried for frustration. Instead she thought SOWISA, babyluv: strap on when it seems appropriate, and tightened her grip on the handle of the spade. She saw herself swinging it. She saw it glitter in the hazy August sun. And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. That light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of gla.s.s. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear G.o.d, night-blooming cereus. Most of all what pierced her was the memory of his skin on her skin, the beat of his blood running in counterpoint against the beat of her own, for they had been lying naked in their bed at The Antlers and now knelt naked in the purple lupin near the top of the hill, naked in the thickening shadows of the sweetheart trees. And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.

Lying on her widow's bed with the spade clamped in her hands, a much older Lisey cried out in joy for what was remembered and grief for what was gone. Her heart was mended even as it was broken again. Cords stood out on her neck. Her swollen lips drew down and broke open, exposing her teeth and spilling fresh blood into the gutters of her gums. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and slipped down her cheeks to her ears, where they hung like exotic jewelry. And the only clear thought in her mind was Oh Scott, we were never made for such beauty, we were never made for such beauty, we should have died then, oh my dear, we should have, naked and in each other's arms, like lovers in a story.

"But we didn't," Lisey murmured. "He held me and said we couldn't stay long because it was getting dark and it wasn't safe after dark, even most of the sweetheart trees turned bad then. But he said there was something he wanted 4.

"There's something I want to show you before we go back," he says, and pulls her to her feet.

"Oh, Scott," she hears herself saying, very faint and weak. "Oh, Scott." It seems to be the only thing she can manage. In a way this reminds her of the first time she felt an o.r.g.a.s.m approaching, only this is drawn out and drawn out and drawn out, it's like all coming and no arrival.

He's leading her someplace. She feels high gra.s.s whispering against her thighs. Then it's gone and she realizes they're on a well-worn path cutting through the drifts of lupin. It leads into what Scott calls the sweetheart trees, and she wonders if there are people here. If there are, how do they stand it? Lisey wonders. She wants to look again at that ascending goblin moon, but doesn't dare.

"Be quiet under the trees," Scott says. "We should be okay a little longer, but better safe than sorry is a good rule to follow even on the edge of the Fairy Forest."

Lisey doesn't think she could talk much above a whisper even if he demanded it. She's doing well to manage Oh, Scott.

He's standing under one of the sweetheart trees now. It looks like a palm, only its trunk is s.h.a.ggy, green with what looks like fur rather than moss. "G.o.d, I hope nothing's knocked it over," he says. "It was okay the last time I was here, the night you were so mad and I put my hand through that dumb greenhouse-ah, okay, there!" He pulls her off the path to the right. And near one of two outlying trees that seem to guard the place where the path slips into the woods, she sees a simple cross made of two boards. To Lisey they look like nothing more than crate-slats. There's no burial mound-if anything, the ground here is slightly sunken-but the cross is enough to tell her it's a grave. On the marker's horizontal arm is one carefully printed word: PAUL.

"The first time I did it in pencil," he says. His voice is clear, but it seems to be coming from far away. "Then I tried a ballpoint, but of course it didn't work, not on rough wood like that. Magic Marker was better, but it faded. Finally I did it in black paint, from one of Paul's old paint-by-the- numbers kits."

She looks at the cross in the strange mixed light of the dying day and the rising night, thinking (as much as she is able to think), All of it's true. What seemed to happen when we came out from under the yum-yum tree really did happen. It's happening now, only longer and clearer.

"Lisey!" He's hectic with joy, and why the h.e.l.l not? He hasn't been able to share this place with anyone since Paul's death. The few times he's come here, he's had to come alone. To mourn alone. "There's something else-let me show you!"

Somewhere a bell rings, very faint-a bell that sounds familiar. "Scott?"

"What?" He's kneeling in the gra.s.s. "What, babyluv?"

"Did you hear...?" But it's stopped. And surely that was her imagination. "Nothing. What were you going to show me?" Thinking, As if you haven't shown me enough.

He's sweeping his hands through the high gra.s.s near the foot of the cross, but there seems to be nothing there and slowly his goofy, happy smile begins to fade. "Maybe something took i-" he begins, then breaks off. His face tightens in a momentary wince, then relaxes, and he lets loose a halfhysterical laugh. "Here it is, and d.a.m.n if I didn't think I p.r.i.c.ked myself on it, that'd be a joke on me, all right-after all these years!-but the cap's still on! Look, Lisey!"

She would have said nothing could divert her from the wonder of where she is-the red-orange sky in the east and west deepening to a weird greenish-blue overhead, the exotic mixed odors, and somewhere, yes, another faint chime of some lost bell-but what Scott is holding up to the last fading daylight does the trick. It's the hypodermic needle his father gave him, the one Scott was supposed to stick Paul with once the boys were over here. There are little speckles of rust on the sleeve of metal at its base, but otherwise it looks brand new. "It was all I had to leave," Scott says. "I didn't have a picture. The kids who went to Donkey School used to get pictures, at least."

"You dug the grave...Scott, you dug it with your bare hands?"

"I tried. And I did scoop out a little hollow-the ground here is soft-but the gra.s.s...pulling out the gra.s.s slowed me down...tough old weeds, boy...and then it started getting dark and the laughers started..."

"The laughers?"

"Like hyenas, I think, only mean. They live in the Fairy Forest."