"The Fairy Forest-did Paul name it that?"

"No, me." He gestures to the trees. "Paul and I never saw the laughers up close, mostly just heard them. But we saw other things...I saw other things...there's this one thing..." Scott looks toward the rapidly darkening ma.s.ses of sweetheart trees, then at the path, which fades away quickly when it enters the forest. There's no mistaking the caution in his voice when he speaks again. "We have to go back soon."

"But you can take us, can't you?"

"With you to help? Sure."

"Then tell me how you buried him."

"I can tell you that when we go back, if you-"

But the slow shake of her head silences him.

"No. I understand about why you don't want to have kids. I get that now. If you ever came to me and said, 'Lisey, I've changed my mind, I want to take the chance,' we could talk about it because there was Paul...and then there was you."

"Lisey-"

"We could talk about it then. Otherwise we're never going to talk about gomers and bad-gunky and this place again, okay?" She sees the way he's looking at her and softens her tone. "It's not about you, Scott-not everything is, you know. This happens to be about me. It's beautiful here..." She looks around. And she shivers. "It's too beautiful. If I spent too much time here-or even too much time thinking about it-I think the beauty would drive me insane. So if our time is short, for once in your smucking life, you be short. Tell me how you buried him."

Scott half-turns away from her. The orange light of the setting sun paints the line of his body: f.l.a.n.g.e of shoulderblade, tuck of waist, curve of b.u.t.tock, the long shallow arc of one thigh. He touches the arm of the cross. In the high gra.s.s, barely visible, the gla.s.s curve of the hypo glimmers like a forgotten bit of trumpery treasure.

"I covered him with gra.s.s, then I went home. I couldn't come back for almos' a week. I was sick. I had a fever. Daddy give me o'meal in the morning and soup when he come home from work. I was ascairt of Paul's ghos, but I never seen his ghos. Then I got better and trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Just me. I thought the aminals- animals-would have ett'n on him-the laughers and such-but they din't yet, so I went back and trite to come over again, this time with a play-shovel I found in our old toybox in the attic. That went and that's what I dug his grave with, Lisey, a red plastic play-shovel we had for the san'box when we 'us very wee."

The sinking sun has started to fade to pink. Lisey puts her arm around him and hugs him. Scott's arms encircle her and for a moment or two he hides his face in her hair. "You loved him so very much," she says.

"He was my brother" is what he replies, and it is enough.

As they stand there in the growing gloom, she sees something else, or thinks she does. Another piece of wood? That's what it looks like, another crate-slat lying just beyond the place where the path leaves the lupin-covered hill (where lavender is now turning a steadily darker purple). No, not just one- two.

Is it another cross, she wonders, one that has fallen apart?

"Scott? Is someone else buried here?"

"Huh?" He sounds surprised. "No! There's a graveyard, sure, but it's not here, it's by the-" He catches sight of what she's looking at and gives a little chuckle. "Oh, wow! That's not a cross, it's a sign! Paul made it right around the time of the first bool hunts, back when he could still come on his own sometimes. I forgot all about that old sign!" He pulls free of her and hurries to where it lies. Hurries a little way down the path. Hurries under the trees. Lisey isn't sure she likes that.

"Scott, it's getting dark. Don't you think we better go?"

"In a minute, babyluv, in just a minute." He picks up one of the boards and brings it back to her. She can make out letters, but they're faint. She has to bring the slat close to her eyes before she can read what's there: TO THE POOL.

"Pool?" Lisey asks.

"Pool," he agrees. "Rhymes with bool, don't you know." And actually laughs. Only that's when, somewhere deep in what he calls the Fairy Forest (where night has surely come already), the first laughers raise their voices.

Only two or three, but the sound still terrifies Lisey more than anything she has ever heard in her life. To her those things don't sound like hyenas, they sound like people, lunatics cast into the deepest depths of some nineteenthcentury Bedlam. She grasps Scott's arm, digging into his skin with her nails, and tells him in a voice she barely recognizes as her own that she wants to go back, he has to take her back right now.

Dim and distant, a bell tinkles.

"Yes," he says, tossing the signboard into the weeds. Above them a dark draft of air stirs the sweetheart trees, making them sigh and give off a perfume that's stronger than the lupin-cloying, almost sickly. "This really isn't a safe place after dark. The pool is safe, and the beach...the benches...maybe even the graveyard, but-"

More laughers join the chorus. In a matter of moments there are dozens of them. Some of the laughter runs up a jagged scale and turns into broken-gla.s.s screams that make Lisey feel like screaming back. Then they descend again, sometimes to guttering chuckles that sound as if they're coming from mud.

"Scott, what are those things?" she whispers. Above his shoulder the moon is a bloated gas balloon. "They don't sound like animals at all."

"I don't know. They run on all fours, but sometimes they...never mind. I never saw them close up. Neither of us did."

"Sometimes they what, Scott?"

"Stand up. Like people. Look around. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting back. You want to go back now, right?"

"Yes!"

"Then close your eyes and visualize our room at The Antlers. See it as well as you can. It will help me. It will give us a boost."

She closes her eyes and for one terrible second nothing comes. Then she's able to see how the bureau and the tables flanking the bed swam out of the gloom when the moon fought clear of the clouds and this brings back the wallpaper (rambler roses) and the shape of the bedstead and the comic-opera creak of the springs each time one of them moved. Suddenly the terrifying sound of those things laughing in the (Forest Fairy Forest) darkling woods seems to be fading. The smells are fading, too, and part of her is sad to be leaving this place, but mostly what she feels is relief. For her body (of course) and her mind (most certainly), but most of all for her soul, her immortal smucking soul, because maybe people like Scott Landon can jaunt off to places like Boo'ya Moon, but such strangeness and beauty were not made for ordinary folk such as she unless it's between the covers of a book or inside the safe dark of a movie theater.

And I only saw a little, she thinks.

"Good!" he tells her, and Lisey hears both relief and surprised delight in his voice. "Lisey, you're a champ-" at this is how he finishes, but even before he does, before he lets go of her and she opens her eyes, Lisey knows 5.

"I knew that we were home," she finished, and opened her eyes. The intensity of her recall was so great that for a moment she expected to see the moonshadowy stillness of the bedroom they'd shared for two nights in New Hampshire twenty-seven years ago. She had been gripping the silver spade so tightly that she had to will her fingers open, one by one. She laid the yellow delight square-blood-crusted but comforting-back on her breast.

And then what? Are you going to tell me that after that, after all that, the two of you just rolled over and went to sleep?

That was pretty much what had happened, yes. She'd been anxious to start forgetting all of it, and Scott had been more than willing. It had taken all his courage to bring his past up in the first place, and no wonder. But she had asked him one more question that night, she remembered, and had almost asked another the following day, when they were driving back to Maine, before realizing she didn't have to. The question she'd asked had been about something he'd said just before the laughers started up, scaring all curiosity from her mind. She'd wanted to know what Scott meant when he'd said Back when he could still come on his own sometimes. Meaning Paul.

Scott looked startled. "Been long years since I've thought of that," he said, "but yeah, he could. It was just hard for him, the way hitting a baseball was always hard for me. So mostly he let me do it, and I think after awhile he lost the knack completely."

The question she'd thought to ask in the car was about the pool to which the broken sign had once pointed the way. Was it the one he always spoke about in his lectures? Lisey didn't ask because the answer was, after all, self-evident. His audiences might believe the myth-pool, the language-pool (to which we all go down to drink, to swim, or perhaps to catch a little fish) was figurative; she knew better. There was a real pool. She knew then because she knew him. She knew now because she had been there. You reached it from Sweetheart Hill by taking the path that led into the Fairy Forest; you had to pa.s.s both the Bell Tree and the graveyard to get there.

"I went to get him," she whispered, holding the spade. Then she said abruptly, "Oh G.o.d I remember the moon," and her body broke out so painfully in gooseflesh that she writhed on the bed.

The moon. Yes, that. A b.l.o.o.d.y orange hophead moon, so suddenly different from the northern lights and the killing cold she had just left behind her. It had been s.e.xy summercrazy, that moon, darkly delicious, lighting the stone cleft of valley near the pool better than she might have wished. She could see it now almost as well as then because she had cut through the purple curtain, had ripped it most righteously, but memory was only memory and Lisey had an idea hers had taken her almost as far as it could. A little more, maybe-another picture or two from her own personal booksnake-but not much, and then she would actually have to go back there, to Boo'ya Moon.

The question was, could she?

Then another question occurred to her: What if he's one of the shrouded ones now?

For an instant, an image struggled to come clear in Lisey's mind. She saw scores of silent figures that might have been corpses wrapped in old-fashioned winding sheets. Only they were sitting up. And she thought they were breathing.

A shudder rolled through her. It hurt her lacerated breast in spite of the Vicodin she had on board, but there was no way to stop that shudder until it had run its course. When it had, she found herself able to face practical considerations again. The foremost was whether she could get over to that other world on her own...because she had to go, shrouded ones or not.

Scott had been able to do it on his own, and had been able to take his brother Paul. As an adult he had been able to take Lisey from The Antlers. The crucial question was what had happened seventeen years later, on that cold January night in 1996.

"He wasn't entirely gone," she murmured. "He squeezed my hand." Yes, and the thought had crossed her mind that somewhere he might have been squeezing with every ounce of his force and being, but did that mean he had taken her?

"I yelled at him, too." Lisey actually smiled. "Told him if he wanted to come home he had to take me to where he was...and I always thought he did..."

Bulls.h.i.t, little Lisey, you never thought about it at all. Did you? Not until today, when you almost literally got your t.i.t in the wringer and had to. So if you're thinking about it, really think about it. Did he pull you to him that night? Did he?

She was on the verge of concluding it was one of those questions, like the chicken-or-egg thing, to which there was no satisfactory answer, when she remembered his saying Lisey, you're a champ at this!

Say she had done it by herself in 1996. Even so, Scott had been alive, and that squeeze of his hand, feeble as it had been, was enough to tell her he was there on the other side, making a conduit for her- "It's still there," she said. She was gripping the handle of the shovel again. "That way through is still there, it must be, because he prepared for all of this. Left me a smucking bool hunt to get me ready. Then, yesterday morning, in bed with Amanda...that was you, Scott, I know it was. You said I had a blood-bool coming...and a prize...a drink, you said...and you called me babyluv. So where are you now? Where are you when I need you to get me over?"

No answer but the ticking of the clock on the wall.

Close your eyes. He'd said that, too. Visualize. See as well as you can. It will help. Lisey, you're a champ at this.

"I better be," she told the empty, sunny, Scottless bedroom. "Oh honey, I just better be."

If Scott Landon had had a fatal flaw, it might have been thinking too much, but that had never been her problem. If she had stopped to consider the situation on that hot day in Nashville, Scott almost certainly would have died. Instead she had simply acted, and saved his life with the shovel she now held.

I trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go.

Would the silver spade from Nashville go?

Lisey thought yes. And that was good. She wanted to keep it with her. "Friends to the end," she whispered, and closed her eyes.

She was summoning her memories of Boo'ya Moon, now vivid indeed, when a disturbing question broke her deepening concentration: another troublesome thought to divert her.

What time is it there, little Lisey? Oh, not the hour, I don't mean that, but is it daytime or nighttime? Scott always knew- he said he did, anyway-but you're not Scott.

No, but she remembered one of his favorite rock 'n roll tunes: "Night Time Is the Right Time." In Boo'ya Moon, nighttime was the wrong time, when smells turned rotten and food could poison you. Nighttime was when the laughers came out-things that ran on all fours but sometimes stood up like people and looked around. And there were other things, worse things.

Things like Scott's long boy.

It's very close, honey. That's what he told her as he lay under the hot Nashville sun on the day when she had been sure he was dying. I hear it taking its meal. She had tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about; he had pinched her and told her not to insult his intelligence. Or her own.

Because I'd been there. Because I'd heard the laughers and believed him when he said there were worse things waiting. And there were. I saw the thing he was talking about. I saw it in 1996, when I went to Boo'ya Moon to bring him home. Just its side, but that was enough.

"It was endless," Lisey muttered, and was horrified to realize she really believed this to be the truth. It had been night in 1996. Night when she had gone to Scott's other world from the cold guest room. She had gone down the path, into the woods, into the Fairy Forest, and- A motor exploded into life nearby. Lisey's eyes flew open and she nearly screamed. Then she relaxed again, little by little. It was only Herb Galloway, or maybe the Luttrell kid Herb sometimes hired, cutting the gra.s.s next door. This was entirely different from the bitterly cold night in January of '96 when she'd discovered Scott in the guest room, there and still breathing but gone in every other way that mattered.

She thought: Even if I could do it, I can't do it like this- it's too noisy.

She thought: The world is too much with us.

She thought: Who wrote that? And, as happened so frequently, that thought came trailing its painful little red caboose: Scott would know.

Yes, Scott would know. She thought of him in all the motel rooms, bent over a portable typewriter (SCOTT AND LISEY, THE EARLY YEARS!) and then later, with his face lit by the glow of his laptop. Sometimes with a cigarette smoldering in an ashtray beside him, sometimes with a drink, always with the curl of hair falling forgotten across his forehead. She thought of him lying on top of her in this bed, of chasing her full-tilt through that awful house in Bremen (SCOTT AND LISEY IN GERMANY!), both of them naked and laughing, h.o.r.n.y but not really happy, while trucks and cars rumbled around and around the traffic-circle up the street. She thought of his arms around her, all the times his arms had been around her, and the smell of him, and the sandpaper rasp his cheek made against hers, and she thought she would sell her soul, yes, her immortal smucking soul, for no more than the sound of him down the hall slamming the door and then yelling Hey, Lisey, I'm home-everything the same?

Hush and close your eyes.

That was her voice, but it was almost his, a very good imitation, so Lisey closed her eyes and felt the first warm tears, almost comforting, slip out through the screen of lashes. There was a lot they didn't tell you about death, she had discovered, and one of the biggies was how long it took the ones you loved most to die in your heart. It's a secret, Lisey thought, and it should be, because who would ever want to get close to another person if they knew how hard the letting-go part was? In your heart they only die a little at a time, don't they? Like a plant when you go away on a trip and forget to ask a neighbor to poke in once in awhile with the old watering-can, and it's so sad- She didn't want to think about that sadness, nor did she want to think about her hurt breast, where the pain had begun to creep back. She turned her thoughts to Boo'ya Moon again, instead. She recalled how utterly amazing and wonderful it had been to go from the bitter subzero Maine night to that tropical place in the wink of a maiden's eye. The somehow sad texture of the air, and the silky aromas of frangipani and bougainvillea. She remembered the tremendous light of the setting sun and the rising moon and how, far off, that bell was ringing. That same bell.

Lisey realized that the sound of the riding mower in the Galloways' yard now seemed oddly distant. So was the blat of a pa.s.sing motorcycle. Something was happening, she was almost sure of it. A spring was winding, a well was filling, a wheel was turning. Maybe the world was not too much with her, after all.

But what if you get over there and it's night? a.s.suming that what you feel isn't just a combination of narcotics and wishful thinking, what if you get over there and it's night, when the bad things come out? Things like Scott's long boy? Then I'll come back here.

If you have time, you mean.

Yes, that's what I mean, if there's t- Suddenly, shockingly, the light shining through the lids of her closed eyes changed from red to a dim purple that was almost black. It was as if a shade had been pulled. But a shade wouldn't account for the glorious mixture of smells that suddenly filled her nose: the mixed perfume of all those flowers. Nor could it account for the gra.s.s she now felt p.r.i.c.king her calves and naked back.

She'd made it. Gotten over. Come through.

"No," Lisey said with her eyes still shut-but it was feeble, little more than a token protest.

You know better, Lisey, Scott's voice whispered. And time is short. SOWISA, babyluv.

And because she knew that voice was absolutely right-time was indeed short-Lisey opened her eyes and sat up in her talented husband's childhood refuge.

Lisey sat up in Boo'ya Moon.

6.

It was neither night nor day, and now that she was here, she wasn't surprised. She had come just before twilight on her previous two trips; was it any wonder it was just before twilight again?

The sun, brilliant orange, stood above the horizon at the end of the seemingly endless field of lupin. Looking the other way, Lisey could see the first rising arc of the moon-one far bigger than the biggest harvest moon she had ever seen in her life.

That's not our moon, is it? How can it be?

A breeze ruffled the sweaty ends of her hair, and somewhere not too far distant, that bell tinkled. A sound she remembered, a bell she remembered.

You better hurry up, don't you think?

Yes indeed. It was safe at the pool, or so Scott had said, but the way there led through the Fairy Forest, and that was not. The distance was short, but she'd do well to hurry.

She half-ran up the slope to the trees, looking for Paul's marker. At first she didn't see it, then spotted it leaning far over to one side. She didn't have time to straighten the cross...but took the time, anyway, because Scott would have taken the time. She set the silver spade aside for a moment (it had indeed come with her, as had the yellow knitted square) so she could use both hands. There must be weather here, because the single painstakingly printed word-PAUL-had faded to little more than a ghost.

I think I straightened it last time, too, she thought. In '96. And thought I'd like to look for the hypodermic needle, only there was no time.

Nor was there now. This was her third real trip to Boo'ya Moon. The first hadn't been so bad because she'd been with Scott and they'd gone no farther than the broken signpost reading TO THE POOL before returning to the bedroom at The Antlers. The second time, however, in 1996, she'd had to take the path into the Fairy Forest on her own. She couldn't recall what bravery she must have summoned, not knowing how far it was to the pool or what she'd find when she got there. Not that this trip didn't have its own unique set of difficulties. She was topless, her badly gored left breast was starting to throb again, and G.o.d only knew what sort of things the smell of her blood might attract. Well, it was too late to worry about that now.

And if something does come at me, she thought, picking up the spade by its short wooden handle, one of those laughers, for instance, I'll just bop it one with Little Lisey's Trusty Maniac Swatter, Copyright 1988, Patent Pending, All Rights Reserved.

Somewhere up ahead, that bell tinkled again. Barefoot, barebreasted, blood-smeared, wearing nothing but a pair of old denim shorts and carrying a spade with a silver scoop in her right hand, Lisey set off toward the sound along the rapidly darkening path. The pool was up ahead, surely no more than half a mile distant. There it was safe even after dark, and she would take off the few clothes she still wore, and wash herself clean.

7.

It grew dim very quickly once she was under the canopy of trees. Lisey felt the urge to hurry more strongly than ever, but when the wind stirred the bell again-it was very close, now, and she knew it was hung from a branch by a bit of stout cord-she stopped, struck by a complex overlay of recall. She knew the bell was hung on a piece of cord because she had seen it on her last trip here, ten years ago. But Scott had swiped it long before that, even before they were married. She knew because she had heard it in 1979. Even then it had sounded familiar, in an unpleasant way. Unpleasant because she had hated the sound of that bell long before it had come over here to Boo'ya Moon.

"And I told him," she murmured, switching the spade to her other hand and brushing back her hair. The yellow square of delight lay over her left shoulder. Around her the sweetheart trees rustled like whispering voices. "He didn't say much, but I guess he took it to heart."

She set off again. The path dipped, then rose to the top of a hill where the trees were a little thinner and strong red light shone through them. Not quite sunset yet, then. Good. And here the bell hung, nodding from side to side just enough to produce the faintest chime. It had, once upon a time, sat beside the cash register of Pat's Pizza & Cafe in Cleaves Mills. Not the kind of bell you hit with your palm, the discreet hotel-desk species that went ding! once and then shut up, but a kind of miniature silver school bell with a handle that went ding-a-ling for as long as you wanted to keep on shaking it. And Chuckie G., the cook who was on duty most nights during the year or so Lisey had waitressed at Pat's, had loved that bell. Sometimes, she remembered telling Scott, she heard its annoying silver ding-a-ling in her dreams, along with Chuckie G. bawling, leather-lunged: Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle! Hungry people! Yes, in bed she had told Scott how much she had hated Chuckie G.'s annoying little bell, in the spring of 1979 it must have been, because not long after that the annoying little bell had disappeared. She'd never a.s.sociated Scott with its disappearance, not even when she'd heard it the first time she'd been here-too many other things going on then, too much weird input-and he had never said a word about it. Then, in 1996, while searching for him, she had heard Chuckie G.'s long-lost bell again, and that time she had (let's hustle hungry people order's up) known it for what it was. And the whole thing had made perfect crackpot sense. Scott Landon had been the man, after all, who thought the Auburn Novelty Shop was the hardy-har capital of the universe. Why wouldn't he have thought it a fine joke to swipe the bell that so annoyed his girlfriend and bring it to Boo'ya Moon? To hang it rah-cheer beside the path for the wind to ring?

There was blood on it last time, the deep voice of memory whispered. Blood in 1996.

Yes, and it had frightened her, but she had pushed on, anyway...and the blood was gone now. The weather that had faded Paul's name from the marker's crosspiece had also washed the bell clean. And the stout length of cord upon which Scott had hung it twenty-seven years before (always a.s.suming time was the same over here) had almost worn away-soon the bell would tumble to the path. Then the joke would be over.

And now intuition spoke to her as powerfully as it ever had in her life, not in words but in a picture. She saw herself laying the silver spade at the foot of the Bell Tree, and she did so without pause or question. Nor did she ask herself why; it looked too perfect lying there at the foot of the old, gnarled tree. Silver bell above, silver spade below. As to why it should be perfect...she might as well ask herself why Boo'ya Moon existed in the first place. She'd thought the spade had been made for her protection this time. Apparently not. She gave it one more look (it was all the time she could afford) and then moved on.