8.The path led her down into another fold of forest. Here the strong red light of evening had faded to dimming orange and the first of the laughers woke somewhere ahead of her in the darker reaches of the woods, its horribly human voice climbing that gla.s.s mad-ladder and making her arms break out in gooseflesh.

Hurry, babyluv.

"Yes, all right."

Now a second laugher joined the first, and although she felt more gooseflesh ripple up her bare back, she thought she was all right. Just up ahead the path curved around a vast gray rock she remembered very well. Beyond it lay a deep rockhollow-oh yes, deep and puffickly huh-yooge-and the pool. At the pool she would be safe. It was scary at the pool, but it was also safe. It- Lisey became suddenly, queerly positive that something was stalking her, just waiting for the last of the light to drain away before making its move.

Its lunge.

Heart pounding so hard it hurt her mutilated breast, she dodged around the great gray bulk of that protruding stone. And the pool was there, lying below like a dream made real. As she looked down at that ghostly shining mirror, the last memories clicked into place, and remembering was like coming home.

9.

She comes around the gray rock and forgets all about the dried smear of blood on the bell, which has so troubled her. She forgets the screaming, windy cold and brilliant northern lights she has left behind. For a moment she even forgets Scott, whom she's come here to find and bring back...always a.s.suming he wants to come. She looks down at the ghostly shining mirror of the pool and forgets everything else. Because it's beautiful. And even though she's never been here before in her life, it's like coming home. Even when one of those things starts to laugh she isn't afraid, because this is safe ground. She doesn't need anyone to tell her that; she knows it in her bones, just as she knows Scott has been talking about this place in his lectures and writing about it in his books for years.

She also knows that this is a sad place.

It's the pool where we all go down to drink, to swim, to catch a little fish from the edge of the sh.o.r.e; it's also the pool where some hardy souls go out in their flimsy wooden boats after the big ones. It is the pool of life, the cup of imagination, and she has an idea that different people see different versions of it, but with two things ever in common: it's always about a mile deep in the Fairy Forest, and it's always sad. Because imagination isn't the only thing this place is about. It's also about (giving in) waiting. Just sitting...and looking out over those dreamy waters...and waiting. It's coming, you think. It's coming soon, I know it is. But you don't know exactly what and so the years pa.s.s.

How can you know that, Lisey?

The moon told her, she supposes; and the northern lights that burn your eyes with their cold brilliance; the sweet-dust smell of roses and frangipani on Sweetheart Hill; most of all Scott's eyes told her as he struggled just to hold on, hold on, hold on. To keep from taking the path that led to this place.

More cackling voices rise in the deeper reaches of the woods and then something roars, momentarily silencing them. Behind her, the bell tinkles, then falls still again.

I ought to hurry.

Yes, even though she senses hurry is ant.i.thetical to this place. They need to be getting back to their house on Sugar Top as soon as possible, and not because there's danger of wild beasts, of ogres and trolls and (vurts and seemies) other strange creatures deep in the Fairy Forest where it's always dark as a dungeon and the sun never shines, but because the longer Scott stays here, the less likely she'll ever be able to bring him back. Also...

Lisey thinks of how it would be to see the moon burning like a cold stone in the still surface of the pool below-and she thinks: I might get fascinated.

Yes.

Old wooden steps lead down this side of the slope. Beside each one is a stone post with a word carved into it. She can read these in Boo'ya Moon, but knows they would mean nothing to her back home; nor will she be able to remember anything but the[image]

[image]

simplest: X means bread.

The stairs end in a downsloping ramp running to her left that finally empties at ground level. Here a beach of fine white sand glimmers in the rapidly failing light. Above the beach, carved on step-backs into a rock wall, are perhaps two hundred long, curved stone benches that look down on the pool. There might be s.p.a.ce for a thousand or even two thousand people here if they were seated side by side, but they're not. She thinks there can be no more than fifty or sixty in all and most of them are hidden in gauzy wrappings that look like shrouds. But if they're dead, how can they be sitting? Does she even want to know?

On the beach, standing scattered, are maybe two dozen more. And a few people-six or eight-are actually in the water. They wade silently. As Lisey reaches the bottom of the steps and begins making her way toward the beach, her feet treading easily along the sunken rut of a path many other feet have walked before her, she sees a woman bend over and begin to lave her face. She does this with the slow gestures of someone in a dream, and Lisey recalls that day in Nashville, how everything fell into slow motion when she realized Blondie meant to shoot her husband. That was also like a dream, but wasn't.

Then she sees Scott. He's sitting on a stone bench nine or ten rows up from the pool. He's still got Good Ma's african, only here it's not bundled around him because it's too warm. It's just drawn across his knees, with the balance puddled over his feet. She doesn't know how the african can be both here and in the house on the View at the same time and thinks: Maybe because some things are special. The way Scott is special. And she? Is a version of Lisey Landon still back in the house on Sugar Top Hill? She thinks not. She thinks she is not that special, not her, not little Lisey. She thinks that, for better or worse, she is entirely here. Or entirely gone, depending on which world you're talking about.

She pulls in breath, meaning to call his name, then doesn't. A powerful intuition stops her.

Shhhh, she thinks. Shhhh, little Lisey, now 10.

Now you must be still, she thought, as she had in January of 1996.

All was as it had been then, only now she saw it a little better because she had come a little earlier; the shadows in the stone valley that cupped the pool were only beginning to gather. The water had the shape, almost, of a woman's hips. At the beach end, where the hips would nip into the waist, was an arrowhead of fine white sand. Upon it, standing far apart from one another, were four people, two men and two women, staring raptly at the pool. In the water were half a dozen more. No one was swimming. Most were in no deeper than their calves; one man was in up to his waist. Lisey wished she could have read the expression on this man's face, but she was still too far away. Behind the waders and the people standing on the beach-those who hadn't yet found enough courage to get wet, Lisey was convinced-was the sloping headland that had been carved into dozens or maybe hundreds of stone benches. Upon them, widely scattered, sat as many as two hundred people. She seemed to remember only fifty or sixty, but this evening there were definitely more. Yet for every person she could see, there had to be at least four in those horrible (cerements) wrappings.

There's a graveyard, too. Do you remember?

"Yes," Lisey whispered. Her breast was hurting badly again, but she looked at the pool and remembered Scott's sliced-up hand. She also remembered how quickly he had recovered from being shot in the lung by the madman-oh, the doctors had been amazed. There was better medicine than Vicodin for her, and not far away.

"Yes," she said again, and began making her way along the downsloping path, this time with only one unhappy difference: there was no Scott Landon sitting on a bench down there.

Just before the path ended at the beach, she saw another path splitting off to her left and away from the pool. Lisey was once more all but overwhelmed by memory as she saw the moon 11.

She sees the moon rising through a kind of slot in the ma.s.sive granite outcropping that cups the pool. That moon is bloated and gigantic, just as it was when her husband-to-be brought her to Boo'ya Moon from their bedroom at The Antlers, but in the widening clearing to which that slot leads, its infected red-orange face is broken into jagged segments by the silhouettes of trees and crosses. So many crosses. Lisey is looking into what might almost be a rustic country graveyard. Like the cross Scott made for his brother Paul, these appear to be made of wood, and although some are quite large and a few are ornate, they all look handmade and many are the worse for wear. There are rounded markers as well, and some of these might be made of stone, but in the gathering gloom, Lisey cannot tell for sure. The light of the rising moon hinders rather than helps, because everything in the graveyard is backlit.

If there's a graveyard here, why did he bury Paul back there? Was it because he died with the bad-gunky?

She doesn't know or care. What she cares about is Scott. He's sitting on one of those benches like a spectator at a badly attended sporting event, and if she intends to do something, she'd better get busy. "Keep your string a-drawing," Good Ma would have said-that was one she caught from the pool.

Lisey leaves the graveyard and its rude crosses behind. She walks along the beach toward the stone benches where her husband sits. The sand is firm and somehow tingly. Feeling it against her soles and heels makes her realize that her feet are bare. She's still wearing her nightgown and layers of underthings, but her slippers didn't travel. The feel of the sand is dismaying and pleasant at the same time. It's also strangely familiar, and as she reaches the first of the stone benches, Lisey makes the connection. As a kid she had a recurring dream in which she'd go zooming around the house on a magic carpet, invisible to everyone else. She'd awaken from those dreams exhilarated, terrified, and sweat-soaked to the roots of her hair. This sand has the same magic-carpet feel...as if she were to bend her knees and then shoot upward, she might fly instead of jump.

I'd swoop over that pool like a dragonfly, maybe dragging my toes in the water...swoop around to the place where it outflows in a brook...along to where the brook fattens into ariver...swooping low...smelling the damp rising up from the water, breaking through the little rising mists like scarves until I finally reached the sea...and then on...yes, on and on and on...

Tearing herself away from this powerful vision is one of the hardest things Lisey has ever done. It's like trying to rise after days of hard work and only a few hours of heavy and beautifully restful sleep. She discovers she's no longer on the sand but sitting on a bench in the third tier up from the little beach, looking out at the water with her chin propped on her palm. And she sees that the moonlight is losing its orange glow. It has become b.u.t.tery, and will soon turn to silver.

How long have I been here? she asks herself, dismayed. She has an idea it's not really been that long, somewhere between fifteen minutes and half an hour, but even that is far too long...although she certainly understands how this place works now, doesn't she?

Lisey feels her eyes being drawn back to the pool-the peace of the pool, where now only two or three people (one is a woman with either a large bundle or a small child in her arms) are wading in the deepening evening-and forces herself to look away, up at the rock horizons that encircle this place and at the stars peeping through the darkening blue above the granite and the few trees that fringe it up there. When she begins to feel a little more like herself, Lisey stands up, turns her back on the water, and locates Scott again. It's easy. That yellow knitted african all but screams, even in the gathering dark.

She goes to him, stepping up from one level to the next, as she would at a football stadium. She detours away from one of the shrouded creatures...but she's close enough to see the very human shape beneath its gauzy wrappings; hollow eyesockets and one hand that peeps out.

It is a woman's hand, with chipped red polish on the nails.

When she reaches Scott, her heart is pumping hard and she feels a little out of breath, even though the climb hasn't been difficult. In the distance the laughers have begun cackling up and down the scale, sharing their endless joke. Back the way she came, faint but still audible, she hears the fitful tinkle of Chuckie G.'s bell, and she thinks, Order's up, Lisey! Come on, let's hustle!

"Scott?" she murmurs, but Scott doesn't look at her. Scott is looking raptly at the pool, where the faintest hazy mist-a mere exhalation-has begun to rise in the light of the rising moon. Lisey allows herself only one quick glance that way before returning her regard firmly to her husband. She's learned her lesson about looking too long at the pool. Or so she hopes. "Scott, it's time to come home."

Nothing. No response whatsoever. She remembers protesting that he wasn't crazy, writing stories didn't make him crazy, and Scott telling her I hope you stay lucky, little Lisey. But she hadn't, had she? Now she knows a lot more. Paul Landon went bad-gunky and wound up raving his life away chained to a post in the cellar of an isolated farmhouse. His younger brother has married and had an undeniably brilliant career, but now the bill has come due.

Your garden-variety catatonic, she thinks, and shivers.

"Scott?" she murmurs again, almost directly into his ear. She has taken both of his hands in hers. They are cool and smooth, waxy and lax. "Scott, if you're in there and you want to come home, squeeze my hands."

For the longest time there's nothing but the sound of the laughing things deep in the woods, and somewhere closer by the shocking, almost womanish cry of a bird. Then Lisey feels something that is either wishful thinking or the barest twitch of his fingers against hers.

She tries to think what she should do next, but the only thing she's sure of is what she shouldn't do: let the night swim up around them, dazzling her with silvery moonlight from above even as it drowns her in shadows rising from below. This place is a trap. She's sure that anyone who stays at the pool for very long will find it impossible to leave. She understands that if you look at it for a little while, you'll be able to see anything you want to. Lost loves, dead children, missed chances-anything.

The most amazing thing about this place? That there aren't more people hanging out on the stone benches. That they aren't packed in shoulder-to-shoulder like spectators at a smucking World Cup soccer match.

She catches movement in the corner of her eye and looks up the path leading from the beach to the stairs. She sees a stout gentleman wearing white pants and a billowing white shirt open all the way down the front. A great red gash runs down the left side of his face. His iron-gray hair is standing up at the back of his oddly flattened-looking head. He looks around briefly, then steps from the path to the sand.

Beside her, speaking with great effort, Scott says: "Car crash."

Lisey's heart takes a wild spring in her chest, but she's careful not to look around or to squeeze down too tightly on his hands, although she cannot forbear a slight twitch. Striving to keep her voice even, she says: "How do you know?"

No answer from Scott. The stout gentleman in the billowing shirt spares one more dismissive glance for the silent folk sitting on the stone benches, then turns his back on them and wades into the pool. Silver tendrils of moonsmoke rise around him, and Lisey once more has to drag her eyes away.

"Scott, how do you know?"

He shrugs. His shoulders also seem to weigh a thousand pounds- that, at least, is how it looks to her-but he manages. "Telepathy, I suppose."

"Will he get better now?"

There's a long pause. Just when she thinks he won't answer, he does. "He might," he says. "He's...it's deep...in here." Scott touches his own head-indicating, Lisey thinks, some sort of brain injury. "Sometimes things just...go too far."

"Then do they come and sit here? Wrap themselves in sheets?"

Nothing from Scott. What she's afraid of now is losing what little of him she's found. She doesn't need anyone to tell her how easily it could happen; she can feel it. Every nerve in her body knows this news.

"Scott, I think you want to come back. I think it's why you hung on so hard all last December. And I think it's why you brought the african. It's hard to miss, even in the gloom."

He looks down, as if seeing it for the first time, then actually smiles a little. "You're always...saving me, Lisey," he says.

"I don't know what you're-"

"Nashville. I was going down." With every word he seems to gain animation. For the first time she allows herself to really hope. "I was lost in the dark and you found me. I was hot-so hot-and you gave me ice. Do you remember?"

She remembers that other Lisa (I spilled half the f.u.c.king c.o.ke getting back here) and how Scott's shivering suddenly stopped when she popped a sliver of ice onto his b.l.o.o.d.y tongue. She remembers c.o.kecolored water dripping out of his eyebrows. She remembers it all. "Of course I do. Now let's get out of here."

He shakes his head, slowly but firmly. "It's too hard. You go on, Lisey."

"I'm supposed to go without you?" She blinks her eyes fiercely, only realizing when she feels the sting that she has begun to cry.

"It won't be hard-do it like that time in New Hampshire." He speaks patiently, but still very slowly, as if every word were a great weight, and he is purposely misunderstanding her. She's almost sure of it. "Just close your eyes...concentrate on the place you came from...see it...and that's the place you'll go back to."

"Without you?" she repeats fiercely, and below them, slowly, like a man moving underwater, a guy in a red flannel shirt turns to look at them.

Scott says, "Shhhh, Lisey-here you must be still."

"What if I don't want to be? This isn't the smucking library, Scott!"

Deep in the Fairy Forest the laughers howl as if this is the funniest thing they've ever heard, a knee-slapper worthy of the Auburn Novelty Shop. From the pool there's a single sharp splash. Lisey glances that way and sees the stout gentleman has gone to...well, to somewhere else. She decides she doesn't give a good G.o.ddam if it's underwater or Dimension X; her business now is with her husband. He's right, she's always saving him, just call her the U.S. Cavalry. And it's okay, she knew that practical s.h.i.t was never exactly going to be Scott's main deal when she married him, but she has a right to expect a little help, doesn't she?

His gaze has drifted back to the water. She has an idea that when night comes and the moon begins to burn there like a drowned lamp, she'll lose him for good. This frightens and infuriates her. She stands up and s.n.a.t.c.hes Good Ma's african. It came from her side of the family, after all, and if this is to be their divorce, she will have it back-all of it-even if it hurts him. Especially if it hurts him.

Scott looks at her with an expression of sleepy surprise that makes her angrier still.

"Okay," she says, speaking with brittle lightness. It's a tone foreign to her and seemingly to this place, as well. Several people look around, clearly disturbed and-perhaps-irritated. Well, smuck them and the various horses (or hea.r.s.es, or ambulances) they rode in on. "You want to stay here and eat lotuses, or whatever the saying is? Fine. I'll just go on back down the path-"

And for the first time she sees a strong emotion on Scott's face. It's fear. "Lisey, no!" he says. "Just boom back from here! You can't use the path! It's too late, almost night!"

"Shhhh!" someone says.

Fine. She'll shhhh. Bundling the yellow african higher in her arms, Lisey starts back down the risers. Two benches down from the bottom she chances a glance back. Part of her is sure that he'll follow her; this is Scott, after all. No matter how strange this place may be, he's still her husband, still her lover. The idea of divorce has crossed her mind, but surely it is absurd, a thing for other people but not for Scott and Lisey. He will not allow her to leave alone. But when she looks over her shoulder he's just sitting there in his white tee-shirt and green long underwear bottoms, with his knees together and his hands clasped tightly as if he is cold even here, where the air is so tropical. He's not coming, and for the first time Lisey lets herself acknowledge that it may be because he can't. If that is so, her choices are down to a pair: stay here with him or go home without him.

No, there's a third. I can gamble. I can shoot the works, as the saying is. Bet the farm. So come on, Scott. If the path is really dangerous, get off your dead a.s.s and keep me from taking it.

She wants to look back as she crosses the beach, but doing that would show weakness. The laughers are closer now, which means that whatever else might be lurking near the path back to Sweetheart Hill will be closer, too. It will be full dark by now under the trees, and she guesses she'll have that sense of something stalking her before she gets far; that sense of something closing in. It's very close, honey, Scott told her that day in Nashville as he lay on the broiling pavement, bleeding from the lung and near death. And when she tried to tell him she didn't know what he was talking about, he had told her not to insult his intelligence.

Or her own.

Never mind. I'll deal with whatever's in the woods when-if-I have to. All I know right now is that Dandy Debusher's girl Lisey has finally got it strapped all the way on. That mysterious "it" Scott said you could never define because it changed from one jackpot to the next. This is the total deal, SOWISA, babyluv, and do you know what? It feels pretty good. She begins making her way up the slanting path that leads to the steps and behind her 12.

"He called me," Lisey murmured.

One of the women who had been standing at the edge of the pool now stood up to her knees in that still water, looking dreamily off to the horizon. Her companion turned to Lisey, her brows drawn together in a disapproving frown. At first Lisey didn't understand, then she did. People didn't like you to talk here, that hadn't changed. She had an idea that in Boo'ya Moon, few things did.

She nodded as if the frowning woman had requestedclarification. "My husband called my name, tried to stop me. G.o.d knows what it cost him to do that, but he did."

The woman on the beach-her hair was blond but dark at the roots, as if it needed touching up-said, "Be...quiet, please. I need...to think."

Lisey nodded-fine by her, although she doubted the blond woman was doing as much thinking as she might believe-and waded into the water. She thought it would be cool, but in fact it was almost hot. The heat coursed up her legs and made her s.e.x tingle in a way it hadn't in a long time. She waded out farther but got no deeper than her waist. She took another half a dozen steps, looked around, and saw she was at least ten yards beyond the farthest of the other waders, and remembered that good food turned bad after dark in Boo'ya Moon. Might the water also turn bad? Even if it didn't, might not dangerous things come out here as well as in the woods? Pool-sharks, so to speak? And if that was the case, might she not find herself too far out to get back before one of them decided dinner was served?

This is safe ground.

Only it wasn't ground, it was water, and she felt a panicky urge to flounder back to the beach before some killer U-boat with teeth took off one of her legs. Lisey fought the fear down. She had come a long way, not just once but twice, her breast hurt like h.e.l.l, and by G.o.d she would get what she'd come for.

She took in a deep breath, and then, not knowing what to expect, lowered herself slowly to her knees on the sandy bottom, letting the water cover her b.r.e.a.s.t.s-the one that was unhurt and the one that was badly wounded. For a moment her left breast hurt more than ever; she thought the pain would tear the top of her head off. But then 13.

He calls her name again, loud and panicky-"Lisey!"

It cuts through the dreamy silence of this place like an arrow with fire at its tip. She almost looks back because there's agony as well as panic in that cry, but something deep inside tells her she must not. If she is to have any chance at all of rescuing him, she must not look back. She has made her wager. She pa.s.ses the graveyard, its crosses gleaming in the light of the rising moon, with hardly a glance and climbs the steps with her back straight and her head up, still holding Good Ma's african bundled high in her arms so she won't trip on it, and she feels a crazy exhilaration, the kind she reckons you only experience when you've put everything you own-the house the car the bank account the family dog-on one throw of the dice. Above her (and not far) is the vast gray rock marking the head of the path that leads back to Sweetheart Hill. The sky is filled with strange stars and foreign constellations. Somewhere the northern lights are burning in long curtains of color. Lisey may never see them again, but she thinks she's okay with that. She reaches the top of the steps and with no hesitation walks around the rock and that is when Scott pulls her backward against him. His familiar odor has never smelled so good to her. At the same moment, she becomes aware that something is moving on her left, moving fast, not on the path leading to the hill of lupins but just beside it.

"Shhhh, Lisey," Scott whispers. His lips are so close they tickle the cup of her ear. "For your life and mine, now you must be still."

It's Scott's long boy. She doesn't need him to tell her. For years she has sensed its presence at the back of her life, like something glimpsed in a mirror from the corner of the eye. Or, say, a nasty secret hidden in the cellar. Now the secret is out. In gaps between the trees to her left, sliding at what seems like express-train speed, is a great high river of meat. It is mostly smooth, but in places there are dark spots or craters that might be moles or even, she supposes (she does not want to suppose and cannot help it) skin cancers. Her mind starts to visualize some sort of gigantic worm, then freezes. The thing over there behind those trees is no worm, and whatever it is, it's sentient, because she can feel it thinking. Its thoughts aren't human, aren't in the least comprehensible, but there is a terrible fascination in their very alienness...

It's the bad-gunky, she thinks, cold all the way to the bone. Its thoughts are the bad-gunky and nothing else.

The idea is awful but also right. A sound escapes her, something between a squeal and a moan. It's just a little sound, but she sees or senses that the thing's endless express-train progress has suddenly slowed, that it may have heard her.

Scott knows, too. The arm around her, just below her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, tightens a bit more. Once again his lips move against the cup of her ear. "If we're going home, we have to go right now," he murmurs. He's totally with her again, totally here. She doesn't know if it's because he's no longer looking at the pool or because he's terrified. Maybe it's both. "Do you understand?"

Lisey nods. Her own fear is so great it's incapacitating, and any sense of exhilaration at having him back is gone. Has he lived with this all his life? If so, how has he lived with it? But even now, in the extremity of her terror, she supposes she knows. Two things have tied him to the earth and saved him from the long boy. His writing is one. The other has a waist he can put his arms around and an ear into which he can whisper.

"Concentrate, Lisey. Do it now. Bust your brains."

She closes her eyes and sees the guest room of their house on Sugar Top Hill. Sees Scott sitting in the rocker. Sees herself sitting on the chilly floor beside him, holding his hand. He is gripping her hand as hard as she is gripping his. Behind them, the frost-filled panes of the window are filled with fantastic shifting light. The TV is on and The Last Picture Show is once more playing. The boys are in Sam the Lion's black-and-white poolroom and Hank Williams is on the juke singing "Jambalaya."

For a moment she feels Boo'ya Moon shimmer, but then the music in her mind-music that was for a moment so clear and happy- fades. Lisey opens her eyes. She's desperate to see home, but the big gray rock and the path leading away through the sweetheart trees are both still there. Those strange stars still blaze down, only now the laughers are silent and the harsh whispering of the bushes has stilled and even Chuckie G.'s bell has quit its fitful tinkling because the long boy has stopped to listen and the whole world seems to hold its breath and listen with it. It's over there, not fifty feet away on their left; Lisey can now actually smell it. It smells like old farts in turnpike rest area bathrooms, or the poison whiff of bourbon and cigarette smoke you sometimes get when you turn the key and walk into a cheap motel room, or Good Ma's p.i.s.sy diapers when she was old and raving senile; it's stopped behind the nearest rank of sweetheart trees, has paused in its tunnelish run through the woods, and dear G.o.d they aren't going, they aren't going back, they are for some reason stuck here.