"Hey, Lisey..."

There's almost nothing to that whisper-No more'n a puff of wind under the door, old Dandy might have said-but she hears him and goes to him. A plastic oxygen mask hangs around his neck, hissing air. Two plastic tubes sprout from his chest, where a couple of freshly stapled incisions look like a child's drawing of a bird. The tubes jutting from his back seem almost grotesquely large in comparison to the ones in front. To Lisey's dismayed eye they look as big as radiator hoses. They're transparent, and she can see cloudy fluid and b.l.o.o.d.y bits of tissue coursing down them to some sort of suitcase-thing that stands on the bed behind him. This isn't Nashville; this is no .22 bullet; although her heart clamors against it, one look is enough to convince her mind that Scott will be dead by the time the sun comes up.

"Scott," she says, going onto her knees beside the bed and taking his hot hand in her cold ones. "What the smuck have you done to yourself now?"

"Lisey." He manages to squeeze her hand a little. His breathing is a loose and screamy wheeze that she remembers all too well from the parking lot that day. She knows exactly what he will say next, and Scott doesn't disappoint. "I'm so hot, Lisey. Ice?...Please?"

She glances at his table but there's nothing on it. She looks over her shoulder at the doctor who's brought her up here, now the Masked Redhaired Avenger. "Doctor..." she begins, and realizes she's drawing a complete blank. "I'm sorry, I've forgotten your name."

"Jantzen, Mrs. Landon. And that's perfectly all right."

"Can my husband have some ice? He says he's-"

"Yes, of course. I'll get it myself." He's gone at once. Lisey realizes he's only wanted a reason to leave them alone. Scott squeezes her hand again. "Going," he says in that same barely there whisper. "Sorry. Love you."

"Scott, no!" And absurdly: "The ice! The ice is coming!"

With what must be a tremendous effort-his breath screams louder than ever-he raises his hand and strokes her cheek with one hot finger. Lisey's tears begin to fall then. She knows what she must ask him. The panicky voice that never calls her Lisey but always little Lisey, the secret-keeper down below, clamors again that she must not, but she thrusts it aside. Every long marriage has two hearts, one light and one dark. Here again is the dark heart of theirs.

She leans closer, into the dying heat of him. She can smell the last palest ghost of the Foamy he shaved with yesterday morning and the Tea Tree he shampooed with. She leans in until her lips touch the burning cup of his ear. She whispers: "Go, Scott. Drag yourself to that smucking pool, if that's what it takes. If the doctor comes back and finds the bed empty I'll make something up, it doesn't matter, but get to the pool and make yourself better, do it, do it for me, G.o.ddam you!"

"Can't," he whispers, and commences a papery coughing that makes her draw back a little. She thinks it will kill him, just tear him apart, but somehow he manages to get it under control. And why? Because he means to have his say. Even here, on his deathbed, in a deserted isolation unit at one o'clock in the morning in a backwater Kentucky town, he means to have his say. "Won't...work."

"Then I'll go! Just help me!"

But he shakes his head. "Lying across the path...to the pool. It."

She knows what he's talking about at once. She glances helplessly toward one of the watergla.s.ses, where the piebald thing can sometimes be glimpsed. There, or in a mirror, or the corner of your eye. Always late at night. Always when one is lost, or in pain, or both. Scott's old boy. Scott's long boy.

"Slee...ping." A weird noise arises from Scott's decomposing lungs. She thinks he's choking and reaches for the call-bell, then observes the mordant shine in his feverish eyes and realizes he's either laughing or trying to. "Sleeping on...the path. Side...high...sky..." His eyes roll up to the ceiling and she's sure he's trying to say that its side is as high as the sky.

Scott plucks at the oxygen mask on his chest but can't lift it. She does it for him, placing it over his mouth and nose. Scott takes several deep breaths, then signals for her to take the mask off again. She does, and for a little while-perhaps as long as a minute-his voice is stronger.

"Went to Boo'ya Moon from the airplane," he says with a kind of wonder. "Never tried anything like that. Thought I might fall, but I came out on Sweetheart Hill, like always. Went again from a stall...airport bathroom. Last time...greenroom, just before the reading. Still there. Ole Freddy. Still right there."

Christ, he even has a name for the smucking thing.

"Couldn't get to the pool, so I ate some berries...they're usually all right, but..."

He can't finish. She gives him the mask again.

"It was too late," she says as he breathes. "It was too late, wasn't it? You ate them after sundown."

He nods.

"But it was all you could think of to do."

He nods again. Motions for her to pull the mask down again.

"But you were all right at the reading!" she says. "That Professor Meade said you were smucking great!"

He's smiling. It just may be the saddest smile she's ever seen. "Dew," he says. "Licked it off the leaves. The last time, when I went...from the greenroom. Thought it might..."

"You thought it might be healing. Like the pool."

He says yes with his eyes. His eyes never leave her.

"And that made you better. For a little while?"

"Yeah. Little while. Now..." He gives a sorry little shrug and turns his head aside. This time the coughing is worse, and she observes with horror that the flow into the tubes is a thicker, richer red. He gropes out and takes her hand again. "I was lost in the dark," he whispers. "You found me."

"Scott, no-"

He nods. Yes.

"You saw me whole. Everything..." He uses his free hand to make a weak circling gesture: Everything the same. He is smiling a little now as he looks at her.

"Hang on, Scott! Just hang on!"

He nods as if she finally gets it. "Hang on...wait for the wind to change."

"No, Scott, the ice!" It's all she can think of to say. "Wait for the ice!"

He says baby. He calls her babyluv. And then the only sound is the steady hiss of oxygen from the mask around his neck. Lisey puts her hands to her face 8.

and took them away dry. She was both surprised and not surprised. Certainly she was relieved; it seemed that she might finally be finished with her grieving. She guessed she still had a lot of work to do up here in Scott's office-she and Amanda had barely made a dent-but she thought she'd made some unexpected progress in cleaning up her own s.h.i.t over these last two or three days. She touched her wounded breast and felt almost no pain at all. This is taking self-healing to a new level, she thought, and smiled.

In the other room Amanda cried indignantly to the TV, "Oh, you dumba.s.s! Leave that b.i.t.c.h alone, can't you see she's no good?" Lisey c.o.c.ked an ear in that direction and deduced that Jacy was about to wheedle Sonny into marrying her. The movie was almost over.

She must have fast-forwarded through some of it, Lisey thought, but when she looked at the dark pressing against the skylight above her, she knew that wasn't so. She'd been sitting at Dumbo's Big Jumbo and reliving the past for over an hour and a half. Doing a little work on herself, as the New Agers liked to say. And what conclusions had she drawn? That her husband was dead, that was all. Dead and gone on. He wasn't waiting for her along the path in Boo'ya Moon, or sitting on one of those stone benches as she had once found him; he wasn't wrapped in one of those creepy shroud-things, either. Scott had left Boo'ya Moon behind. Like Huck, he'd lit out for the Territories.

And what had caused his final illness? His death certificate claimed pneumonia, and she had no problem with that. They could have put Nibbled to death by ducks on it and he'd have been just as dead-but she couldn't help wondering. Had his death been on a flower that he had picked up and smelled, or a bug that had slipped its sipper under his skin as the sun went down red in its house of thunder? Did he get it on a quick visit to Boo'ya Moon a week or a month before his final reading in Kentucky, or had it been waiting for decades, ticking like a clock? It might have been in a single grain of dirt that got under one fingernail while he was digging his brother's grave. Just a single bad bug that lay asleep as the years pa.s.sed, finally waking up at his computer one day when a reluctant word finally came to him and he snapped his fingers in satisfaction. Maybe-terrible thought, but who knew?-she had even brought it back herself from one of her own visits, a lethal mite in a tiny dot of pollen he had kissed from the tip of her nose.

Oh s.h.i.t, now she was crying.

She had seen a packet of unopened Kleenex in the top lefthand drawer of the desk. She took it out, opened it, removed a couple, and began to blot her eyes with them. In the other room, she heard Timothy Bottoms shout, "He was sweepin, you sonsab.i.t.c.hes!" and knew that time had taken another of those ungainly crow-hops forward. There was only one more scene in the movie. Sonny goes back to the coach's wife. His middleaged lover. Then the credits roll.

On the desk, the telephone gave a brief ting. Lisey knew what it meant as surely as she had known what Scott meant when he made that weak twirling gesture at the end of his life, the one that meant everything the same.

The phone was dead, the lines either cut or torn out. Dooley was here. The Black Prince of the Incunks had come for her.

XV. Lisey and The Long Boy

(Pafko at the Wall)

1.

"Amanda, come here!"

"In a minute, Lisey, the movie's almost-"

"Amanda, right now!"

She picked up the telephone, confirmed the nothing inside it, put it back down. She knew everything. It seemed to have been there all along, like the sweet taste in her mouth. The lights would be next, and if Amanda didn't come before he doused them- But there she was, standing between the entertainment alcove and the long main room, looking suddenly afraid and old. On the VHS tape the coach's wife would soon be throwing the coffee pot at the wall, angry because her hands were too unsteady to pour. Lisey wasn't surprised to see her own hands were trembling. She picked up the .22. Amanda saw her do it and looked more frightened than ever. Like a lady who would have preferred to be in Philadelphia, all things considered. Or catatonic. Too late, Manda, Lisey thought.

"Lisey, is he here?"

"Yes."

In the distance thunder rumbled, seeming to agree.

"Lisey, how do you kn-"

"Because he's cut the phone."

"The cell-"

"Still in the car. The lights will go next." She reached the end of the big redwood desk-Dumbo's Big Jumbo indeed, she thought, you could almost put a jet fighter down on the smucking thing-and now it was a straight shot to where her sister was standing, maybe eight steps across the rug with the maroon smears of her own blood on it.

When she reached Amanda the lights were still on, and Lisey had a moment's doubt. Wasn't it possible, after all, that a tree-branch knocked loose by the afternoon storms had finally fallen, taking down a telephone line?

Sure, but that's not what's happening.

She tried to give Amanda the gun. Amanda didn't want to take it. It thumped to the carpet and Lisey tensed for the explosion, which would be followed by either Amanda's scream of pain or her own as one of them took a bullet in the ankle. The gun didn't go off, just stared into the distance with its single idiot eye. As Lisey bent down to get it, she heard a thud from below, as if someone had walked into something down there and knocked it over. A cardboard box filled with mostly blank pages, say-one of a stack.

When Lisey looked up at her sister again, Amanda's hands were pressed, left over right, on the scant shelf of her bosom. Her face had gone pale; her eyes were dark pools of dismay. "I can't hold that gun," she whispered. "My hands...see?" She turned them palms out, displaying the cuts.

"Take the smucking thing," Lisey said. "You won't have to shoot him."

This time Amanda closed her fingers reluctantly around the Pathfinder's rubber grip. "Do you promise?"

"No," Lisey said. "But almost."

She peered toward the stairs leading down to the barn. It was darker at that end of the study, far more ominous, especially now that Amanda had the gun. Untrustworthy Amanda, who might do anything. Including, maybe fifty percent of the time, what you asked of her.

"What's your plan?" Amanda whispered. In the other room, Ole Hank was singing again, and Lisey knew The Last Picture Show's final credits were rolling.

Lisey put a finger across her lips in a Shhh gesture (now you must be still) and backed away from Amanda. One step, two steps, three steps, four. Now she was in the middle of the room, equidistant from Dumbo's Big Jumbo and the alcove doorway where Amanda held the .22 awkwardly with the barrel pointed at the bloodstained rug. Thunder rumbled. Country music played. From below: silence.

"I don't think he's down there," Amanda whispered.

Lisey took another backward step toward the big red maple desk. She still felt entirely keyed up, was almost vibrating with tension, but the rational part of her had to admit that Amanda might be right. The telephone was out, but up here on the View you could count on losing your service at least twice a month, especially during or just after storms. That thump she'd heard when she bent to pick up the gun...had she heard a thump? Or had it just been her imagination?

"I don't think anyone's down th-" Amanda began, and that was when the lights went out.

2.

For a few seconds-endless ones-Lisey could see nothing, and d.a.m.ned herself for not bringing the flashlight from the car. It would have been so easy. It was all she could do to stay where she was, and she had to keep Amanda where she was.

"Manda, don't move! Stand still until I tell you!"

"Where is he, Lisey?" Amanda was starting to cry. "Where is he?"

"Why, right here, Missy," Jim Dooley said easily from the pitch blackness where the stairs were. "And I can see you both with these goggles I got on. You look a smidge green, but I can see you fine."

"He can't, he's lying," Lisey said, but she felt a sinking in her middle. She hadn't counted on him having some sort of night-vision equipment.

"Oh, Missus-if I'm lyin, I'm dyin." The voice was still coming from the stairhead, and now Lisey began to see a dim figure there. She couldn't see his paper sack of horrors, but oh Jesus she could hear it crackling. "I see you well enough to know it's Miss Tall-N-Scrawny with the peashooter. I want you to drop that gun on the floor, Missy Tall. Right now." His voice sharpened and cracked like the end of a whip loaded with shot. "Mind me, now! Drop hit!"

It was full dark out now, and if there was a moon it either hadn't risen or was occluded, but enough ambient light came through the skylights to show Lisey that Amanda was lowering the gun. Not dropping it yet, but lowering it. Lisey would have given anything to have been holding it herself, but- But I need both hands free. So when the time comes I can grab you, you sonofab.i.t.c.h.

"No, Amanda, hold onto it. I don't think you'll have to shoot him. That's not the plan."

"Drop it, Missy, that's the plan."

Lisey said, "He comes in here where he doesn't belong, he calls you mean names, then tells you to drop the gun? Your own gun?"

The barely-there phantom that was Lisey's sister raised the Pathfinder again. Amanda didn't point it at the black cutout hovering in the shadows by the stairs, only held it with the muzzle pointing toward the ceiling, but she was still holding it. And her back had straightened.

"I tole you drop hit!" the dim figure nearly snarled, but something in Dooley's voice told Lisey he knew that battle was lost. His d.a.m.ned bag rattled.

"No!" Amanda shouted. "I won't! You...you get on out of here! Get out and leave my sister alone!"

"He won't," Lisey said before the shadow at the head of the stairs could reply. "He won't because he's crazy."

"You want to watch out for talk like that," Dooley said. "You seem to be forgettin I can see you like you 'us on a stage." "But you are crazy. Just as crazy as the kid who shot my husband in Nashville. Gerd Allen Cole. Do you know about him? Sure you do, you know everything about Scott. We used to laugh about guys like you, Jimmy-"

"That's enough now, Missus-"

"We called you Deep s.p.a.ce Cowboys. Cole was one and you're another. Slyer and meaner-because you're older-but not much different. A Deep s.p.a.ce Cowboy is a Deep s.p.a.ce Cowboy. You toooour the Milky Smuckin Way."

"You want to stop that talk," Dooley said. He was snarling again, and this time, Lisey thought, not just for effect. "I'm here on bi'ness." The paper bag rattled and now she could see the shadow move. The stairs were maybe fifty feet away from the desk and in the darkest part of the long main room. But Dooley was moving toward her as if her words were reeling him in and now her eyes were fully adapted to the gloom. Another few steps and his fancy mail-order goggles would make no difference. They would be on equal footing. Visually, at least.

"Why should I? It's true." And it was. Suddenly she knew everything she needed to know about Jim Dooley, alias Zack McCool, alias the Black Prince of the Incunks. The truth was in her mouth, like that sweet taste. It was that sweet taste.

"Don't provoke him, Lisey," Amanda said in a terrified voice.

"He provokes himself. All the provocation he needs comes right out of the overheated warp-drive inside his own head. Just like Cole."

"I ain't nuthin like him!" Dooley shouted.