Lisey’s Story (66 page)

“Jim,” she whispered, holding him. “I'll give you what you want. Let me give you what you want.”

His grip loosened a little. She sensed his confusion. Then, with a feline yowl, Amanda landed on his back and Lisey was forced down again, now almost sprawling on the desk. Her spine gave a warning creak, but she could see the oval smudge of his face—enough to make out how afraid he looked.
Was he afraid of me all along?
she wondered.

Now or never, little Lisey
.

She sought his eyes behind the weird circles of glass, found them, locked in on them. Amanda was still yowling like a cat on a hot griddle, and Lisey could see her fists hammering Dooley's shoulders. Both fists. So she had fired that one shot into the ceiling, then dropped the gun. Ah well, maybe it was for the best.

“Jim.” God, his weight was killing her.
“Jim.”

His head dipped, as if drawn by the lock of her eyes and the force of her will. For a moment Lisey didn't think she would be able to reach him, even so. Then, with a final desperate lunge—
Pafko at the wall
, Scott would have said, quoting God knew who—she did. She breathed the meat and onions he'd eaten for his supper as she settled her mouth on his. She used her tongue to force his lips open, kissed harder, and so passed on her second sip of the pool. She felt the sweetness go. The world she knew wavered and then began to go with it. It happened fast. The walls turned transparent and that other world's mingled scents filled her nose: frangipani, bougainvillea, roses, night-blooming cereus.

“Geromino,” she said into his mouth, and as if it had only been waiting for that word, the solid weight of the desk beneath her turned to rain. A moment later it was gone completely. She fell; Jim Dooley fell on top of her; Amanda, still screaming, fell on top of both.

Bool
, Lisey thought.
Bool, the end
.

She landed on a thick mat of grass that she knew so well she might have been rolling around in it her whole life. She had time to register the sweetheart trees and then the breath was driven out of her in a large and noisy
woof
. Black spots danced before her in the sunset-colored air.

She might have passed out if Dooley hadn't rolled away. Amanda he shrugged off his back as if she had been no more than a troublesome kitten. Dooley surged to his feet, staring first down the hill carpeted with purple lupin and then turning the other way, toward the sweetheart trees that formed the outrider of what Paul and Scott Landon had called the Fairy Forest. Lisey was shocked by Dooley's aspect. He looked like some weird flesh-and-hair-covered skull. After a moment she realized it was his narrowness of face combined with evening shadows, and what had happened to his goggles. The lenses hadn't made the trip to Boo'ya Moon. His eyes stared out through the holes where they had been. His mouth hung open. Spit ran between the upper and lower lips in silver strings.

“You always . . . liked . . . Scott's books,” Lisey said. She sounded like a winded runner, but her breath was returning and the black flecks in front of her eyes were disappearing. “How do you like his
world
, Mr. Dooley?”

“Where . . .” His mouth moved, but he couldn't finish.

“Boo'ya Moon, on the edge of the Fairy Forest, near the grave of Scott's brother, Paul.”

She knew that Dooley would be as dangerous to her (and to Amanda) over here as in Scott's study once such wits as he possessed came back to him, but she still allowed herself a moment to look over that long purple slope, and at the darkening sky. Once more the sun was going down in orange fire while the full moon rose opposite. She thought, as she had before, that the mixture of heat and cold silver might kill her with its feverish beauty.

Not that it was beauty she had to worry about. A sunburned hand fell on her shoulder.

“What are you doin-a me, Missus?” Dooley asked. His eyes bulged inside the empty goggles. “You tryin to hypno-lize me? Because it won't work.”

“Not at all, Mr. Dooley,” Lisey said. “You wanted what was Scott's, didn't you? And surely this is better than any unpublished story, or even cutting a woman with her own can opener, wouldn't you say? Look! A whole other world! A place made of imagination! Dreams spun into whole cloth! Of course it's dangerous in the forest—dangerous
everywhere
at night, and it's almost night now—but I'm confident that a brave and strapping lunatic such as yourself—”

She saw what he meant to do, saw her murder clearly in those weird socketed eyes, and cried out her sister's name . . . in alarm, yes, but also starting to laugh. In spite of everything. Laughing at
him
. Partly because he looked pretty silly with the glass gone out of his goggles, mostly because at this mortal moment the punchline of some ancient whore-house joke had popped into her mind:
Hey, youse guys, your sign fell down!
The fact that she couldn't remember the joke itself only made it funnier.

Then her breath was gone and Lisey could no longer laugh. She could only rattle.

She clawed at Dooley's face with her short but far from nonexistent nails and left three bleeding gouges in one cheek, but the grip on her throat didn't loosen—if anything, it tightened down. The rattle coming from her was louder now, the sound of some primitive mechanical device with dirt in its gears. Mr. Silver's potato-grader, maybe.

Amanda, where the smuck are you?
she thought, and then Amanda was there. Pounding her fists on Dooley's back and shoulders had done no good. This time she fell on her knees, grasped his crotch through his jeans with her wounded hands . . . and
twisted
.

Dooley howled and thrust Lisey away. She flew into the high grass, fell on her back, and then scrambled to her feet again, gasping breath down her fiery throat. Dooley was bent over with his head down and his
hands between his legs, a painful pose that brought Lisey a clear memory of a seesaw accident in the schoolyard and Darla saying matter-of-factly: “That's just
one
of the reasons I'm glad I'm not a boy.”

Amanda charged him.

“Manda, no!”
Lisey shouted, but too late. Even hurt, Dooley was miserably quick. He evaded Amanda easily, then clubbed her aside with one bony fist. He tore off the useless goggles with the other hand and threw them into the grass: he slang them forth. All pretense at sanity had left those blue eyes. He could have been the dead thing in
Empty Devils
, climbing implacably out of the well to exact its revenge.

“I dunno just where we are, but I tell you one thing, Missus: you ain't never goan home.”

“Unless you catch me,
you're
the one who's never going home,” Lisey said. Then she laughed again. She was frightened—terrified—but it felt good to laugh, perhaps because she understood that her laughter was her knife. Every peal from her burning throat drove the point deeper into his flesh.

“Don't you run 'at hee-haw sound at
me
, you bitch, don't you goddam
dare!
” Dooley roared, and ran at her.

Lisey turned to flee. She had taken no more than two running steps toward the path into the woods when she heard Dooley scream in pain. She looked over her shoulder and saw him on his knees. There was something jutting out of his upper arm, and his shirt was darkening rapidly around it. Dooley staggered to his feet and plucked at it with a curse. The jutting thing wiggled but didn't come out. Lisey saw a flash of yellow, running away from it in a line. Dooley cried out again, then seized the thing stuck in his flesh with his free hand.

Lisey understood. It came in a flash, too perfect not to be true. He had started to run after her, but Amanda had tripped him before he could do more than get started. And he had come down on Paul Landon's wooden grave-marker. The crosspiece was sticking out of his bicep like an oversized pin. Now he yanked it free and threw it aside. More blood flowed from the open wound, scarlet creeping down his shirtsleeve to the elbow. Lisey knew she had to make sure Dooley didn't turn his rage on Amanda, who was lying helplessly in the grass almost at his feet.

“Can't catch a flea, can't catch me!”
Lisey chanted, drawing on playground lore she didn't even know she remembered. Then she stuck her tongue out at Dooley, twiddling her fingers in her ears for good measure.

“You bitch! You
cunt!
” Dooley screamed, and charged.

Lisey ran. She wasn't laughing now, she was finally too afraid to laugh, but she was still wearing a terrified smile as her feet found the path and she ran into the Fairy Forest, where it was already night.

The marker that said
was gone, but as Lisey ran down the first stretch—the path a dim white line that seemed to float amid the darker masses of the surrounding trees—broken cackles arose from ahead of her.
Laughers
, she thought, and chanced a look back over her shoulder, thinking that if her friend Dooley heard
those
babies, he might change his mind about—

But no. Dooley was still there, visible in the stutters of fading light because he had gained on her, he was really flying along in spite of the black blood now coating his left sleeve from shoulder to wrist. Lisey tripped over a root in the path, almost lost her balance, and somehow managed to keep it, in part by reminding herself that Dooley would be on top of her five seconds after she fell. The last thing she'd feel would be his breath, the last thing she'd smell would be the curdling aroma of the surrounding trees as they changed to their more dangerous night-selves, and the last thing she'd hear would be the insane laughter of the hyena-things that lived deeper in the forest.

I can hear him panting. I can hear that because he's gaining. Even running at top speed—and I won't be able to keep this up for long—he can run a little bit faster than I can. Why doesn't that squeeze in the balls she fetched him slow him down? Why doesn't the blood-loss?

The answer to those questions was simple, the logic stark: they
were
slowing him down. Without them, she'd be caught already. Lisey was in third gear. She tried to find fourth and couldn't. Apparently she didn't
have
a fourth gear. Behind her, the harsh and rapid sound of Jim
Dooley's breathing grew closer still, and she knew that in only a minute, maybe less, she would feel the first brush of his fingers on the back of her shirt.

Or in her hair.

The path tilted and grew steeper for a few moments; the shadows grew deeper. She thought she might finally be gaining a little bit on Dooley. She didn't dare cast a glance back to see, and she prayed that Amanda wouldn't try following them. It might be safe on Sweetheart Hill, and it might be safe at the pool, but it wasn't a bit safe in these woods. Jim Dooley was far from the worst of it, either. Now she heard the faint and dreamy ring of Chuckie G.'s bell, swiped by Scott in another lifetime and hung from a tree at the top of the next rise.

Lisey saw brighter light ahead, not reddish-orange now but just a dying pink afterglow. It stole through a thinning of the trees. The path was a bit brighter, too. She could see its gentle upslope. Beyond that next rise, she remembered, it sank again, winding through even thicker forest until it reached the big rock and the pool beyond.

Can't make it
, she thought. The breath tearing in and out of her throat was hot and there was the beginning of a stitch in her side.
He'll catch me before I'm halfway up that hill
.

It was Scott's voice that responded, laughing on top, surprisingly angry beneath.
You didn't come all this way for that. Go on, babyluv—SOWISA
.

SOWISA, yes. Strapping it on had never seemed more appropriate than right now. Lisey tore up the hill, hair plastered to her skull in sweaty strings, arms pumping. She breathed in huge snatches, exhaled in harsh bursts. She wished for the sweet taste in her mouth, but she'd given her last sip of the pool to the crazy smuck behind her and now what her mouth tasted of was copper and exhaustion. She could hear him closing in again, not yelling now, saving all his breath for the chase. The cramp in her side deepened. A high, sweet singing started up first in her
right ear, then in both of them. The laughers cackled closer now, as if they wanted to be in at the kill. She could smell the change in the trees, how the aroma that had been sweet had grown sharp, like the smell of the ancient henna she and Darla had found in Granny D's bathroom after she died, a poison smell, and—

That's not the trees
.

All the laughers had fallen silent. Now there was only the sound of Dooley ripping breath from the air as he pounded along behind her, trying to close those last few feet of distance. And what she thought of was Scott's arms sweeping around her, Scott pulling her against his body, Scott whispering
Shhhh, Lisey. For your life and mine, now you must be still
.