“How far ahead is he now?” Owen asked, not daring to ask the real question, the only one that mattered: Are we already too late? He assumed that Henry would tell him, were that the case.

“He’s there,” Henry said absently. He had turned around in the seat and was wiping Duddits’s face with a damp cloth. Duddits looked at him gratefully and tried to smile. His ashy cheeks were sweaty now, and the black patches under his eyes had spread, turning them into raccoon s eyes.

“If he’s there, why did we have to come here?” Owen asked. He had the Hummer up to seventy, very dangerous on this slick stretch of two-lane blacktop, but now there was no choice.

“I didn’t want to risk Duddits losing the line,” Henry said. “If that happens…”

Duddits uttered a vast groan, wrapped his arms around his midsection, and doubled over them. Henry, still kneeling on the seat, stroked the slender column of his neck.

“Take it easy, Duds,” Henry said. “You’re all right.”

But he wasn’t. Owen knew it and so did Henry. Feverish, crampy in spite of a second Prednisone pill and two more Percocets, now spraying blood every time he coughed, Duddits Cavell was several country miles from all right. The consolation prize was that the Jonesy-Gray combination was also a very long way from all right.

It was the bacon. All they’d hoped to do was to make Mr Gray stop for awhile; none of them had guessed how prodigious his gluttony would turn out to be. The effect on Jonesy’s digestion had been fairly predictable. Mr Gray had vomited once in the parking lot of the little store, and had had to pull over twice more on the road to Ware, leaning out the window and offloading several pounds of raw bacon with almost convulsive force.

Diarrhea came next. He had stopped at the Mobil on Route 9, southeast of Ware, and had barely made it into the men’s room. The sign outside the station read CHEAP GAS CLEAN TOILETS, but the CLEAN TOILETS part was certainly out of date by the time Mr Gray left. He didn’t kill anyone at the Mobil, which Henry counted as a plus.

Before turning onto the Quabbin access road, Mr Gray had needed to stop twice more and dash into the sopping woods, where he tried to evacuate Jonesy’s groaning bowels. By then the rain had changed over to huge flakes of wet snow. Jonesy’s body had weakened considerably, and Henry was hoping for a faint. So far it hadn’t happened.

Mr Gray was furious with Jonesy, railing at him continuously by the time he slipped back behind the wheel of the car after his second trip into the woods. This was all Jonesy’s fault, Jonesy had trapped him. He chose to ignore his own hunger and the compulsive greed with which he had eaten, pausing between bites only to lick the grease from his fingers. Henry had seen such selective arrangements of the facts-emphasizing some, ignoring others completely-many times before, in his patients. In some ways, Mr Gray was Barry Newman all over again.How human he’s becoming, he thought. How curiously human. “When you say he’s there,” Owen asked, “just how there do you mean?” “I don’t know. He’s closed down again, at least pretty much. Duddits, do you hear Jonesy?”

Duddits looked at Henry wearily, then shook his head. “Isser Ay ookar cards,” he said-Mr Gray took our cards-but that was like a literal translation of a slang phrase. Duddits hadn’t the vocabulary to express what had actually happened, but Henry could read it in his mind. Mr Gray was unable to enter Jonesy’s office stronghold and take the playing cards, but he had somehow turned them all blank.

“Duddits, how are you making out?” Owen said, looking into the rearview mirror.

“I o-ay,” Duddits said, and immediately began to shiver. On his lap was his yellow lunchbox and the brown bag with his medicines in it… his medicines and that odd little string thing. Surrounding him was the voluminous blue duffel coat, yet inside it, he still shivered.

He’s going fast, Owen thought, as Henry began to swab his old friend’s face again.

The Humvee skidded on a slick patch, danced on the edge of disaster-a crash at seventy miles an hour would probably kill them all, and even if it didn’t, it would put paid to any final thin chance they might have of stopping Mr Gray-and then came back under control again.

Owen found his eyes drifting back to the paper bag, his mind going again to that string-thing.

Beaver sent to me. For my Christmas last week.

Trying to communicate now by telepathy was, Owen thought, like putting a message into a bottle and then tossing the bottle into the ocean. But he did it anyway, sending out a thought in what he hoped was Duddits’s direction: What do you call it, son?

Suddenly and unexpectedly, he saw a large space, combination living room, dining room, and kitchen. The mellow pine boards glowed with varnish. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a tapestry on one wall-tiny Indian hunters surrounding a gray figure, the archetypal alien of a thousand supermarket tabloids. There was a fireplace, a stone chimney, an oak dining table. But what riveted Owen’s attention (it had to; it was at the center of the picture Duddits had sent him, and glowed with its own special light) was the string creation which hung from the center rafter. It was the Cadillac version of the one in Duddits’s medicine bag, woven in bright colors instead of drab white string, but otherwise the same. Owen’s eyes filled with tears. It was the most beautiful room in the world. He felt that way because Duddits felt that way. And Duddits felt that way because it was where his friends went, and he loved them.

“Dreamcatcher,” said the dying man in the back seat, and he pronounced the word perfectly.

Owen nodded. Dreamcatcher, yes.

It’s you, he sent, supposing that Henry was overhearing but not caring one way or the other. This message was for Duddits, strictly for Duddits. You’re the dreamcatcher, aren’t you? Their dreamcatcher. You always were.

In the mirror, Duddits smiled.

They passed a sign which read QUABBIN RESERVOIR 8 MILES NO FISHING NO SERVICES PICNIC AREA OPEN HIKING TRAILS OPEN PASS AT OWN RISK. There was more, but at eighty miles an hour, Henry had no time to read it.

“Any chance he’ll park and walk in?” Owen asked.

“Don’t even hope for it,” Henry said. “He’ll drive as far as he can. Maybe he’ll get stuck. That’s what you want to hope for. There’s a good chance it might happen. And he’s weak. He won’t be able to move fast.”

“What about you, Henry? Will you be able to move fast?”

Considering how stiff he was and how badly his legs ached, that was a fair question. “If there’s a chance,” he said, “I’ll go as hard as I can. In any case, there’s Duddits. I don’t think he’s going to be capable of a very strenuous hike.”

Any hike at all, he didn’t add.

“Kurtz and Freddy and Perlmutter, Henry. How far back are they?”

Henry considered this. He could feel Perlmutter clearly enough… and he could touch the ravening cannibal inside him, as well. It was like Mr Gray, only the weasel was living in a world made of bacon. The bacon was Archibald Perlmutter, once a captain in the United States Army. Henry didn’t like to go there. Too much pain. Too much hunger.

“Fifteen miles,” he said. “Maybe only twelve. But it doesn’t matter, Owen. We’re going to beat them. The only question is whether or not we’re going to catch Mr Gray. We’ll need some luck. Or some help.”

“And if we catch him, Henry. Are we still going to be heroes?”

Henry gave him a tired smile. “I guess we’ll have to try.”