No face where its face should be, and yet it is shrieking in a glot.
Loonlike voice. It must be Johanna. She was able to escape her coffin, her winding shroud. She is all tangled up in it.)usly speedy this creature is! It doesn’t drift as one imagines drifting, but races across the stoop toward the driveway. It has wating down here during all the dreams when I had been frozen, that I have finally been able to walk down, it means to have scream when it wraps me in its silk arms, and I will scream when its rotting, bug-raddled flesh and see its dark staring eyes fine weave of the cloth. I will scream as the sanity leaves my forever. I will scream… but there is no one out here to hear me. The loons will hear me. I have come again to Manderley, and this I will never leave.
White thing reached for me and I woke up on the floor of crying out in a cracked, horrified voice and slamming my head repeatedly against something. How long before I finally realized I was no longer asleep, that I wasn’t at Sara Laughs? How long before I realized that I had fallen out of bed at some point and had crawled across the room in my sleep, that I was on my hands and knees in a corner, butting my head against the place where the walls came together, doing it over and over again like a lunatic in an asylum? I didn’t know, couldn’t with the power out and the bedside clock dead. I know that at first I couldn’t move out of the corner because it felt safer than the wider room would have done, and I know that for a long time the dream’s force held me even after I woke up (mostly, I imagine, because I couldn’t turn on a light and dispel its power). I was afraid that if I crawled out of my corner, the white thing would burst out of my bathroom, shrieking its dead shriek, eager to finish what it had started. I know I was shivering all over, and that I was cold and wet from the waist down, because my bladder had let go. I stayed there in the corner, gasping and wet, staring into the darkness, wondering if you could have a nightmare powerful enough in its imagery to drive you insane. I thought then (and think now) that I almost found out on that night in March. Finally I felt able to leave the corner. Halfway across the floor I pulled off my wet pajama pants, and when I did that, I got disoriented. What followed was a miserable and surreal five minutes in which I crawled aimlessly back and forth in my familiar bedroom, bumping into stuff and moaning each time I hit something with a blind, flailing hand. Each thing I touched at first seemed like that awful white thing.
Nothing I touched felt like anything I knew. With the reassuring green numerals of the bedside clock gone and my sense of direction temporarily lost, I could have been crawling around a mosque in Addis Ababa. At last I ran shoulder-first into the bed. I stood up, yanked the pillowcase off the extra pillow, and wiped my groin and upper legs with it. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets up, and lay there shivering, listening to the steady tick of sleet on the windows. There was no sleep for me the rest of that night, and the dream didn’t fade as dreams usually do upon waking. I lay on my side, the shivers slowly subsiding, thinking of her coffin there in the driveway, think ’ that it made a kind of mad sense—Jo had loved Sara, and if she were haunt anyplace, it would be there. But why would she want to hurt Why would my Jo ever want to hurt me? I could think of no reason. Somehow the time passed, and there came a moment when I realized the air had turned a dark shade of gray; the shapes of the furniture in it like sentinels in fog. That was a little better. That was more it. I would light the kitchen woodstove, I decided, and make strong Begin the work of getting this behind me. I swung my legs out of bed and raised my hand to brush my sweat-hair off my forehead. I froze with the hand in front of my eyes. I have scraped it while I was crawling, disoriented, in the dark and to find my way back to bed. There was a shallow, clotted cut across the back, just below the knuckles.
CHAPTER 3
Oace, when I was sixteen, a plane went supersonic directly over my head.
I was walking in the woods when it happened, thinking of some story I was going to write, perhaps, or how great it would be if Doreen Fournier weakened some Friday night and let me take off her panties while we were parked at the end of Cushman Road.
In any case I was travelling far roads in my own mind, and when that boom went off, I was caught totally by surprise. I went flat on the leafy ground with my hands over my head and my heart drumming crazily, sure I’d reached the end of my life (and while I was still a virgin). In my forty years, that was the only thing which equalled the final dream of the “Manderley series” for utter terror.
I lay on the ground, waiting for the hammer to fall, and when thirty seconds or so passed and no hammer did fall, I began to realize it had just been some jet-jockey from the Brunswick Naval Air Station, too eager to wait until he was out over the Atlantic before going to Mach 1.
But, holy shit, who ever could have guessed that it would be so loud?
I got slowly to my feet and as I stood there with my heart finally slowing down, I realized I wasn’t the only thing that had been scared witless by that sudden clear-sky boom. For the first time in my memory, the little patch of woods behind our house in Prout’s Neck was entirely silent. I stood there in a dusty bar of sunlight, crumbled leaves all over my tee-shirt and jeans, holding my breath, listening. I had never heard a silence like it. Even on a cold day in January, the woods would have been full of conversation.
At last a finch sang. There were two or three seconds of silence, and then a jay replied. Another two or three seconds went by, and then a crow added his two cents’ worth. A woodpecker began to hammer for grubs.
A chipmunk bumbled through some underbrush on my left. A minute after I had stood up, the woods were fully alive with little noises again; it was back to business as usual, and I continued with my own. I never forgot that unexpected boom, though, or the deathly silence which followed it. I thought of that June day often in the wake of the nightmare, and there was nothing so remarkable in that. Things had changed, somehow, or could change… but first comes silence while we assure ourselves that we are still unhurt and that the danger—if there was danger—is gone.
Derry was shut down for most of the following week, anyway. Ice and high winds caused a great deal of damage during the storm, and a sudden twenty-degree plunge in the temperature afterward made the digging out hard and the cleanup slow. Added to that, the atmosphere after a March storm is always dour and pessimistic; we get them up this way every year (and two or three in April for good measure, if we’re not lucky), but we never seem to expect them. Every time we get clouted, we take it personally.
On a day toward the end of that week, the weather finally started to break. I took advantage, going out for a cup of coffee and a mid-morning pastry at the little restaurant three doors down from the Rite Aid where Johanna did her last errand. I was sipping and chewing and working the newspaper crossword when someone asked, “Could I share your booth, Mr. Noonan? It’s pretty crowded in here today.”
I looked up and saw an old man that I knew but couldn’t quite place.
“Ralph Roberts,” he said. “I volunteer down at the Red Cross. Me and my wife, Lois.”
“Oh, okay, sure,” I said. I give blood at the Red Cross every six weeks or so. Ralph Roberts was one of the old parties who passed out juice and cookies afterward, telling you not to get up or make any sudden movements if you felt woozy. “Please, sit down.” He looked at my paper, folded open to the crossword and lying in a patch of sun, as he slid into the booth. “Don’t you find that doing the crossword in the Derry News is sort of like striking out the pitcher in a baseball game?” he asked. I laughed and nodded. “I do it for the same reason folks climb Mount Everest, Mr. Roberts… because it’s there. Only with the News crossword, no one ever falls off.”