Even before the shrouded thing had come bursting out of the house, I had felt something was all wrong, all twisted up; I had felt that somehow the house itself had gone insane. It was at this point, passing the old scarred pine, that I had wanted to run like the gingerbread man.
I didn’t feel that now. I was afraid, yes, but not in terror. There was nothing behind me, for one thing, no sound of slobbering breath. The worst thing a man was likely to come upon in these woods was an irritated moose. Or, I supposed, if he was really unlucky, a pissed-off bear.
In the dream there had been a moon at least three quarters full, but there was no moon in the sky above me that night. Nor would there be; in glancing over the weather page in that morning’s Derry News, I had noticed that the moon was new.
Even the most powerful d6j? vu is fragile, and at the thought of that moonless sky, mine broke. The sensation of reliving my nightmare departed so abruptly that I even wondered why I had done this, what I had hoped to prove or accomplish. Now I’d have to go all the way back down the dark lane to retrieve my car.
All right, but I’d do it with a flashlight from the house. One of them would surely still be just inside the- A series of jagged explosions ran themselves off on the far side of the lake, the last loud enough to echo against the hills. I stopped, drawing in a quick breath. Moments before, those unexpected bangs probably would have sent me running back up the driveway in a panic, but now I had only that brief, startled moment. It was firecrackers, of course, the last one—the loudest one—maybe an M-80. Tomorrow was the Fourth of July, and across the lake kids were celebrating early, as kids are wont to do.
I walked on. The bushes still reached like hands, but they had been pruned back and their reach wasn’t very threatening. I didn’t have to worry about the power being out, either; I was now close enough to the back stoop to see moths fluttering around the light Bill Dean had left on for me. Even if the power had been out (in the western part of the state a lot of the lines are still above ground, and it goes out a lot), the gennie would have kicked in automatically.
Yet I was awed by how much of my dream was actually here, even with the powerful sense of repetition—of reliving—departed. Jo’s planters were where they’d always been, flanking the path which leads down to Sara’s little lick of beach; I suppose Brenda Meserve had found them stacked in the cellar and had had one of her crew set them out again. Nothing was growing in them yet, but I suspected that stuff would be soon. And even without the moon of my dream, I could see the black square on the water, standing about fifty yards offshore. The swimming float.
No oblong shape lying overturned in front of the stoop, though; no coffin. Still, my heart was beating hard again, and I think if more firecrackers had gone off on the Kashwakamak side of the lake just then, I might have screamed.
You funny little man, said Strickland.
Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.
What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?
I had reached the point where, in my nightmare, the door banged open and that white shape came hurtling out with its wrapped arms upraised. I took one more step and then stopped, hearing the harsh sound of my respiration as I drew each breath down my throat and then pushed it back out over the dry floor of my tongue. There was no sense of dji vu, but for a moment I thought the shape would appear anyway—here in the real world, in real time. I stood waiting for it with my sweaty hands clenched. I drew in another dry breath, and this time I held it.
The soft lap of water against the shore.
A breeze that patted my face and rattled the bushes.
A loon cried out on the lake; moths battered the stoop light.
No shroud-monster threw open the door, and through the big windows to the left and right of the door, I could see nothing moving, white or otherwise. There was a note above the knob, probably from Bill, and that was it. I let out my breath in a rush and walked the rest of the way down the driveway to Sara Laughs.
The note was indeed from Bill Dean. It said that Brenda had done some shopping for me; the supermarket receipt was on the kitchen table, and I would find the pantry well stocked with canned goods. She’d gone easy with the perishables, but there was milk, butter, half-and-half, and hamburger, that staple of single-guy cuisine. I will see you next Mon… Bill had written. if I had my druthers I’d be here to say hello in person but the good wi3 says it’s our turn to do the holiday trotting and so we are going down to l’rginia (hot!!) to spend the 4th with her sister. If you need anything or run into problems… He had jotted his sister-in-law’s phone number in Virginia as well as Butch Wiggins’s number in town, which locals just call “the TR,” as in “Me and mother got tired of Bethel and moved our trailer over to the TR.” There were other numbers, as well—the plumber, the electrician, Brenda Meserve, even the TV guy over in Harrison who had repositioned the DSS dish for maximum reception. Bill was taking no chances. I turned the note over, imagining a final P.S.: Say, Mike, if nuclear war should break out bej3re me and Yvette get back from l, qrginia-Something moved behind me.
I whirled on my heels, the note dropping from my hand. It fluttered to the boards of the back stoop like a larger, whiter version of the moths banging the bulb overhead. In that instant I was sure it would be the shroud-thing, an insane revenant in my wife’s decaying body, Give me my dust-catcher, give it to me, how dare you come down here and disturb my rest, how dam you come to Manderley again, and now that you’re here, how will you ever get away? Into the mystery with you, you silly little man.
Into the mystery with you. Nothing there. It had just been the breeze again, stirring the bushes around a little… except I had felt no breeze against my sweaty skin, not that time. “Well it must have been, there’s nothing there,” I said. The sound of your voice when you’re alone can be either scary or reassuring. That time it was the latter. I bent over, picked up Bill’s note, and stuffed it into my back pocket.
Then I rummaged out my keyring. I stood under the stoop light in the big, swooping shadows of the light-struck moths, picking through my keys until I found the one I wanted.!t had a funny disused look, and as I rubbed my thumb along its serrated edge, I wondered again why I hadn’t come down here-except for a couple of quick broad daylight errands—in all the months and years since Jo had died. Surely if she had been alive, she would have insisted- But then a peculiar realization came to me: it wasn’t just a matter of since Jo died. It was easy to think of it that way—never once during my six weeks on Key Largo had I thought of it any other way—but now, actually standing here in the shadows of the dancing moths (it was like standing under some weird organic disco ball) and listening to the loons out on the lake, I remembered that although Johanna had died in August of 1994, she had died in Derry. It had been miserably hot in the city… so why had we been there? Why hadn’t we been sitting out on our shady deck on the lake side of the house, drinking iced tea in our bathing suits, watching the boats go back and forth and commenting on the form of the various water-skiers? What had she been doing in that damned Rite Aid parking lot to begin with, when during any other August we would have been miles from there? Nor was that all. We usually stayed at Sara until the end of September—it was a peaceful, pretty time, as warm as summer. But in ’93 we’d left with August only a week gone. I knew, because I could remember Johanna going to New York with me later that month, some kind of publishing deal and the usual attendant publicity crap. It had been dog-hot in Manhattan, the hydrants spraying in the East Village and the uptown streets sizzling. On one night of that trip we’d seen The Phantom of the Opera.