Lisey's Story by Stephen King
"You can't go on a bool hunt when the house is full of great big clutterbugging deputies," she said. "Also . . ."
Also, I believe that Scott's still having his say. Or trying to.
"Honey," she told the empty room, "I only wish I knew what it was."
3
She looked over at the digital clock on the bedside table and was astounded to see it was only twenty to eleven. Already this day seemed a thousand years long, but she suspected that was because she had spent so much of it re-living the past. Memories screwed up perspective, and the most vivid ones could annihilate time completely while they held sway.
But enough about the past; what was happening right now?
Well, Lisey thought, let's see. In the Kingdom of Pittsburgh, the former King of the Incunks is no doubt suffering the sort of terror my late husband used to call Stinky Testicle Syndrome. Deputy Alston's over in Cash Corners, inspecting a little house-fiah. Aaaason suspected, deah. Jim Dooley? Maybe laid up in the woods near here, whittling on a stick with my Oxo can opener in his pocket, waiting for the day to pass. His PT Cruiser could be tucked away in any one of a dozen deserted barns or sheds on the View, or in the Deep Cut, across the Harlow town line. Darla's probably on her way to the Portland Jetport to pick up Canty. Good Ma would say she's gone tooting. And Amanda? Oh, Amanda's gone, babyluv. Just as Scott knew she would, sooner or later. Didn't he do everything but reserve her a smucking room? Because it takes one to know one. As the saying is.
Out loud she said: "Am I supposed to go to Boo'ya Moon? Is that the next station of the bool? It is, isn't it? Scott, you goon, how do I do that with you dead?"
You're getting ahead of yourself again, aren't you?
Sure--carrying on about her inability to reach a place she had as yet not given herself permission to fully remember.
You've got to do a lot more than lift that curtain and peep under the hem.
"I've got to rip it down," she said dismally. "Don't I?"
No answer. Lisey took that for a yes. She rolled over on her side and picked up the silver spade. The inscription winked in the morning sunlight. She wrapped the bloody piece of african around the handle, then took hold of it that way.
"All right," she said, "I'll rip it down. He asked me if I wanted to go, and I said all right. I said Geronimo."
Lisey paused, thinking.
"No. I didn't. I said it his way. I said Geromino. And what happened? What happened then?"
She closed her eyes, saw only brilliant purple, and could have cried for frustration. Instead she thought SOWISA, babyluv: strap on when it seems appropriate, and tightened her grip on the handle of the spade. She saw herself swinging it. She saw it glitter in the hazy August sun. And the purple parted before it, snapping back like skin after a slash, and what it let out wasn't blood but light: amazing orange light that filled her heart and mind with a terrible mixture of joy, terror, and sorrow. No wonder she had repressed this memory all these years. It was too much. Far too much. That light seemed to give the fading air of evening a silken texture, and the cry of a bird struck her ear like a pebble made of glass. A cap of breeze filled her nostrils with a hundred exotic perfumes: frangipani, bougainvillea, dusty roses, and oh dear God, night-blooming cereus. Most of all what pierced her was the memory of his skin on her skin, the beat of his blood running in counterpoint against the beat of her own, for they had been lying naked in their bed at The Antlers and now knelt naked in the purple lupin near the top of the hill, naked in the thickening shadows of the sweetheart trees. And rising above one horizon came the orange mansion of the moon, bloated and burning cold, while the sun sank below the other, boiling in a crimson house of fire. She thought that mixture of furious light would kill her with its beauty.
Lying on her widow's bed with the spade clamped in her hands, a much older Lisey cried out in joy for what was remembered and grief for what was gone. Her heart was mended even as it was broken again. Cords stood out on her neck. Her swollen lips drew down and broke open, exposing her teeth and spilling fresh blood into the gutters of her gums. Tears ran from the corners of her eyes and slipped down her cheeks to her ears, where they hung like exotic jewelry. And the only clear thought in her mind was Oh Scott, we were never made for such beauty, we were never made for such beauty, we should have died then, oh my dear, we should have, naked and in each other's arms, like lovers in a story.
"But we didn't," Lisey murmured. "He held me and said we couldn't stay long because it was getting dark and it wasn't safe after dark, even most of the sweetheart trees turned bad then. But he said there was something he wanted
4
"There's something I want to show you before we go back," he says, and pulls her to her feet.
"Oh, Scott," she hears herself saying, very faint and weak. "Oh, Scott." It seems to be the only thing she can manage. In a way this reminds her of the first time she felt an orgasm approaching, only this is drawn out and drawn out and drawn out, it's like all coming and no arrival.
He's leading her someplace. She feels high grass whispering against her thighs. Then it's gone and she realizes they're on a well-worn path cutting through the drifts of lupin. It leads into what Scott calls the sweetheart trees, and she wonders if there are people here. If there are, how do they stand it? Lisey wonders. She wants to look again at that ascending goblin moon, but doesn't dare.
"Be quiet under the trees," Scott says. "We should be okay a little longer, but better safe than sorry is a good rule to follow even on the edge of the Fairy Forest."
Lisey doesn't think she could talk much above a whisper even if he demanded it. She's doing well to manage Oh, Scott.
He's standing under one of the sweetheart trees now. It looks like a palm, only its trunk is shaggy, green with what looks like fur rather than moss. "God, I hope nothing's knocked it over," he says. "It was okay the last time I was here, the night you were so mad and I put my hand through that dumb greenhouse--ah, okay, there!" He pulls her off the path to the right. And near one of two outlying trees that seem to guard the place where the path slips into the woods, she sees a simple cross made of two boards. To Lisey they look like nothing more than crate-slats. There's no burial mound--if anything, the ground here is slightly sunken--but the cross is enough to tell her it's a grave. On the marker's horizontal arm is one carefully printed word: PAUL.
"The first time I did it in pencil," he says. His voice is clear, but it seems to be coming from far away. "Then I tried a ballpoint, but of course it didn't work, not on rough wood like that. Magic Marker was better, but it faded. Finally I did it in black paint, from one of Paul's old paint-by-the-numbers kits."
She looks at the cross in the strange mixed light of the dying day and the rising night, thinking (as much as she is able to think), All of it's true. What seemed to happen when we came out from under the yum-yum tree really did happen. It's happening now, only longer and clearer.
"Lisey!" He's hectic with joy, and why the hell not? He hasn't been able to share this place with anyone since Paul's death. The few times he's come here, he's had to come alone. To mourn alone. "There's something else--let me show you!"
Somewhere a bell rings, very faint--a bell that sounds familiar. "Scott?"
"What?" He's kneeling in the grass. "What, babyluv?"
"Did you hear . . .?" But it's stopped. And surely that was her imagination. "Nothing. What were you going to show me?" Thinking, As if you haven't shown me enough.
He's sweeping his hands through the high grass near the foot of the cross, but there seems to be nothing there and slowly his goofy, happy smile begins to fade. "Maybe something took i--" he begins, then breaks off. His face tightens in a momentary wince, then relaxes, and he lets loose a half-hysterical laugh. "Here it is, and damn if I didn't think I pricked myself on it, that'd be a joke on me, all right--after all these years!--but the cap's still on! Look, Lisey!"
She would have said nothing could divert her from the wonder of where she is--the red-orange sky in the e
"It was all I had to leave," Scott says. "I didn't have a picture. The kids who went to Donkey School used to get pictures, at least."
"You dug the grave . . . Scott, you dug it with your bare hands?"
"I tried. And I did scoop out a little hollow--the ground here is soft--but the grass . . . pulling out the grass slowed me down . . . tough old weeds, boy . . . and then it started getting dark and the laughers started . . ."
"The laughers?"
"Like hyenas, I think, only mean. They live in the Fairy Forest."
"The Fairy Forest--did Paul name it that?"
"No, me." He gestures to the trees. "Paul and I never saw the laughers up close, mostly just heard them. But we saw other things . . . I saw other things . . . there's this one thing . . ." Scott looks toward the rapidly darkening masses of sweetheart trees, then at the path, which fades away quickly when it enters the forest. There's no mistaking the caution in his voice when he speaks again. "We have to go back soon."
"But you can take us, can't you?"
"With you to help? Sure."
"Then tell me how you buried him."
"I can tell you that when we go back, if you--"
But the slow shake of her head silences him.
"No. I understand about why you don't want to have kids. I get that now. If you ever came to me and said, 'Lisey, I've changed my mind, I want to take the chance,' we could talk about it because there was Paul . . . and then there was you."
"Lisey--"
"We could talk about it then. Otherwise we're never going to talk about gomers and bad-gunky and this place again, okay?" She sees the way he's looking at her and softens her tone. "It's not about you, Scott--not everything is, you know. This happens to be about me. It's beautiful here . . ." She looks around. And she shivers. "It's too beautiful. If I spent too much time here--or even too much time thinking about it--I think the beauty would drive me insane. So if our time is short, for once in your smucking life, you be short. Tell me how you buried him."
Scott half-turns away from her. The orange light of the setting sun paints the line of his body: flange of shoulder-blade, tuck of waist, curve of buttock, the long shallow arc of one thigh. He touches the arm of the cross. In the high grass, barely visible, the glass curve of the hypo glimmers like a forgotten bit of trumpery treasure.
"I covered him with grass, then I went home. I couldn't come back for almos' a week. I was sick. I had a fever. Daddy give me o'meal in the morning and soup when he come home from work. I was ascairt of Paul's ghos, but I never seen his ghos. Then I got better and trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Just me. I thought the aminals--animals--would have ett'n on him--the laughers and such--but they din't yet, so I went back and trite to come over again, this time with a play-shovel I found in our old toybox in the attic. That went and that's what I dug his grave with, Lisey, a red plastic play-shovel we had for the san'box when we 'us very wee."
The sinking sun has started to fade to pink. Lisey puts her arm around him and hugs him. Scott's arms encircle her and for a moment or two he hides his face in her hair. "You loved him so very much," she says.
"He was my brother" is what he replies, and it is enough.
As they stand there in the growing gloom, she sees something else, or thinks she does. Another piece of wood? That's what it looks like, another crate-slat lying just beyond the place where the path leaves the lupin-covered hill (where lavender is now turning a steadily darker purple). No, not just one--two.
Is it another cross, she wonders, one that has fallen apart?
"Scott? Is someone else buried here?"
"Huh?" He sounds surprised. "No! There's a graveyard, sure, but it's not here, it's by the--" He catches sight of what she's looking at and gives a little chuckle. "Oh, wow! That's not a cross, it's a sign! Paul made it right around the time of the first bool hunts, back when he could still come on his own sometimes. I forgot all about that old sign!" He pulls free of her and hurries to where it lies. Hurries a little way down the path. Hurries under the trees. Lisey isn't sure she likes that.
"Scott, it's getting dark. Don't you think we better go?"
"In a minute, babyluv, in just a minute." He picks up one of the boards and brings it back to her. She can make out letters, but they're faint. She has to bring the slat close to her eyes before she can read what's there:
"Pool?" Lisey asks.
"Pool," he agrees. "Rhymes with bool, don't you know." And actually laughs. Only that's when, somewhere deep in what he calls the Fairy Forest (where night has surely come already), the first laughers raise their voices.
Only two or three, but the sound still terrifies Lisey more than anything she has ever heard in her life. To her those things don't sound like hyenas, they sound like people, lunatics cast into the deepest depths of some nineteenth-century Bedlam. She grasps Scott's arm, digging into his skin with her nails, and tells him in a voice she barely recognizes as her own that she wants to go back, he has to take her back right now.
Dim and distant, a bell tinkles.
"Yes," he says, tossing the signboard into the weeds. Above them a dark draft of air stirs the sweetheart trees, making them sigh and give off a perfume that's stronger than the lupin--cloying, almost sickly. "This really isn't a safe place after dark. The pool is safe, and the beach . . . the benches . . . maybe even the graveyard, but--"
More laughers join the chorus. In a matter of moments there are dozens of them. Some of the laughter runs up a jagged scale and turns into broken-glass screams that make Lisey feel like screaming back. Then they descend again, sometimes to guttering chuckles that sound as if they're coming from mud.
"Scott, what are those things?" she whispers. Above his shoulder the moon is a bloated gas balloon. "They don't sound like animals at all."
"I don't know. They run on all fours, but sometimes they . . . never mind. I never saw them close up. Neither of us did."
"Sometimes they what, Scott?"
"Stand up. Like people. Look around. It doesn't matter. What matters is getting back. You want to go back now, right?"
"Yes!"
"Then close your eyes and visualize our room at The Antlers. See it as well as you can. It will help me. It will give us a boost."
She closes her eyes and for one terrible second nothing comes. Then she's able to see how the bureau and the tables flanking the bed swam out of the gloom when the moon fought clear of the clouds and this brings back the wallpaper (rambler roses) and the shape of the bedstead and the comic-opera creak of the springs each time one of them moved. Suddenly the terrifying sound of those things laughing in the
(Forest Fairy Forest)
darkling woods seems to be fading. The smells are fading, too, and part of her is sad to be leaving this place, but mostly what she feels is relief. For her body (of course) and her mind (most certainly), but most of all for her soul, her immortal smucking soul, because maybe people like Scott Landon can jaunt off to places like Boo'ya Moon, but such strangeness and beauty were not made for ordinary folk such as she unless it's between the covers of a book or inside the safe dark of a movie theater.
And I only saw a little, she thinks.
"Good!" he tells her, and Lisey hears both relief and surprised delight in his voice. "Lisey, you're a champ--" at this is how he finishes, but even before he does, before he lets go of her and she opens her eyes, Lisey knows
5
"I knew that we were home," she finished, and opened her eyes. The intensity of her recall was so great that for a moment she expected to see the moonshadowy sti
And then what? Are you going to tell me that after that, after all that, the two of you just rolled over and went to sleep?
That was pretty much what had happened, yes. She'd been anxious to start forgetting all of it, and Scott had been more than willing. It had taken all his courage to bring his past up in the first place, and no wonder. But she had asked him one more question that night, she remembered, and had almost asked another the following day, when they were driving back to Maine, before realizing she didn't have to. The question she'd asked had been about something he'd said just before the laughers started up, scaring all curiosity from her mind. She'd wanted to know what Scott meant when he'd said Back when he could still come on his own sometimes. Meaning Paul.
Scott looked startled. "Been long years since I've thought of that," he said, "but yeah, he could. It was just hard for him, the way hitting a baseball was always hard for me. So mostly he let me do it, and I think after awhile he lost the knack completely."
The question she'd thought to ask in the car was about the pool to which the broken sign had once pointed the way. Was it the one he always spoke about in his lectures? Lisey didn't ask because the answer was, after all, self-evident. His audiences might believe the myth-pool, the language-pool (to which we all go down to drink, to swim, or perhaps to catch a little fish) was figurative; she knew better. There was a real pool. She knew then because she knew him. She knew now because she had been there. You reached it from Sweetheart Hill by taking the path that led into the Fairy Forest; you had to pass both the Bell Tree and the graveyard to get there.
"I went to get him," she whispered, holding the spade. Then she said abruptly, "Oh God I remember the moon," and her body broke out so painfully in gooseflesh that she writhed on the bed.