"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 stillness of the bedroom they'd shared for two nights in New Hampshire twenty-seven years ago. She had been gripping the silver spade so tightly that she had to will her fingers open, one by one. She laid the yellow delight square - blood-crusted but comforting - back on her breast.
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?