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.
The moon. Yes, that. A bloody orange hophead moon, so suddenly different from the northern lights and the killing cold she had just left behind her. It had been sexy summer-crazy, that moon, darkly delicious, lighting the stone cleft of valley near the pool better than she might have wished. She could see it now almost as well as then because she had cut through the purple curtain, had ripped it most righteously, but memory was only memory and Lisey had an idea hers had taken her almost as far as it could. A little more, maybe - another picture or two from her own personal booksnake - but not much, and then she would actually have to go back there, to Boo'ya Moon.
The question was, could she?
Then another question occurred to her: What if he's one of the shrouded ones now?
For an instant, an image struggled to come clear in Lisey's mind. She saw scores of silent figures that might have been corpses wrapped in old-fashioned winding sheets. Only they were sitting up. And she thought they were breathing.
A shudder rolled through her. It hurt her lacerated breast in spite of the Vicodin she had on board, but there was no way to stop that shudder until it had run its course. When it had, she found herself able to face practical considerations again. The foremost was whether she could get over to that other world on her own...because she had to go, shrouded ones or not.
Scott had been able to do it on his own, and had been able to take his brother Paul. As an adult he had been able to take Lisey from The Antlers. The crucial question was what had happened seventeen years later, on that cold January night in 1996.
"He wasn't entirely gone, " she murmured. "He squeezed my hand." Yes, and the thought had crossed her mind that somewhere he might have been squeezing with every ounce of his force and being, but did that mean he had taken her?
"I yelled at him, too." Lisey actually smiled. "Told him if he wanted to come home he had to take me to where he was...and I always thought he did..."
Bullshit, little Lisey, you never thought about it at all. Did you? Not until today, when you almost literally got your tit in the wringer and had to. So if you're thinking about it, really think about it. Did he pull you to him that night? Did he?
She was on the verge of concluding it was one of those questions, like the chicken-oregg thing, to which there was no satisfactory answer, when she remembered his saying Lisey, you're a champ at this!
Say she had done it by herself in 1996. Even so, Scott had been alive, and that squeeze of his hand, feeble as it had been, was enough to tell her he was there on the other side, making a conduit for her -
"It's still there," she said. She was gripping the handle of the shovel again. "That way through is still there, it must be, because he prepared for all of this. Left me a smucking bool hunt to get me ready. Then, yesterday morning, in bed with Amanda...that was you, Scott, I know it was. You said I had a blood-bool coming...and a prize...a drink, you said...and you called me babyluv. So where are you now? Where are you when I need you to get me over?"
No answer but the ticking of the clock on the wall.
Close your eyes. He'd said that, too. Visualize. See as well as you can. It will help. Lisey, you're a champ at this.
"I better be," she told the empty, sunny, Scottless bedroom. "Oh honey, I just better be."
If Scott Landon had had a fatal flaw, it might have been thinking too much, but that had never been her problem. If she had stopped to consider the situation on that hot day in Nashville, Scott almost certainly would have died. Instead she had simply acted, and saved his life with the shovel she now held.
I trite to come here with Daddy's shovel from the shed, but it wouldn't go. Would the silver spade from Nashville go?
Chapter 18
Lisey thought yes. And that was good. She wanted to keep it with her. "Friends to the end," she whispered, and closed her eyes.
She was summoning her memories of Boo'ya Moon, now vivid indeed, when a disturbing question broke her deepening concentration: another troublesome thought to divert her.
What time is it there, little Lisey? Oh, not the hour, I don't mean that, but is it daytime or nighttime? Scott always knew - he said he did, anyway - but you're not Scott. No, but she remembered one of his favorite rock 'n roll tunes: "Night Time Is the Right Time." In Boo'ya Moon, nighttime was the wrong time, when smells turned rotten and food could poison you. Nighttime was when the laughers came out - things that ran on all fours but sometimes stood up like people and looked around. And there were other things, worse things.