Kineo Town Manager: 'I Don't Know What They 24 page

He hated being in this position.

'Who's Duddits, Jonesy?'

No answer.

'Who is Richie? Why was he a shit? Why did you kill him?'

'We didn't!'

A little tremble in the mental voice. Ah, that shot had gone home. And something interesting: Mr Gray had meant 'you' in the singular, but Jonesy had taken it in the plural.

'You did, though. Or you think you did.'

'That's a lie.'

'How silly of you to say so. I have the memories, right here in one of your boxes. There's snow in the box. Snow and a moccasin. Brown suede. Come out and look.'

For one giddy second he thought Jonesy might do just that. If he did, Mr Gray would sweep him back to the hospital at once. Jonesy could see himself die on television. A happy ending to the movie they had been watching. And then, no more Mr Gray. just what Jonesy thought of as 'the cloud'.

Mr Gray looked eagerly at the doorknob, willing it to turn. It didn't.

'Come out.'

Nothing.

'You killed Richie, you coward! You and your friends. You . . . you dreamed him to death.' And although Mr Gray didn't know what dreams were, he knew that was true. Or that Jonesy believed it was.

Nothing.

'Come out! Come out and. . .'He searched Jonesy's memories. Many of them were in boxes called MOVIES, Jonesy seemed to love movies above all things, and Mr Gray plucked what he thought a par­ticularly potent line from one of these: ' . . . and fight like a man!'

Nothing.

You bastard, Mr Gray thought, once more dipping into the enticing pool of his host's emotions. You son of a bitch. You stubborn asshole. Kiss my bender, you stubborn asshole.

Back in the days when Jonesy had been Jonesy, he had often expressed anger by slamming his fist down on something. Mr Gray did it now, bringing Jonesy's fist down on the center of the truck's wheel hard enough to honk the horn. 'Tell me! Not about Richie, not about Duddits, about you! Something makes you different. I want to know what it is.'

No answer.

'It's in the crib — is that it?'

Still no answer, but Mr Gray heard Jonesy's feet shuffle behind the door. And perhaps a low intake of breath. Mr Gray smiled with Jonesy's mouth.

'Talk to me, Jonesy — we'll play the game, we'll pass the time. Who was Richie, besides Number 19? Why were you angry with him? Because he was a Tiger? A Derry Tiger? What were they? Who's Duddits?'

Nothing.

The truck crept more slowly than ever through the storm, the headlights almost helpless against the swirling wall of white. Mr Gray's voice was low, coaxing.

'You missed one of the Duddits-boxes, buddy, did you know that? There's a box inside the box, as it happens — it's yellow. There are Scooby-Doos on it. What are Scooby-Doos? They're not real people, are they? Are they movies? Are they televisions? Do you want the box? Come out, Jonesy. Come out and I'll give you the box.'

Mr Gray removed his foot from the gas pedal and let the truck coast slowly to the left, over into the thicker snow. Something was happening here, and he wanted to turn all his attention to it. Force had not dislodged Jonesy from his stronghold . . . but force wasn't the only way to win a battle, or a war.

The truck stood idling by the guardrails in what was now a full-fledged blizzard. Mr Gray closed his eyes. Immediately he was in Jonesy's brightly lit memory storehouse. Behind him were miles of stacked boxes, marching away under the fluorescent tubes. In front of him was the closed door, shabby and dirty and for some reason very, very strong. Mr Gray placed his three-fingered hands on it and began to speak in a low voice that was both intimate and urgent.

'Who is Duddits? Why did you call him after you killed Richie? Let me in, we need to talk. Why did you take some of the Derry boxes? What did you not want me to see? It doesn't matter, I have what I need, let me in, Jonesy, better now than later.'

It was going to work. He sensed Jonesy's blank eyes, could see Jonesy's hand moving toward the knob and the lock.

'We always win,' Mr Gray said. He sat behind the wheel with Jonesy's eyes closed, and in another universe the wind screamed and rocked the truck on its springs. 'Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.'

Silence. And then, from less than three inches away and as surprising as a basinful of cold water dashed on warm skin: 'Eat shit and die.'

Mr Gray recoiled so violently that the back of Jonesy's head connected with the truck's rear window. The pain was sudden and shocking, a second unpleasant surprise.

He slammed a fist down again, then the other, then the first once more; he was hammering on the wheel, the horn beating out a Morse code of rage. A largely emotionless creature and part of a largely emotionless species, he had been hijacked by his host's emotional juices — not just dipping in them this time but bathing. And again he sensed this was only happening because Jonesy was still there, an unquiet tumor in what should have been a serene and focused consciousness.

Mr Gray hammered on the wheel, hating this emotional ejacu­lation — what Jonesy's mind identified as a tantrum — but loving it, too. Loving the sound of the horn when he hit it with Jonesy's fists, loving the beat of Jonesy's blood in Jonesy's temples, loving the way Jonesy's heart sped up and the sound of Jonesy's hoarse voice crying 'You fuckhead! You fuckhead!' over and over and over.

And even in the midst of this rage, a cold part of him realized what the true danger was. They always came, they always made the worlds they visited over in their image. It was the way things had always been, and the way they were meant to be.

But now . . .

Something's happening to me, Mr Gray thought, aware even as the thought came that it was essentially a 'Jonesy' thought. I'm starting to be human.

The fact that the idea was not without its attractions filled Mr Gray with horror.

Jonesy came out of a doze where the only sound was the soothing, lulling rhythm of Mr Gray's voice, and saw that his hands were resting on the locks of the office door, ready to turn the lower and draw the bolt on the upper. The son of a bitch was trying to hypnotize him, and doing a pretty good job of it.

'We always win,' said the voice on the other side of the door. It was soothing, which was nice after such a stressful day, but it was also vilely complacent. The usurper who would not rest until he had it all . . . who took getting it all as a given. 'Open the door, Jonesy, open it now.'

For a moment he almost did it, He was awake again, but he almost did it anyway. Then he remembered two sounds: the tenebrous creak of Pete's skull as the red stuff tightened on it, and the wet squittering Janas's eye had made when the tip of the pen pierced it.

Jonesy realized he hadn't been awake at all, not really. But now he was.

Now he was.

Dropping his hands away from the lock and putting his lips to the door, he said 'Eat shit and die' in his clearest voice. He felt Mr Gray recoil. He even felt the pain when Mr Gray thumped back against the window, and why not? They were his nerves, after all. Not to mention his head. Few things in his life gave him so much pleasure as Mr Gray's outraged surprise, and he vaguely realized what Mr Gray already knew: the alien presence in his head was more human now.

If you could come back as a physical entity, would you still be Mr Gray? Jonesy wondered. He didn't think so. Mr Pink, maybe, but not Mr Gray.

He didn't know if the guy would try his Monsieur Mesmer routine again, but Jonesy decided to take no chances. He turned and went to the office window, tripping over one of the boxes and stepping over the rest. Christ, but his hip hurt. It was crazy to feel such pain when you were imprisoned in your own head (which, Henry had once assured him, had no nerves anyway, at least not once you got into the old gray matter), but the pain was there, all right. He had read that amputees sometimes felt horrible agonies and unscratchable itches in limbs that no longer existed; probably this was the same deal.

The window had returned to a tiresome view of the weedy, double-rutted driveway which had run alongside the Tracker Brothers depot back in 1978. The sky was white and overcast; apparently when his window looked into the past, time was frozen at midafternoon. The only thing the view had to recommend it was that, as he stood here taking it in, Jonesy was as far from Mr Gray as he could possibly get.

He guessed that he could change the view, if he really wanted to; could look out and see what Mr Gray was currently seeing with the eyes of Gary Jones. He had no urge to do that, however. There was nothing to look at but the snowstorm, nothing to feel but Mr Gray's stolen rage.

Think of something else, he told himself.

What?

I don't know — anything. Why not—

On the desk the telephone rang, and that was odd on an Alice in Wonderland scale, because a few minutes ago there had been no telephone in this room, and no desk for it to sit on. The litter of old used rubbers had disappeared. The floor was still dirty, but the dust on the tiles was gone. Apparently there was some sort of Janitor inside his head, a neatnik who had decided Jonesy was going to be here for awhile and so the place ought to be at least tolerably clean. He found the concept awesome, the implications depressing.

On the desk, the phone shrilled again. Jonesy picked up the receiver and said, 'Hello?'

Beaver's voice sent a sick and horrible chill down his back. A telephone call from a dead man — it was the stuff of the movies he liked. Had liked, anyway.

'His head was off, Jonesy. It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.'

There was a click, then dead silence. Jonesy hung up the phone and walked back to the window. The driveway was gone. Derry was gone. He was looking at Hole in the Wall under a pale clear early-morning sky. The roof was black instead of green, which meant this was Hole in the Wall as it had been before 1982, when the four of them, then strapping high-school boys (well, Henry had never been what you'd call strapping), had helped Beav's Dad put up the green shingles the camp still wore.

Only Jonesy needed no such landmark to know what time it was. No more than he needed someone to tell him the green shingles were no more, Hole in the Wall was no more, Henry had burned it to the ground. In a moment the door would open and Beaver would run out. It was 1978, the year all this had really started, and in a moment Beaver would run out, wearing only his boxer shorts and his many-zippered motorcycle jacket, the orange bandannas fluttering. It was 1978, they were young . . . and they had changed. No more same shit, different day. This was the day when they began to realize just how much they had changed.

Jonesy stared out the window, fascinated.

The door opened.

Beaver Clarendon, age fourteen, ran out.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

HENRY AND OWEN

Henry watched Underhill trudge toward him in the glare of the security lights. Underhill's head was bent against the snow and the intensifying wind. Henry opened his mouth to call out, but before he could, he was overwhelmed, nearly flattened, by a sense of Jonesy. And then a memory came, blotting out Underhill and this brightly lit, snowy world completely. All at once it was 1978 again, not October but November and there was blood, blood on cattails, broken glass in marshy water, and then the bang of the door.

Henry awakes from a terrible confused dream — blood, broken glass, the rich smells of gasoline and burning rubber — to the sound of a banging door and a blast of cold air. He sits up and sees Pete sitting up beside him, Pete's hairless chest covered with goosebumps. Henry and Pete are on the floor in their sleeping—bags because they lost the four—way toss. Beav and Jonesy got the bed Oater there will be a third bedroom at Hole in the Wall, but now there are only two and Lamar has one all to himself, by the divine right of adulthood), only now Jonesy is alone in the bed, also sitting up, also looking confused and frightened.

Scooby-ooby-Doo, where are you, Henry thinks for no appreci­able reason as he gropes for his glasses on the windowsill. In his nose he can still smell gas and burning tires. We got some work to do now—

'Crashed,' Jonesy says thickly, and throws back the covers. His chest is bare, but like Henry and Pete, he wore his socks and longjohn bottoms to bed.

'Yeah, went in the water,' Pete says, his face suggesting he doesn't have the slightest idea what he's talking about. 'Henry, you got his shoe—'

'Moccasin—'Henry says, but he hasn't any idea what he's talking about either. Nor wants to.

'Beav,' Jonesy says, and gets out of bed in a clumsy lunge. One of his stocking-clad feet comes down on Pete's hand.

'Ow!' Pete cries. 'Ya stepped on me, ya fuckin gomer, watch where you're—'

'Shut up, shut up,' Henry says, grabbing Pete's shoulder and giving it a shake. 'Don't wake up Mr Clarendon!'

Which would be easy, because the door of the boys' bedroom is open. So is the door on the far side of the big central room, the one to the outside. No wonder they're cold, there's a hell of a draft. Now that Henry has his eyes back on (that is how he thinks of it), he can see the dreamcatcher out there dancing in the cold November breeze coming in through the open door.

'Where's Duddits?' Jonesy asks in a dazed, I'm-still-dreaming voice. 'Did he go out with Beaver?'

'He's back in Derry, foolish,' Henry says, getting up and pulling on his thermal undershirt. And he doesn't feel that Jonesy is foolish, not really; he also has a sense that Duddits was just here with them.

It was the dream, he thinks. Duddits was in the dream. He was sitting on the bank. He was crying. He was so. He didn't mean to. If anyone meant to, it was us.

And there is still crying. He can hear it, coming in through the front door, carried on the breeze. It's not Duddits, though; it's the Beav.

They leave the room in a line, pulling on scraps of clothes as they go, not bothering with their shoes, which would take too long.

One good thing — judging from the tin city of beer-cans on the kitchen table (plus a suburb of same on the coffee-table), it'll take more than a couple of open doors and some whispering kids to wake up Beaver's Dad.

The big granite doorstep is freezing under Henry's stocking feet, cold in the deep thoughtless way death must be cold, but he barely notices.

He sees the Beaver right away. He's at the foot of the maple tree with the deer-stand in it, on his knees as if praying. His legs and feet are bare, Henry sees. He's wearing his motorcycle jacket, and tied up and down its arms, fluttering like pirate's finery, are the orange bandannas his father made his son wear when Beaver insisted on wearing such a damned foolish unhunterly thing in the woods. The outfit looks pretty funny, but there's nothing funny about that agonized face tilted up toward the maple's nearly bare branches. The Beav's cheeks are streaming with tears.

Henry breaks into a run. Pete and Jonesy follow suit, their breath puffing white in the chill morning air. The needle-strewn ground under Henry's feet is almost as hard and cold as the granite doorstep.

He drops to his knees beside Beaver, scared and somehow awed by those tears. Because the Beav isn't just misting up, like the hero of a movie who may be allowed to shed a manly drop or two when his dog or his girlfriend dies; Beav is running like Niagara Falls. From his nose hang two ropes of clear glistening snot. You never saw stuff like that in the movies.

'Gross,' Pete says.

Henry looks at him impatiently, but then he sees Pete isn't looking at Beaver but past him, at a steaming puddle of vomit. In it are kernels of last night's corn (Lamar Clarendon believes passionately in the virtues of canned food when it comes to camp cooking) and strings of last night's fried chicken. Henry's stomach takes a big unhappy lurch. And just as it starts to settle, Jonesy yarks. The sound is like a big liquid belch. The puke is brown.

'Gross!' Pete almost screams it this time.

Beaver doesn't seem to even notice. 'Henry!' he says. His eyes, submerged beneath twin lenses of tears, are huge and spooky. They seem to peer past Henry's face and into the supposedly private rooms behind his forehead.

'Beav, it's okay. You had a bad dream.'

'Sure, a bad dream.' Jonesy's voice is thick, his throat still plated with puke. He tries to clear it with a thick ratching noise that is somehow worse than what just came out of him, then bends over and spits. His hands are planted on the legs of his longhandles, and his bare back is covered with bumps.

Beav takes no notice of Jonesy, nor of Pete as Pete kneels down on his other side and puts a clumsy, tentative arm around Beav's shoulders. Beav continues to look only at Henry.

'His head was off,' Beaver whispers.

Jonesy also drops to his knees, and now all three of them are surrounding the Beav, Henry and Pete to either side, Jonesy in front. There is vomit on Jonesy's chin. He reaches to wipe it away, but Beaver takes his hand before he can. The boys kneel beneath the maple, and suddenly they are all one. It is brief, this sense of union, but as vivid as their dream. It is the dream, but now they are all awake, the sensation is rational, and they cannot disbelieve.

Now it is Jonesy the Beav is looking at with his spooky swimming eyes. Clutching Jonesy's hand.

'It was laying in the ditch and his eyes were full of mud.'

'Yeah,' Jonesy whispers in an awed and shaky voice. 'Oh jeez, it was.'

'Said he'd see us again, remember?' Pete asks. 'One at a time or all together. He said that.'

Henry hears these things from a great distance, because he's back in the dream. Back at the scene of the accident. At the bottom of a trash—littered embankment where there is a soggy piece of marsh, created by a blocked drainage culvert. He knows the place, it's on Route 7, the old Derry-Newport Road. Lying overturned in the muck and the murk is a burning car. The air stinks of gas and burning tires. Duddits is crying. Duddits is sitting halfway down the trashy slope and holding his yellow Scooby-Doo lunchbox against his chest and crying his eyes out.

A hand protrudes from one of the windows of the overturned car. It's slim, the nails painted candy-apple red. The car's other two occupants have been thrown clear, one of them almost thirty damn feet. This one's facedown, but Henry still recognizes him by the masses of soaked blond hair. It's Duncan, the one who said you're not gonna tell anyone anything, because you'll be fuckin dead. Only Duncan's the one who wound up dead.

Something floats against Henry's shin. 'Don't pick that up!' Pete says urgently, but Henry does. It's a brown suede moccasin. He has just time to register this, and then Beaver and Jonesy shriek in terrible childish harmony. They are standing together, ankle-deep in the muck, both of them wearing their hunting clothes: Jonesy in his new bright orange parka, bought special from Sears for this trip (and Mrs Jones still tearfully, unpersuadably convinced that her son win be killed in the woods by a hunter's bullet, cut down in his prime), Beaver in his tattered motorcycle jacket (What a lot of zippers! Duddie's Mom had said admiringly, thus winning Beaver's love and admiration forever) with the orange bandannas tied up and down the arms. They aren't looking at the third body, the one lying just outside the driver's door, but Henry does, just for a moment (still holding the moccasin, like a small waterlogged canoe, in his hands), because something is terribly, fundamentally wrong with it, so wrong that for a moment he cannot tell what it might be. Then he realizes that there's nothing above the collar of the corpse's high-school jacket. Beaver and Jonesy are screaming because they have seen what should have been above it. They have seen Richie Grenadeau's head lying faceup, glaring at the sky from a blood-spattered stand of cattails. Henry knows it's Richie at once. Even though the swatch of tape no longer rides the bridge of his nose, there is no mistaking the guy who was trying to feed Duddits a piece of shit that day behind Tracker's.

Duds is up there on the bank, crying and crying, that crying that gets into your head like a sinus headache, and if it goes on it will drive Henry mad. He drops the moc and slogs around the back of the burning car to where Beaver and Jonesy stand with their arms around each other.

'Beaver! Beav!' Henry shouts, but until he reaches out and gives Beaver a hard shake, Beaver just continues to stare at the severed head, as if hypnotized.

Finally, though, Beaver looks at him. 'His head's off,' he says, as if this were not evident. 'Henry, his head's—'

'Never mind his head, take care of Duddits! Make him stop that goddam crying!'

'Yeah,' Pete says. He looks at Richie's head, that final dead glare, then looks away, mouth twitching. 'It's drivin me fuckin bugshit.'

'Like chalk on a chalkboard,' Jonesy mutters. Above his new orange parka, his skin is the color of old cheese. 'Make him stop, Beav.'

'H—H—H—'

'Don't be a dweeb, sing him the fuckin song!' Henry shouts. He can feel mucky water oozing up between his toes. 'The lullaby, the goddam lullaby!'

For a moment the Beav looks as though he still doesn't understand, but then his eyes clear a little and he says 'Oh!' He goes slogging toward the embankment where Duddits sits, clutching his bright yellow lunchbox and howling as he did on the day they met him. Henry sees something that he barely has time to notice: there is blood caked around Duddits's nostrils, and there's a bandage on his left shoulder. Something is poking out of it, something that looks like white plastic.

'Duddits,' the Beav says, climbing the embankment. 'Duddle, honey, don't. Don't cry no more, don't look at it no more, it's not for you to look at, it's so fuckin gross . . .'

At first Duddits takes no notice, just goes on howling. Henry thinks, He cried himself into a nosebleed and that's the blood part, but what's that white thing sticking out of his shoulder?

Jonesy has actually raised his hands to cover his ears. Pete has got one of his on top of his head, as if to keep it from blowing off. Then Beaver takes Duddits in his arms, just as he did a few weeks earlier, and be ins to sing in that high clear voice that you'd never think could come out of a scrub like the Beav.

'Baby's boat's a silver dream, sailing near and far . . .'

And oh miracle of blessed miracles, Duddits begins to quiet.

Speaking from the comer of his mouth, Pete says: 'Where are we, Henry? Where the fuck are we?'

'In a dream,' Henry says, and all at once the four of them are back under the maple tree at Hole in the Wall, kneeling together in their underwear and shivering in the cold.

'What?' Jonesy says. He pulls free to wipe at his mouth, and when the contact among them breaks, reality comes all the way back. 'What did you say, Henry?'

Henry feels the withdrawal of their minds, actually feels it, and he thinks, We weren't meant to be like this, none of us. Sometimes being alone is better.

Yes, alone. Alone with your thoughts.

'I had a bad dream,' Beaver says. He seems to be explaining this to himself rather than to the rest of them. Slowly, as if he were still dreaming, he unzips one of his jacket pockets, rummages around inside, and comes out with a Tootsie Pop. Instead of unwrapping it, Beaver puts the stick end in his mouth and be ins to roll it back and forth, nipping and gnawing lightly. 'I dreamed that—'

'Never mind,' Henry says, and pushes his glasses up on his nose. 'We all know what you dreamed.' We ought to, we were there trembles on his lips, but he keeps it inside. He's only fourteen, but wise enough to know that what is said cannot be unsaid. When it's laid, it's played they say when they're playing rummy or Crazy Eights and someone makes a goofy-ass discard. If he says it, they'll have to deal with it. If he doesn't, then maybe . . . just maybe it'll go away.

'I don't think it was your dream, anyhow,' Pete says. 'I think it was Duddits's dream and we all—'

'I don't give a shit what you think,' Jonesy says, his voice so harsh that it startles them all. 'It was a dream, and I'm going to forget it. We're all going to forget it, aren't we, Henry?'

Henry nods at once.

'Let's go back in,' Pete says. He looks vastly relieved. 'My feet're fre—

'One thing, though,' Henry says, and they all look at him nervously. Because when they need a leader, Henry is it. And if you don't like the way I do it, he thinks resentfully, someone else can do it. Because this is no tit job, believe me.

'What?' Beaver asks, meaning What now?

'When we go into Gosselin's later on, someone's got to call Duds. In case he's upset.'

No one replies to this, all of them awed to silence by the idea of calling their new retardo friend on the phone. It occurs to Henry that Duddits has likely never received a phone call in his life; this will be his first.

'You know, that's probably right,' Pete agrees and then slaps his hand over his mouth like someone who has said something incriminating.

Beaver, naked except for his dopey boxers and his even dopier jacket, is now shivering violently. The Tootsie Pop jitters at the end of its gnawed stick.

'Someday you'll choke on one of those things,' Henry tells him.

'Yeah, that's what my Mom says. Can we go in? I'm freezing.' They start back toward Hole in the Wall, where their friendship will end twenty-three years from this very day.

'Is Richie Grenadeau really dead, do you think?' Beaver asks.

'I don't know and I don't care,' Jonesy says. He looks at Henry. 'We'll call Duddits, okay — I've got a phone and we can bill the charges to my number.'

'Your own phone,' Pete says. 'You lucky duck. Your folks spoil you fuckin rotten, Gary.'

Calling him Gary usually gets under his skin, but not this morning — Jonesy is too preoccupied. 'It was for my birthday and I have to pay the long-distance out of my allowance, so let's keep it short. And after that, this never happened — never happened, you got that?'

And they all nod. Never happened. Never fucking hap—

A gust of wind pushed Henry forward, almost into the electrified compound fence. He came back to himself, shaking off the memory like a heavy coat. It couldn't have come at a more inconvenient time (of course, the time for some memories was never convenient). He had been waiting for Underhill, freezing his katookis off and waiting for his only chance to get out of here, and Underhill could have walked right by him while he stood daydreaming, leaving him up shit creek without a paddle.

Only Underhill hadn't gone past. He was standing on the other side of the fence, hands in his pockets, looking at Henry. Snowflakes landed on the transparent, buglike bulb of the mask he wore, were melted by the warmth of his breath, and ran down its surface like . . .

Like Beaver's tears that day, Henry thought.

'You ought to go in the barn with the rest of them,' Underhill said. 'You'll turn into a snowman out here.'

Henry's tongue was stuck to the roof of his mouth. His life quite literally depended on what he said to this man, and he could think of no way to get started. Couldn't even loosen his tongue.

And why bother? the voice inside inquired — the voice of darkness, his old friend. Really and truly, why bother? Why not just let them do what you were going to do to yourself, anyway?

Because it wasn't just him anymore. Yet he still couldn't speak.

Underhill stood where he was a moment longer, looking at him. Hands in pockets. Hood thrown back to expose his short dark-blond hair. Snow melting on the mask the soldiers wore and the detainees did not, because the detainees would not be needing them; for the detainees, as for the grayboys, there was a final solution.

Henry struggled to speak and could not, could not. Ah God, it should have been Jonesy here, not him; Jonesy had always been better with his mouth. Underhill was going to walk away, leaving him with a lot of could-have-beens and might-have-beens.

But Underhill stayed a moment longer.

'I'm not surprised you knew my name, Mr . . . Henreld? Is your name Henreid?'

'Devlin. It's my first name you're picking up. I'm Henry Devlin.' Moving very carefully, Henry thrust his hand through the gap between a strand of barbed wire and one of electrified smoothwire. After Underhill did nothing but look at it expression­lessly for five seconds or so, Henry pulled his hand back to his part of the newly drawn world, feeling foolish and telling himself not to be such an idiot, it wasn't as if he'd been snubbed at a cocktail party.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 560