back to bed, where he slept until the middle of the afternoon.
The storm was still pounding away when he got up the second time, but Drew didn’t care. He felt almost like himself again. He wanted a sandwich—there was bologna and cheese—and then he wanted to go to work. Sheriff Averill was about to fool the gun thugs with his big abracadabra, and now that Drew felt rested and well, he couldn’t wait to write it.
Halfway down the stairs, he noticed that the toybox by the fireplace was lying on its side with the toys that had been inside spilling out onto the rag rug. Drew thought he must have kicked it over on his sleepwalk to bed the previous night. He went to it and knelt, meaning to put the toys back in the box before starting work. He had the Frisbee in one hand and the old Stretch Armstrong in the other, when he froze. Lying on its side near Stacey’s topless Barbie doll was a stuffed rat.
Drew felt his pulse throbbing in his head as he picked it up, so maybe he wasn’t completely well, after all. He squeezed the rat and it gave a tired squeak. Just a toy, but sort of creepy, all things considered. Who gave their kid a stuffed rat to sleep with, when there was a perfectly good teddy bear (only one eye, but still) in the same box?
No accounting for tastes, he thought, and finished his mother’s old maxim out loud: “Said the old maid as she kissed the cow.”
Maybe he’d seen the stuffed rat at the height of his fever and it had kicked off the dream. Make that probably, or almost certainly. That he couldn’t remember searching all the way to the bottom of the toybox didn’t signify; hell, he couldn’t even remember taking off his clothes and going to bed.
He piled the toys back into the box, made himself a cup of tea, and went to work. He was doubtful at first, hesitant, a little scared, but after a few initial missteps, he caught hold and wrote until it was too dark to see without using the lantern. Nine pages, and he thought they were good.
Damn good.
24
It wasn’t a three-day blow; Pierre actually lasted four. Sometimes the wind and rain slackened and then the storm would crank up again. Sometimes a tree fell, but none as close as the one that had smashed the shed. That part hadn’t been a dream; he’d seen it with his own eyes. And although the tree—a huge old pine—had largely spared his Suburban, it had fallen close enough to tear off the passenger side mirror.
Drew barely noticed these things. He wrote, he ate, he slept in the afternoon, he wrote again. Every now and then he had a sneezing fit, and every now and then he thought about Lucy and the kids, anxiously waiting for some word. Mostly he didn’t think about them. That was selfish and he knew it and didn’t care. He was living in Bitter River now.
Every now and then he had to pause for the right word to come to him (like messages floating up in the window of the Magic 8 Ball he’d had as a kid), and every now and then he had to get up and walk around the room as he tried to think of how to make a smooth transition from one scene to the next, but there was no panic. No frustration. He knew the words would come, and they did. He was hitting from all over the court, hitting from way downtown. He wrote on Pop’s old portable now, pounding the keys til his fingers hurt. He didn’t care about that, either. He had carried this book, this idea that had come to him out of nowhere while standing on a street corner; now it was carrying him.
What a fine ride it was.
25
They sat in the dank cellar with no light but the kerosene lantern the sheriff had found upstairs, Jim Averill on one side and Andy Prescott on the other. In the lantern’s reddish-orange light, the kid looked no older than fourteen. He certainly didn’t look like the half-drunk, half-mad young tough who had blown off that girl’s head. Averill thought that evil was a very strange thing. Strange, and sly. It found a way in, as a rat finds its way into a house, it ate whatever you had been too stupid or lazy to put away, and when