Read Online Dreamcatcher by Stephen King - Free Book Online Page B

a smell on his breath—something like bananas. It reminded Jonesy of the ether he’d sprayed into the carburetor of his first car, a Vietnam-era Ford, to get it to crank over on cold mornings.
    â€œGet you inside, right?”
    â€œYeah. C-Cold. Thank God you came along. Is this—”
    â€œMy place? No, a friend’s.” Jonesy opened the varnished oak door and helped the man over the threshold. The stranger gasped at the feel of the warm air, and a flush began to rise in his cheeks. Jonesy was relieved to see there was some blood in him, after all.
    6
    Hole in the Wall was pretty grand by deep-woods standards. You came in on the single big downstairs room—kitchen, dining room, and living room, all inone—but there were two bedrooms behind it and another upstairs, under the single eave. The big room was filled with the scent of pine and its mellow, varnished glow. There was a Navajo rug on the floor and a Micmac hanging on one wall which depicted brave little stick-hunters surrounding an enormous bear. A plain oak table, long enough to accommodate eight places, defined the dining area. There was a woodstove in the kitchen and a fireplace in the living area; when both were going, the place made you feel stupid with the heat even if it was twenty below outside. The west wall was all window, giving a view of the long, steep slope which fell off to the west. There had been a fire there in the seventies, and the dead trees stood black and twisted in the thickening snow. Jonesy, Pete, Henry, and the Beav called this slope The Gulch, because that’s what the Beav’s Dad and his friends had called it.
    â€œOh God, thank God, and thank you, too,” the man in the orange hat said to Jonesy, and when Jonesy grinned—that was a lot of thank-you’s—the man laughed shrilly as if to say yes, he knew it, it was a funny thing to say but he couldn’t help it. He began to take deep breaths, for a few moments looking like one of those exercise gurus you saw on high-number cable. On every exhale, he talked.
    â€œGod, I really thought I was done-for last night . . . it was so cold . . . and the damp air, I remember that . . . remember thinking Oh boy, oh dear, what if there’s snow coming after all . . . I got coughing and couldn’t stop . . . something came and I thought I have to stop coughing, if that’s a bear or something I’ll . . . you know. . . provoke it or something . . . only I couldn’t and after awhile it just . . . you know, went away on its own—”
    â€œYou saw a bear in the night?” Jonesy was both fascinated and appalled. He had heard there were bears up here—Old Man Gosselin and his pickle-barrel buddies at the store loved to tell bear stories, particularly to the out-of-staters—but the idea that this man, lost and on his own, had been menaced by one in the night was keenly horrible. It was like hearing a sailor talk about a sea monster.
    â€œI don’t know that it was,” the man said, and suddenly shot Jonesy a sideward look of cunning that Jonesy didn’t like and couldn’t read. “I can’t say for sure, by then there was no more lightning.”
    â€œLightning, too? Man!” If not for the guy’s obviously genuine distress, Jonesy would have wondered if he wasn’t getting his leg pulled. In truth, he wondered it a little, anyway.
    â€œDry lightning, I guess,” the man said. Jonesy could almost see him shrugging it off. He scratched at the red place on his cheek, which might have been a touch of frostbite. “See it in winter, it means there’s a storm on the way.”
    â€œAnd you saw this? Last night?”
    â€œI guess so.” The man gave him another quick, sideways glance, but this time Jonesy saw no slyness in it, and guessed he had seen none before. He saw only exhaustion.