OBERTA

1

With her hair now all gray, a widow at fifty-eight (but still a birdie-woman who favored flowered print dresses, those things hadn't changed), Duddits's mother sat in front of the television in the ground-floor apartment in West Derry Acres which she and her son now shared. She had sold the house on Maple Lane after Alfie died. She could have afforded to keep it - Alfie had left plenty of money, the life insurance had paid out plenty more, and there was her share of the imported auto-parts company he'd started in 1975 on top of that - but it was too big and there were too many memories above and below the living room where she and Duddits spent most of their time. Above was the bedroom where she and Alfie had slept and talked, made plans and made love. Below was the rec room where Duddits and his friends had spent so many afternoons and evenings. In Roberta's view they had been friends sent from heaven, angels with kind hearts and dirty mouths who had actually expected her to believe that when Duddits started saying fut, he was trying to say Fudd, which, they explained earnestly, was the name of Pete's new puppy - Elmer Fudd, just Fudd for short. And of course she had pretended to believe this.

Too many memories, too many ghosts of happier times. And then, of course, Duddits had gotten sick. Two years now he'd been sick, and none of his old friends knew because they didn't come around anymore and she hadn't had the heart to pick up the phone and call Beaver, who would have called the others.

Now she sat in front of the TV, where the local-news folks had finally given up just breaking into her afternoon stories and had gone on the air full-time. Roberta listened, afraid of what might be happening up north but fascinated, too. The scariest part was that no one seemed to know exactly what was happening or just what the story was or how big it was. There were missing hunters, maybe as many as a dozen, in a remote area of Maine a hundred and fifty miles north of Derry. That part was clear enough. Roberta wasn't positive, but she was quite sure that the reporters were talking about Jefferson Tract, where the boys used to go hunting, coming back with bloody stories that both fascinated Duddits and frightened him.

Were those hunters just cut off by an Alberta Clipper storm that had passed through, dropping six or eight inches of snow on the area? Maybe. No one could say for sure, but one party of four that had been hunting in the Kineo area really did seem to be missing. Their pictures were flashed on the screen, their names recited solemnly: Otis, Roper, McCarthy, Shue. The last was a woman.

Missing hunters weren't big enough to warrant interrupting the afternoon soaps, but there was other stuff, too. People had glimpsed strange, varicolored lights in the sky. Two hunters from Millinocket who had been in the Kineo area two days previous claimed to have seen a cigar-shaped object hovering over a powerline-cut in the woods. There had been no rotors on the craft, they said, and no visible means of propulsion. It simply hung there about twenty feet above the powerlines, emitting a deep hum that buzzed in your bones. And in your teeth, it seemed. Both of the hunters claimed to have lost teeth, although when they opened their mouths to display the gaps, Roberta had thought the rest of their teeth looked ready to fall out, as well. The hunters had been in an old Chevy pickup, and when they tried to drive closer for a better look, their engine had died. One of the men had a battery - powered watch that had run backward for about three hours following the event and had then quit for good (the other's watch, the old-fashioned wind-up kind, had been fine). According to the reporter, a number of other hunters and area residents had been seeing unidentified flying objects - some cigar-shaped, some of the more traditional saucer shape - for the last week or so. The military slang for such an outbreak of sightings, the reporter said, was a 'flap'.

Missing hunters, UFOS. Juicy, and certainly good enough to lead with on Live at Six ('Local! Late-breaking! Your Town and Our State!'), but now there was more. There was worse. Still only rumors, to be sure, and Roberta prayed they would prove to be untrue, but creepy enough to have kept her here for almost two hours now, drinking too much coffee and growing more and more nervous.

The scariest rumors clustered around reports that something had crash-landed in the woods, not far from where the men had reported the cigar-shaped craft hovering over the powerlines. Almost as disquieting were reports that a fairly large area of Aroostook County, perhaps two hundred square miles mostly owned by the paper companies or the government, had been quarantined.

A tall, pale man with deep-set eyes spoke briefly to reporters at the Air National Guard base in Bangor (he stood in front of a sign which proclaimed HOME OF THE MANIACS) and said that none of the rumors were true, but that 'a number of conflicting reports' were being checked. The super beneath him read Simply ABRAHAM KURTZ. Roberta couldn't tell what his rank was, or indeed if he was really a military man at all. He was dressed in a simple green coverall with nothing on it but a zipper. If he was cold - you would have thought so, wearing nothing but that coverall - he didn't show it. There was something in his eyes, which were very large and fringed with white lashes, that Roberta didn't much like. They looked to her like liar's eyes.

'Can you at least confirm that the downed aircraft is neither foreign nor . . . nor extraterrestrial in origin?' a reporter asked. He sounded young.

'ET phone home,' Kurtz said, and laughed. There was laughter from most of the other reporters as well, and no one except Roberta, watching the clip here in her West Derry Acres apartment, seemed to realize that was not an answer at all.

'Can you confirm that there is no quarantine in the area of the Jefferson Tract?' another reporter asked.

'I can neither confirm nor deny that at this time,' Kurtz said. 'We're taking this matter quite seriously. Your government dollars are working very hard today, ladies and gentlemen.' He then walked away toward a helicopter with slowly turning rotors and ANG, printed on the side in big white letters.

That clip had been videotaped at 9:45 A.M., according to the news anchor. The next clip - shaky footage from a hand-held video camera - had been taken from a Cessna chartered by Channel 9 News to overfly the Jefferson Tract. The air had obviously been bumpy and there was a lot of snow, but not enough to obscure the two helicopters which had appeared and flanked the Cessna on either side like big brown dragonflies. There was a radio transmission, so blurry that Roberta needed to read the transcript printed in yellow at the bottom of the TV screen: 'This area is interdicted. You are ordered to turn back to your point of flight origination. Repeat, this area is interdicted. Turn back.'

Did interdicted mean the same as quarantined? Roberta Cavell thought it probably did, although she also thought fellows like that man Kurtz might quibble. The letters on the flanking helicopters were clearly visible: ANG. One of them might have been the very one that took Abraham Kurtz north.

Cessna pilot: 'Under whose orders is this operation being carried out?'

Radio: 'Turn back, Cessna, or you will be forced to turn back.' The Cessna had turned back. It had been low on fuel anyway, the news anchor reported, as if that explained everything. Since then they had just been rehashing the same stuff and calling it updates. The major networks supposedly had correspondents en route.

She was getting up to turn the TV off - watching had begun to make her nervous - when Duddits screamed. Roberta's heart stopped in her chest, then jackrabbited into doubletime. She whirled around, bumping the table by the La-Z-Boy which had been Alfie's and was now hers, overturning her coffee cup. It soaked the TV Guide, drowning the cast of The Sopranos in a puddle of brown.

The scream was followed by high, hysterical sobbing, the sobs of a child. But that was the thing about Duddits - he was in his thirties now, but he would die a child, and long before he turned forty.

For a moment all she could do was stand still. At last she got moving, wishing that Alfie were here . . . or even better, one of the boys. Not that any of them were boys now, of course; only Duddits was still a boy; Down's syndrome had turned him into Peter Pan, and soon he would die in Never-Never Land.

'I'm coming, Duddie!' she called, and so she was, but she felt old to herself as she went hurrying down the hall to the back bedroom, her heart banging leakily against her ribs, arthritis pinging her hips. No Never Land for her.

'Coming, Mummy's coming!'

Sobbing and sobbing, as if his heart had broken. He had cried out the first time he realized his gums were bleeding after he brushed his teeth, but he had never screamed and it had been years since he'd cried like this, the kind of wild sobbing that got into your head and tore at your brains. Thump and hum, thump and hum, thump and hum.

'Duddie, what is it?'

She burst into his room and looked at him, wide-eyed, so convinced he must be hemorrhaging that at first she actually saw blood. But there was only Duddits, rocking back and forth in his crank-up hospital bed, cheeks wet with tears. His eyes were that same old brilliant green, but the rest of his color was gone. His hair was gone, too, his lovely blond hair that had reminded her of the young Art Garfunkel. The faint winterlight coming in through the window gleamed on his skull, gleamed on the bottles ranked on the bedside table (pills for infection, pills for pain, but no pills that would stop what was happening to him, or even slow it down), gleamed on the IV pole standing in front of the table.

But there was nothing wrong that she could see. Nothing that would account for the almost grotesque expression of pain on his face.

She sat down beside him, captured the restlessly whipping head and held it to her bosom. Even now, in his agitation, his skin was cool; his exhausted, dying blood could bring no heat to his face. She remembered reading Dracula long ago, back in high school, the pleasurable terror that had been quite a bit less pleasurable once she was in bed, the lights out, her room filled with shadows. She remembered being very glad there were no real vampires, except now she knew different. There was at least one, and it was far more terrifying than any Transylvanian count; its name wasn't Dracula but leukemia, and there was no stake you could put through its heart.

'Duddits, Duddie, honey, what is it?'

And he screamed it out as he lay against her breast, making her forget all about what might or might not be happening up in the Jefferson Tract, freezing her scalp to her skull and making her

skin crawl and horripilate. 'Eeyer-eh! Eeeyer-eh! Oh Amma, Eeeyer-eh!' There was no need to ask him to say it again or to say it more clearly; she had been listening to him her whole life, and she knew well enough:

Beaver's dead! Beaver's dead! Oh, Mamma, Beaver's dead!