Free Dreamcatcher by Stephen King Page A

hands clasped between his knees. His jeans had the sausagey look they get when there are longjohns underneath, and still he shook and shivered. But the heat had brought on an absolute flood of color; instead of looking like a corpse, the stranger now looked like a diphtheria victim.
    Pete and Henry were doubling in the bigger of the two downstairs bedrooms. Jonesy ducked in, opened the cedar chest to the left of the door, and pulled out one of the two down comforters folded up inside. As he recrossed the living room to where the man sat shivering on the couch, Jonesy realized he hadn’t asked the most elementary question of all, the one even six-year-olds who couldn’t get their own zippers down asked.
    As he spread the comforter over the stranger onthe outsized camp couch, he said: “What’s your name?” And realized he almost knew. McCoy? McCann?
    The man Jonesy had almost shot looked up at him, at once pulling the comforter up around his neck. The brown patches under his eyes were filling in purple.
    â€œMcCarthy,” he said. “Richard McCarthy.” His hand, surprisingly plump and white without its glove, crept out from beneath the coverlet like a shy animal. “You are?”
    â€œGary Jones,” he said, and took the hand with the one which had almost pulled the trigger. “Folks mostly call me Jonesy.”
    â€œThanks, Jonesy.” McCarthy looked at him earnestly. “I think you saved my life.”
    â€œOh, I don’t know about that,” Jonesy said. He looked at that red patch again. Frostbite, just a small patch. Frostbite, had to be.

CHAPTER TWO

T HE B EAV
    1
    â€œYou know I can’t call anyone, don’t you?” Jonesy said. “The phone lines don’t come anywhere near here. There’s a genny for the electric, but that’s all.”
    McCarthy, only his head showing above the comforter, nodded. “I was hearing the generator, but you know how it is when you’re lost—noises are funny. Sometimes the sound seems to be coming from your left or your right, then you’d swear it’s behind you and you better turn back.”
    Jonesy nodded, although he did not, in fact, know how it was. Unless you counted the week or so immediately after his accident, time he had spent wandering in a fog of drugs and pain, he had never been lost.
    â€œI’m trying to think what’d be the best thing,” Jonesy said. “I guess when Pete and Henry get back, we better take you out. How many in your party?”
    It seemed McCarthy had to think. That, added to the unsteady way he had been walking, solidified Jonesy’s impression that the man was in shock. He wondered that one night lost in the woods would do that; he wondered if it would do it to him.
    â€œFour,” McCarthy said, after that minute to think. “Just like you guys. We were hunting in pairs. I was with a friend of mine, Steve Otis. He’s a lawyer like me, down in Skowhegan. We’re all from Skowhegan, you know, and this week for us . . . it’s a big deal.”
    Jonesy nodded, smiling. “Yeah. Same here.”
    â€œAnyway, I guess I just wandered off.” He shook his head. “I don’t know, I was hearing Steve over on my right, sometimes seeing his vest through the trees, and then I . . . I just don’t know. I got thinking about stuff, I guess—one thing the woods are great for is thinking about stuff—and then I was on my own. I guess I tried to backtrack but then it got dark . . .” He shook his head yet again. “It’s all mixed up in my mind, but yeah—there were four of us, I guess that’s one thing I’m sure of. Me and Steve and Nat Roper and Nat’s sister, Becky.”
    â€œThey must be worried sick.”
    McCarthy looked first startled, then apprehensive. This was clearly a new idea for him. “Yeah, they must be. Of course they are. Oh dear, oh