Hugh and the Dooze Man trudged through the house-high snow, destination unknown, at least so far, at least to the Doozer. Hugh, presumably, knew where he was going. It seemed to Dewey that they had been walking a long time without covering much ground, but that was likely due to the agonizingly slow pace of the proceedings, which were hampered a lot by the fact that Dewey kept sinking in the snow up to his waist and Hugh kept having to turn around and help pull him out. It wasn’t the kind of thing he’d had in mind on all the winter days in Mount Pleasant when he sat looking out the window and wishing for snow instead of rain. Right now, he’d go for rain any day. Little harmless drops of rain.
“You hanging in there all right?” Hugh called over his shoulder. He was walking in front of Dewey and when he took his wool cap off a burst of steam rose into the cold air from his sweaty bald head. Nice as Hugh was, he was not the sort of person Dewey would be hanging around with if his father was here.
“I’m okay,” Dewey said, but then thought better of it. “Actually, I’m soaking wet all the way past my waist,” he said. He wanted Hugh to know that he was potentially going to freeze to death if they didn’t head back to the diner soon. He had no gloves, but at least he’d remembered to wear his hat, so his ears were pretty warm, but the bottom half of him felt like it could be chipped away with an ice pick.
Hugh stopped and turned to him, his breath wafting up in a huge cloud, almost purple in the fading light. “Do you want to ride on my shoulders?”
It would be nice to ride on someone’s shoulders right now, thought the Dooze Man, but not Hugh’s. If you rode on Hugh’s shoulders, where would you have to put your hands if you didn’t want to fall off? Answer: On his sweaty bald head. “No, thank you,” Dewey said. “Where are we going again?”
“It’s just up here,” Hugh said, forging ahead. From behind, he resembled a large troll. “You’ll see.”
Dewey’s left foot sank deep into the snow with his next step and he grabbed the back of Hugh’s coat to haul himself forward. “Why did your mom and dad come here?”
Hugh barely even lifted his legs to go through the snow. He just plowed through it like a horse. You could hang on to the back of his coat like reins. “It was only my mom and my sister and me,” Hugh said. “I never knew my dad. He never came around.”
“Oh,” Dewey said, because he didn’t know what else to say.
“Yeah,” Hugh said, which somehow made sense.
“What was your sister’s name?” Dewey asked.
“What is my sister’s name, do you mean?” Hugh said. “She’s still here, same as me. Her name’s Stephanie. The two of us are souvenirs. That’s what they call the kids who get left behind.”
“Why would they call them that?” Dewey said. “Why would you call a person a souvenir?”
Hugh plowed ahead faster, forgetting he had to wait for Dewey to catch up. “That’s just how these people are,” he said. “It’s just their way of letting you know you’re not like them, that you don’t belong. Like you’re some trinket that got left behind when the people at Travelers Rest disappeared.” Hugh’s knees jerked up and down and his legs drove ahead. He was getting almost out of earshot. “It’s just because they don’t want to admit they’re afraid.”
“Hold up,” Dewey shouted.
Hugh turned around. “Jeez, buddy, come on,” he said. “I don’t have all day.” Dewey plodded up and got behind him again. “Grab on to my coat and let me pull you,” Hugh said.
They went along for a while without saying anything, and while Dewey stared at Hugh’s wide back and big shoulders he tried to imagine him as a kid, at the time he would have first come here.
Hugh’s story, most of which he’d told Dewey before they left the diner, would have made no sense at all if pretty much the same thing wasn’t happening to Dewey. The story went like this. Hugh and his younger sister and his mother had stayed at the hotel and the next morning his mother disappeared. This was in the summer, and the temperature in the town had stayed at well over a hundred degrees every day. Even in the morning there was almost no relief from the heat, which was so dry, Hugh said, that it made your eyes feel like sandpaper. He was afraid of the hotel, so he slept in a park by the creek. He saw his mother walking through the park, more than once, and then on the third day the weather turned cooler and the air rushed upward like a lid had been taken off the sky, and there was a popping sound, like your ears popping, almost, and then he never saw his mother again. And now here he was, a grown man who owned a diner. It seemed like a magical transformation.
They had turned off the main street and onto a short road that led to some snow-covered steps and a handrail that resembled a long, white caterpillar. So much snow had swept across the steps that you couldn’t really tell where to put your feet, and Hugh had to pull himself up by the handrail while Dewey held on to his waist from behind. Hugh was breathing so hard that Dewey thought he might explode. He should probably get some more exercise, Hugh, and maybe eat something besides the food at the diner, which was tasty but probably not what Dewey’s mother would refer to as “heart smart.”
“I don’t really know why my mother came here,” Hugh said, catching his breath after they’d reached the top of the stairs. “The only thing I remember her saying before she pulled off the highway was that she wanted to take pictures. It was like she already decided she wanted to take pictures before she even saw any of the things she could take pictures of.” He leaned over and grabbed his knees and groaned once and then started walking again. “Anything else you’d have to ask my sister,” he said.
They were up on a hill and there were a lot of snowy bushes and evergreens and you could hear the snow hiss into them and you could look back to Main Street and see the snow sweep across the streetlights. There were the top floors of the hotel, not as far away as you might think, considering all the walking. The town was actually kind of pretty when you stood here and viewed it this way, from this angle, if you didn’t think about it being evil and creepy and how if you ever found your mom and dad you were going to get the hell out of here and never come back to the state of Idaho again—if you didn’t think about any of that, then the view was sort of peaceful. But Hugh pulled on Dewey’s coat sleeve and pointed him toward a huge rock wall that was closed off, for some reason, by a heavy iron door or gate cut into the cliff face. Cold as he was, Dewey found this wall and this door fascinating, and he felt himself creeping dangerously toward that place in his head where he went to be all alone, where he wouldn’t hear Hugh anymore or know that time was passing. To keep himself from going there he reached out and grabbed Hugh’s arm, squeezed the rough material of his coat sleeve.
“It’s the entrance to the mine,” Hugh said. Very gently he took Dewey’s hand off his arm and he stepped forward and brushed away the snow from an inscription above the entrance.
“Is that where you’re taking me?” Dewey asked. He could see himself following Hugh into the pitch-dark hole, no flashlight or anything, feeling his way along the rocks, the noises echoing everywhere, water dripping down from the cave ceiling. Still dangerously close to zoning out here. When you’d done nothing for four days but sit in a lonely, cold hotel room missing your parents, Dewey thought, your brain probably got overstimulated easily.
“Shit,” Hugh said, and then apologized. “There’s not enough money in the world. You couldn’t pay me enough to go in there.” He reached out and pulled on the door. “Anyway, see? It’s locked.” He wiped the last of the snow from the inscription above the doorframe. “There’s a reason they closed this up, bud. Here, look at this.”
Dewey waded forward through the snow. His face felt hot and cold at the same time from all the walking, and his nose was running. The engraving was like something he would have done in kindergarten—the uneven lettering, the simple phrase—except that it was carved in stone: “All Our Dreams Are True,” it said.
Dewey wiped his nose on his sleeve, which he knew was pretty gross, but who was there that cared. “That’s stupid,” he said.
“I guess,” Hugh said. “Sort of.”
“It doesn’t even say it right,” Dewey said. “It’s come true.”
Hugh wrapped his arms across his chest. “I don’t think the guy who owned the mine knew English very good,” he said. He unwrapped his arms and took off his gloves and put his hands up to his face and then put the gloves on again. “But that’s not exactly the point I was trying to make.”
Yes, Dewey thought, it would be nice, after all the walking and the sweating and the freezing, after being soaked from head to toe with the snow that fell from overhead, constantly, and the snow that kept piling up on the ground, constantly, if there was a point. That would be nice. Regardless, the idea of that mine was like an itch inside his skin. It was hard to think about anything else, especially now that it dawned on him—“like a light breaking through the clouds,” as it would say in a book—that he had seen this place before, on the weird TV. It was this place, this dark, open mouth, that the lights moved in and out of. Scary close, really scary close now to getting sucked in, so he bent down and cupped his hands in the snow and packed a snowball as quick as he could because it stung, a good sting that did what he wanted it to do, which was get his mind back inside his body—but wow, he could sure use some gloves about now. He could sure use Hugh’s gloves about now, but apparently Hugh wasn’t used to thinking about what kids needed, and Dewey didn’t think it was his place to tell him. He took good aim and, with the same fluid motion he used to throw out runners on ground balls to short, pegged the snowball at Hugh and hit him square in the ass.
“Ow, man!” Hugh said. “What the hey?” He turned to Dewey with a momentary expression of outrage. “That hurt, little dude.” He rubbed his butt. “You got an arm on you.”
“I play shortstop,” Dewey said. He put his hands back in his coat pockets, which didn’t help much because the pockets were wet. Next time he left the hotel, he’d have to substitute the sweater for the coat, so it could dry.
“Do you want to know about your parents or not?” Hugh said, looking at him earnestly.
Yes and no. Yes and no. There stood this big guy with the stubbly hair and the oversized jacket with grease stains. It was pretty ridiculous that he had to listen to this guy, who he’d only known for like four days, tell him anything about his parents, with whom he’d spent his entire life. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair. He looked up at the sky, where it was getting dark again, another day gone, and he felt the snowflakes on his face but he couldn’t see them.
“Hey, Dewey, I’m sorry,” Hugh said. “Come here.”
He shuffled over to Hugh and his shoulders drooped and Hugh picked him up around the waist, and together they examined the inscription.
“All our dreams are true,” Hugh said, almost under his breath. In some little corner of Dewey’s brain the concept was already taking hold—dreams are true, dreams are true. In this strange place, what did that mean?
“The reason I brought you here,” Hugh said, “was to show you this is where the first event occurred.”
Then there was a story about an explosion in the mine and a guy named Diamond and while Hugh continued to talk Dewey’s thoughts went, finally, where they wanted to go, which was down into that hole where Hugh was telling him the first disaster had occurred. He could imagine it, the hole pulling him in while he felt dreamier and dreamier, farther and farther away, in a cold and unreachable place. He could feel the hole throbbing in time with his breath, and in the darkening sky he saw the same pulse in the snow clouds overhead.
Then he looked back at the gate, barely visible now. A terrible thought had occurred to him. “Are my mom and dad in there?” he said, and took a step toward the entrance, but Hugh put a firm grip on his arm.
“No,” Hugh said. “No.” He let go of Dewey’s arm and patted him on the shoulder. “This place has been closed off since before you and I were born. It’s the hotel where things happen now. But this was the first place.”
“I don’t get it,” Dewey said. “What does the mine have to do with the hotel? Why’d you bring me out here?”
Hugh laughed. “Have you been down the stairs underneath the hotel?”
“No,” Dewey said. “Why would I go underneath the hotel?”
“Exactly,” Hugh said. “I wouldn’t either. Smart man. But if you did, you’d see pretty quick how things are around here. Everything in this entire town is connected. There are shafts in this mine that run right down under the streets.” He nodded his head toward the mine entrance. “Something went wrong in there and it ruined the whole place.”
None of it made any sense, of course, but Dewey had noticed how sometimes things that didn’t make any sense turned out to be true. And while his father would certainly make that little snorting laugh under his breath at what Hugh was suggesting, and call it superstition, and remind Dewey of the myriad ways in which cultures from the most primitive to the most modern assuaged their fears of death and cosmic aloneness, his father wasn’t here now and in fact had seemed to disappear in the very way that Hugh was suggesting, and so if Dewey wanted to get his mom and his dad back he might have to deviate somewhat from his dad’s way of thinking, because while it was always logical, maybe it wasn’t always right.
“So what is it? The thing that happens to people,” Dewey said. “You bring me out here in the snow to some mine shaft I can’t even go into and you tell me some story and then you expect me to stop believing in the laws of physics, like all the things I learned in third grade science class.” Right away he regretted saying this because, as his mother was always pointing out to people, he was a very nice kid with an enviable disposition, and he really didn’t like hurting people’s feelings. “Can we maybe just go back to the diner and get some hot chocolate? It’s really cold,” he said. “Can’t you tell me the rest on the way?”
“Sure,” Hugh said. “Let’s go back.” But he stood there gazing at something down the other side of the hill, and Dewey all of a sudden sensed, once again, what Hugh was thinking—he was thinking about his mother. He nodded toward something in the near distance that Dewey couldn’t see. “That’s where I saw my mother,” he said, and pointed. “The creek is right through those trees.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out his wool hat and put it back on his head. “Let’s go,” he said. Dewey took one last look at the heavy gate that hid the opening. Then they went back to the steps and down the hill.
When they reached the edge of town, Hugh stopped under the first streetlight and pointed toward the hotel, which was still a ways away, a lot farther than Dewey wanted it to be.
“You see your mother in the window, right? You see her there.”
Dewey nodded glumly.
“And you see your father. But when you go to them, they’re not there.”
Dewey nodded again.
“The way I feel about it, that means they have to be here somewhere,” Hugh said. “They have to be.” He started walking again, kind of agitated, it seemed, and Dewey followed a step or two behind. “I’ve always thought that, no matter what anyone says,” Hugh said, as if he were arguing with someone who wasn’t there. They got to the next streetlight and Hugh stopped again. Dewey wished he would quit doing that. “Have you ever sat in the bathtub and checked out your feet underwater?” Hugh said.
Dewey sighed, somewhat inaudibly, he hoped. Of course he had looked at his feet underwater in the bathtub. Hugh wanted to tell him something about perception. “I take showers,” Dewey said.
“All right,” Hugh said. “But you know what I mean.”
“Your feet look bigger or they look smaller or they look like they’re bent in the middle. Yeah.” Dewey started to walk again, just to hurry Hugh along. “It depends on the angle of perception.”
“Yes,” Hugh said, “perception.” He sounded like he’d made an extraordinary scientific discovery, like when Dewey’s dad used to go “Eureka,” only it was a joke, because he would have discovered something like, for instance, that Dewey had remembered to put down the toilet seat. “So which perception is real, then?” Hugh persisted. “The one where you see your mom right there in front of you? The one where she disappears? The one where you try to follow your dad but he can’t hear you all of a sudden? Or what about the perceptions they have when you can’t see them but you know they’re still there?”
Dewey took a deep breath. “That would be, like, anyone when you weren’t with them. They wouldn’t have to be vanished to go on having perceptions when you’re not there.”
Hugh didn’t say anything for a while. They passed beneath two streetlights before he stopped again. They were about halfway between the end of town and the hotel. The snow was blowing down in huge sheets now, the wind whipping down the street about twice as hard as when they left the diner, like the blizzard was gaining in intensity instead of slowing down. Dewey couldn’t feel anything below his knees. “Can we please just go inside?” he asked.
“Sorry, sorry,” Hugh said, and started walking again, pushing through the snow briskly this time.
The diner came into sight up ahead across the street from the hotel. Dewey took his hands out of his coat pockets and blew on them and put them back in his pockets.
“Here,” Hugh said, “take these.” He took off his gloves and tried to hand them to Dewey.
Dewey glanced up the street. The diner was about half a block away. They’d be there in two minutes. They’d left over an hour ago. “No, thanks,” he said.
Hugh shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. “I’d think you’d be cold by now.”
They walked the rest of the way in silence, but right when they got outside the door, right when Dewey could almost feel the heat coming from inside the building, something made him stop. “I still don’t get it, though,” he said. “Who gets drawn here?” He could see Lorraine serving a plate of roast beef and mashed potatoes to an old guy wearing suspenders. She’d be upset they were gone so long. The teenager who cooked with Hugh in the kitchen wasn’t all that great, even when they hardly had any orders to fill. “We didn’t even know about this place. We just ended up here on accident.”
Hugh was fixated on the window, his eyes not moving, and Dewey knew he was thinking about his mother again. “I’m not exactly sure,” Hugh said, “but I think it’s people who are trying to remember something, or maybe they want to change something they regret.”
Dewey wondered if this was what he looked like when he had one of his episodes. Hugh was like a blind man who was also drunk and standing there with his eyes open. He wobbled back and forth like he was going to fall asleep. Then he raised his eyebrows slightly, just the tiniest amount. “Or maybe there’s just a certain type of person who’s more susceptible,” he said, and he breathed quietly in and out, so that the words seemed to go up into the air like the thinnest trail of smoke. “My mother was always dreamy.”
“And you really never saw her again?”
“I saw her the same way you’ve been seeing your mother. Does that count?” Hugh nodded in little tiny jerks and chewed on his bottom lip. Dewey realized something kind of scary, which was that Hugh was about to cry himself, a big guy like that.
“I hope it does,” Dewey said.
“Right,” Hugh said. “Hope it does. That’s good.” Dewey made a move to go inside but Hugh held him back gently by the shoulder and looked at him real hard. Dewey could feel the cold all over him for a second, rushing from his head down into his legs, and he started to shake. Hugh took hold of both his shoulders. “Listen to me now, Dewey.” Dewey shook so hard he thought he would shake right out of his clothes, but he did his best to pay attention. “You’ve been a really big boy about this, a real tough little guy. But this is going to get hard. If there’s a way to find your mother and your father and your uncle, we’ve got to do it fast. Because it usually only takes a day or two before people disappear for good. It’s been four days already.”
“Good!” Dewey said. He was crying now. It was hopeless to try to hide it. His nose was running all over the place. “Whatever happens, let’s just go ahead and get it over with. I don’t want to be in this creepy town. I don’t want to be a stupid ‘souvenir.’”
“Don’t say that,” Hugh said. “Don’t say that.”
“Why?” Dewey said. “What difference does it make?”
“It’s not always just the grown-ups,” Hugh said, and he pulled Dewey close to him. Dewey could feel Hugh shaking inside his coat and hear his voice tremble. “Sometimes the little kids disappear.”