Bag of Bones by Stephen King

‘Don’t put me down, Mike, I scared.’

‘I won’t put you down. You’re my good girl.’

‘I scared of the boy and the blue-pants man and the lady. I think it’s the lady who wore Mattie’s dress. Are they ghosties?’

‘Yes.’

‘Are they bad, like the men who chased us at the fair? Are they?’

‘I don’t really know, Ki, and that’s the truth.’

‘But we’ll find out.’

‘Huh?’

‘That’s what you thought. “But we’ll find out. “‘

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I guess that’s what I was thinking. Something like that.’

I took her down to the master bedroom while the water heated in the kettle, thinking there had to be something left of Jo’s I could pop her into, but all of the drawers in Jo’s bureau were empty. So was her side of the closet. I stood Ki on the big double bed where I had not so much as taken a nap since coming back, took off her clothes, carried her into the bathroom, and wrapped her in a bathtowel.

She hugged it around herself, shaking and blue-lipped. I used another one to dry her hair as best I could. During all of this, she never let go of the stuffed dog, which was now beginning to bleed stuffing from its seams.

I opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it, and found what I was looking for on the top shelf: the Benadryl Jo had kept around for her ragweed allergy. I thought of checking the expiration date on the bottom of the box, then almost laughed out loud. What difference did that make? I stood Ki on the closed toilet seat and let her hold on around my neck while I stripped the childproof backing from four of the little pink-and-white caplets. Then I rinsed out the tooth-glass and filled it with cold water. While I was doing this I saw movement in the bathroom mirror, which reflected the doorway and the master bedroom beyond. I told myself that I was only seeing the shadows of windblown trees. I offered the caplets to Ki. She reached for them, then hesitated.

‘Go on,’ I said. ‘It’s medicine.’

‘What kind?’ she asked. Her small hand was still poised over the little cluster of caplets.

‘Sadness medicine,’ I said. ‘Can you swallow pills, Ki?’

‘Sure. I taught myself when I was two.’

She hesitated a moment longer — looking at me and looking into me, I think, ascertaining that I was telling her something I really believed. What she saw or felt must have satisfied her, because she took the caplets and put them in her mouth, one after another. She swallowed them with little birdie-sips from the glass, then said: ‘I still feel sad, Mike.’

‘It takes awhile for them to work.’

I rummaged in my shirt drawer and found an old Harley-Davidson tee that had shrunk. It was still miles too big for her, but when I tied a knot in one side it made a kind of sarong that kept slipping off one of her shoulders. It was almost cute.

I carry a comb in my back pocket. I took it out and combed her hair back from her forehead and her temples. She was starting to look put together again, but there was still something missing.

Something that was connected in my mind with Royce Merrill. That was crazy, though . . . wasn’t it?

‘Mike? What cane? What cane are you thinking about it?’

Then it came to me. ‘A candy cane,’ I said. ‘The kind with stripes.’ From my pocket I took the two white ribbons. Their red edges looked almost raw in the uncertain light. ‘Like these.’ I tied her hair back in two little ponytails. Now she had her ribbons; she had her black dog; the sunflowers had relocated a few feet north, but they were there. Everything was more or less the way it was supposed to be.

Thunder blasted, somewhere close a tree fell, and the lights went out. After five seconds of dark-gray shadows, they came on again. I carried Ki back to the kitchen, and when we passed the cellar door, something laughed behind it. I heard it; Ki did, too. I could see it in her eyes.

‘Take care of me,’ she said. ‘Take care of me cause I’m just a little guy. You promised.’

‘I will.’

‘I love you, Mike.’

‘I love you, too, Ki.’

The kettle was huffing. I filled the cup to the halfway mark with hot water, then topped it up with milk, cooling it off and making it richer. I took Kyra over to the couch. As we passed the dining-

room table I glanced at the IBM typewriter and at the manuscript with the cross-word-puzzle book lying on top of it. Those things looked vaguely foolish and somehow sad, like gadgets that never worked very well and now do not work at all.

Lightning lit up the entire sky, scouring the room with purple light. In that glare the laboring trees looked like screaming fingers, and as the light raced across the sliding glass door to the deck I saw a woman standing behind us, by the woodstove. She was indeed wearing a straw hat, with a brim the size of a cartwheel.

‘What do you mean, the river is almost in the sea?’ Ki asked.

I sat down and handed her the cup. ‘Drink that up.’

‘Why did the men hurt my mommy? Didn’t they want her to have a good time?’

‘I guess not,’ I said. I began to cry. I held her on my lap, wiping away the tears with the backs of my hands.

‘You should have taken some sad-pills, too,’ Ki said. She held out her cocoa. Her hair ribbons, which I had tied in big sloppy bows, bobbed. ‘Here. Drink some.’

I drank some. From the north end of the house came another grinding, crackling crash. The low rumble of the generator stuttered and the house went gray again. Shadows raced across Ki’s small face.

‘Hold on,’ I told her. ‘Try not to be scared. Maybe the lights will come back.’ A moment later they did, although now I could hear a hoarse, uneven note in the gennie’s roar and the flicker of the lights was much more noticeable.

‘Tell me a story,’ she said. ‘Tell me about Cinderbell.’

‘Cinderella.’

‘Yeah, her.’

‘All right, but storyguys get paid.’ I pursed my lips and made sipping sounds.

She held the cup out. The cocoa was sweet and good. The sensation of being watched was heavy and not sweet at all, but let them watch. Let them watch while they could.

‘There was this pretty girl named Cinderella — ‘

‘Once upon a time! That’s how it starts! That’s how they all start!’

‘That’s right, I forgot. Once upon a time there was this pretty girl named Cinderella, who had two mean stepsisters. Their names were . . . do you remember?’

‘Tammy Faye and Vanna.’

‘Yeah, the Queens of Hairspray. And they made Cinderella do all the really unpleasant chores, like sweeping out the fireplace and cleaning up the dogpoop in the back yard. Now it just so happened that the noted rock band Oasis was going to play a gig at the palace, and although all the girls had been invited . . . ‘

I got as far as the part about the fairy godmother catching the mice and turning them into a Mercedes limousine before the Benadryl took effect. It really was a medicine for sadness; when I looked down, Ki was fast asleep in the crook of my arm with her cocoa cup listing radically to port.

I plucked it from her fingers and put it on the coffee-table, then brushed her drying hair off her forehead.

‘Ki?’

Nothing. She’d gone to the land of Noddy-Blinky. It probably helped that her afternoon nap had ended almost before it got started.

I picked her up and carried her down to the north bedroom, her feet bouncing limply in the air and the hem of the Harley shirt flipping around her knees. I put her on the bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Thunder boomed like artillery fire, but she didn’t even stir. Exhaustion, grief,

Benadryl . . . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good. I bent over and kissed her cheek, which had finally begun to cool. ‘I’ll take care of you,’ I said. ‘I promised, and I will.’

As if hearing me, Ki turned on her side, put the hand holding Strickland under her jaw, and made a soft sighing sound. Her lashes were dark soot against her cheeks, in startling contrast to her light hair. Looking at her I felt myself swept by love, shaken by it the way one is shaken by a sickness.

Take care of me, I’m just a little guy.

‘I will, Ki-bird,’ I said.

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