Bag of Bones by Stephen King

‘mischievous’ is the word I want) hand groped me for a moment in a place where no one other than myself had groped in almost three and a half years. It was a shock, but not an entirely unpleasant one.

It went no further — in a houseful of Arlens and with Susy Donahue not quite officially divorced yet (like me, she was an honorary Arlen that Christmas), it hardly could have done — but I decided it was time to leave . . . unless, that was, I wanted to go driving at high speed down a narrow street that most likely ended in a brick wall. I left on the twenty-seventh, very glad that I had come, and I gave Frank a fierce goodbye hug as we stood by my car. For four days I hadn’t thought at all about how there was now only dust in my safe-deposit box at Fidelity Union, and for four nights I had slept straight through until eight in the morning, sometimes waking up with a sour stomach and a hangover headache, but never once in the middle of the night with the thought Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley going through my mind. I got back to Derry feeling refreshed and renewed.

The first day of 1998 dawned clear and cold and still and beautiful. I got up, showered, then stood at the bedroom window, drinking coffee. It suddenly occurred to me — with all the simple, powerful reality of ideas like up is over your head and down is under your feet — that I could write

now. It was a new year, something had changed, and I could write now if I wanted to. The rock had rolled away.

I went into the study, sat down at the computer, and turned it on. My heart was beating normally, there was no sweat on my forehead or the back of my neck, and my hands were warm. I pulled down the main menu, the one you get when you click on the apple, and there was my Word Six. I clicked on it. The pen-and-parchment logo came up, and when it did I suddenly couldn’t breathe. It was as if iron bands had clamped around my chest. I pushed back from the desk, gagging and clawing at the round neck of the sweatshirt I was wearing. The wheels of my office chair caught on little throw rug — one of Jo’s finds in the last year of her life — and I tipped right over backward.

My head banged the floor and I saw a fountain of bright sparks go whizzing across my field of vision. I suppose I was lucky to black out, but I think my real luck on New Year’s Morning of 1998

was that I tipped over the way I did. If I’d only pushed back from the desk so that I was still looking at the logo — and at the hideous blank screen followed it — I think I might have choked to death.

‘When I staggered to my feet, I was at least able to breathe. My throat the size of a straw, and each inhale made a weird screaming sound, but I was breathing. I lurched into the bathroom and threw up in the basin with such force that vomit splashed the mirror. I grayed out and my knees buckled. This time it was my brow I struck, thunking it against the lip of the basin, and although the back of my head didn’t bleed there was a very respectable lump there by noon, though), my forehead did, a little. This latter bump also left a purple mark, which I of course lied about, telling folks who asked that I’d run into the bathroom door in the middle of the night, silly me, that’ll teach a fella to get up at two A.M. without turning on a lamp.

,’When I regained complete consciousness (if there is such a state), I was curled up on the floor. I got up, disinfected the cut on my forehead, and sat on the lip of the tub with my head lowered to my knees until I felt confident enough to stand up. I sat there for fifteen minutes, I guess, and in that space of time I decided that barring some miracle, my career was over. Harold would scream in pain and Debra would moan in disbelief, but what could they do? Send out the Publication Police?

me with the Book-of-the-Month-Club Gestapo? Even if they could, what difference would it make?

You couldn’t get sap out of a brick or blood out of a stone. Barring some miraculous recovery, my life as a writer was over.

And if it is? I asked myself. What’s on for the back forty, Mike? You can play a lot of Scrabble in forty years, go on a lot of Crossword Cruises, drink a lot of whiskey. But is that enough? What else are you going to put on your back forty?

I didn’t want to think about that, not then. The next forty years could take care of themselves; I would be happy just to get through New Year’s Day of 1998.

When I felt I had myself under control, I went back into my study, shuffled to the computer with my eyes resolutely on my feet, felt around for the right button, and turned off the machine. You can damage the program shutting down like that without putting it away, but under the circumstances, I hardly thought it mattered.

That night I once again dreamed I was walking at twilight on Lane Forty-two, which leads to Sara Laughs; once more I wished on the evening star as the loons cried on the lake, and once more I sensed something in the woods behind me, edging ever closer. It seemed my Christmas holiday was over.

That was a hard, cold winter, lots of snow and in February a flu epidemic that did for an awful lot of Derry’s old folks. It took them the way a hard wind will take old trees after an ice storm. It missed me completely. I hadn’t so much as a case of the sniffles that winter.

In March, I flew to Providence and took part in Will Weng’s New England Crossword Challenge.

I placed fourth and won fifty bucks. I framed the uncashed check and hung it in the living room.

Once upon a time, most of my framed Certificates of Triumph (Jo’s phrase; all the good phrases are Jo’s phrases, it seems to me) went up on my office walls, but by March of 1998, I wasn’t going in there very much. When I wanted to play Scrabble against the computer or do a tourney-level crossword puzzle, I used the Powerbook and sat at the kitchen table.

I remember sitting there one day, opening the Powerbook’s main menu, going down to the crossword puzzles, then dropping the cursor two or three items further, until it had highlighted my old pal, Word Six.

What swept over me then wasn’t frustration or impotent, balked fury (I’d experienced a lot of both since finishing All the Way from the Top), but sadness and simple longing. Looking at the Word Six icon was suddenly like looking at the pictures of Jo I kept in my wallet. Studying those, I’d sometimes think that I would sell my immortal soul in order have her back again . . . and on that day in March, I thought I would sell my soul to be able to write a story again.

Go on and try it, then, a voice whispered. Maybe things have changed.

Except that nothing had changed, and I knew it. So instead of opening Word Six, I moved it across to the trash barrel in the lower righthand corner of the screen, and dropped it in. Goodbye, old pal.

Weinstock called a lot that winter, mostly with good news. Early in March she reported that Helen’s Promise had been picked as one half of the Literary Guild’s main selection for August, the other half a legal thriller by Steve Martini, another veteran of the eight-to-fifteen segment of the Times bestseller list. And my British publisher, Debra, loved Helen, was sure it would be my

‘breakthrough book.’ (My British sales had always lagged.)

‘ Promise is sort of a new direction for you,’ Debra said. ‘Wouldn’t you say?’

‘I kind of thought it was,’ I confessed, and wondered how Debbie respond if I told her my new-direction book had been written a dozen years ago.

‘It’s got . . . I don’t know . . . a kind of maturity.’

‘Thanks.’

‘Mike? I think the connection’s going. You sound muffled.’

Sure I did. I was biting down on the side of my hand to keep from howling with laughter. Now, cautiously, I took it out of my mouth and examined the bite-marks. ‘Better?’

‘Yes, lots. So what’s the new one about? Give me a hint.’