Bag of Bones by Stephen King

I walked on. The bushes still reached like hands, but they had been pruned back and their reach wasn’t very threatening. I didn’t have to worry about the power being out, either; I was now close enough to the back stoop to see moths fluttering around the light Bill Dean had left on for me. Even if the power had been out (in the western part of the state a lot of the lines are still above ground, and it goes out a lot), the gennie would have kicked in automatically.

Yet I was awed by how much of my dream was actually here, even with the powerful sense of repetition — of reliving — departed. Jo’s planters were where they’d always been, flanking the path which leads down to Sara’s little lick of beach; I suppose Brenda Meserve had found them stacked in the cellar and had had one of her crew set them out again. Nothing was growing in them yet, but I suspected that stuff would be soon. And even without the moon of my dream, I could see the black square on the water, standing about fifty yards offshore. The swimming float.

No oblong shape lying overturned in front of the stoop, though; no coffin. Still, my heart was beating hard again, and I think if more firecrackers had gone off on the Kashwakamak side of the lake just then, I might have screamed.

You funny little man, said Strickland.

Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.

What if death drives us insane? What if we survive, but it drives us insane? What then?

I had reached the point where, in my nightmare, the door banged open and that white shape came hurtling out with its wrapped arms upraised. I took one more step and then stopped, hearing the harsh sound of my respiration as I drew each breath down my throat and then pushed it back out over the dry floor of my tongue. There was no sense of déjà vu, but for a moment I thought the shape would appear anyway — here in the real world, in real time. I stood waiting for it with my sweaty hands clenched. I drew in another dry breath, and this time I held it.

The soft lap of water against the shore.

A breeze that patted my face and rattled the bushes.

A loon cried out on the lake; moths battered the stoop light.

No shroud-monster threw open the door, and through the big windows to the left and right of the door, I could see nothing moving, white or otherwise. There was a note above the knob, probably from Bill, and that was it. I let out my breath in a rush and walked the rest of the way down the driveway to Sara Laughs.

The note was indeed from Bill Dean. It said that Brenda had done some shopping for me; the supermarket receipt was on the kitchen table, and I would find the pantry well stocked with canned goods. She’d gone easy with the perishables, but there was milk, butter, half-and-half, and hamburger, that staple of single-guy cuisine.

I will see you next Mon. , Bill had written. If I had my druthers I’d be here to say hello in person but the good wife says it’s our turn to do the holiday trotting and so we are going down to Virginia (hot!!) to spend the 4th with her sister. If you need anything or run into problems . . .

He had jotted his sister-in-law’s phone number in Virginia as well as Butch Wiggins’s number in town, which locals just call ‘the TR,’ as in ‘Me and mother got tired of Bethel and moved our trailer over to the TR.’ There were other numbers, as well — the plumber, the electrician, Brenda Meserve, even the TV guy over in Harrison who had repositioned the DSS dish for maximum reception. Bill was taking no chances. I turned the note over, imagining a final P.S.: Say, Mike, if nuclear war should break out before me and Yvette get back from Virginia —

Something moved behind me.

I whirled on my heels, the note dropping from my hand. It fluttered to the boards of the back stoop like a larger, whiter version of the moths banging the bulb overhead. In that instant I was sure it would be the shroud-thing, an insane revenant in my wife’s decaying body, Give me my dust-catcher, give it to me, how dare you come down here and disturb my rest, how dam you come to Manderley again, and now that you’re here, how will you ever get away? Into the mystery with you, you silly little man. Into the mystery with you.

Nothing there. It had just been the breeze again, stirring the bushes around a little . . . except I had felt no breeze against my sweaty skin, not that time.

‘Well it must have been, there’s nothing there,’ I said.

The sound of your voice when you’re alone can be either scary or reassuring. That time it was the latter. I bent over, picked up Bill’s note, and stuffed it into my back pocket. Then I rummaged out my keyring. I stood under the stoop light in the big, swooping shadows of the light-struck moths,

picking through my keys until I found the one I wanted. It had a funny disused look, and as I rubbed my thumb along its serrated edge, I wondered again why I hadn’t come down here — except for a couple of quick broad daylight errands — in all the months and years since Jo had died.

Surely if she had been alive, she would have insisted —

But then a peculiar realization came to me: it wasn’t just a matter of since Jo died. It was easy to think of it that way — never once during my six weeks on Key Largo had I thought of it any other way — but now, actually standing here in the shadows of the dancing moths (it was like standing under some weird organic disco ball) and listening to the loons out on the lake, I remembered that although Johanna had died in August of 1994, she had died in Derry. It had been miserably hot in the city . . . so why had we been there? Why hadn’t we been sitting out on our shady deck on the lake side of the house, drinking iced tea in our bathing suits, watching the boats go back and forth and commenting on the form of the various water-skiers? What had she been doing in that damned Rite Aid parking lot to begin with, when during any other August we would have been miles from there?

Nor was that all. We usually stayed at Sara until the end of September — it was a peaceful, pretty time, as warm as summer. But in ’93 we’d left with August only a week gone. I knew, because I could remember Johanna going to New York with me later that month, some kind of publishing deal and the usual attendant publicity crap. It had been dog-hot in Manhattan, the hydrants spraying in the East Village and the uptown streets sizzling. On one night of that trip we’d seen The Phantom of the Opera. Near the end Jo had leaned over to me and whispered, ‘Oh fuck!

The Phantom is snivelling again!’ I had spent the rest of the show trying to keep from bursting into wild peals of laughter. Jo could be evil that way.

Why had she come with me that August? Jo didn’t like New York even in April or October, when it’s sort of pretty. I didn’t know. I couldn’t remember. All I was sure of was’ that she had never been back to Sara Laughs after early August of 1993 . . . and before long I wasn’t even sure of that.

I slipped the key into the lock and turned it. I’d go inside, flip on the kitchen overheads, grab a flashlight, and go back for the car. If I didn’t, some drunk guy with a cottage at the far south end of the lane would come in too fast, rear-end my Chevy, and sue me for a billion dollars.

The house had been aired out and didn’t smell a bit musty; instead of still, stale air, there was a faint and pleasing aroma of pine. I reached for the light inside the door, and then, somewhere in the blackness of the house, a child began to sob. My hand froze where it was and my flesh went cold. I didn’t panic, exactly, but all rational thought left my mind. It was weeping, a child’s weeping, but I hadn’t a clue as to where it was coming from.

Then it began to fade. Not to grow softer but to fade, as if someone had picked that kid up and was carrying it away down some long corridor. . . not that any such corridor existed in Sara Laughs.

Pages: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91 92 93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106 107 108 109 110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133

Leave a Reply 0

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *