Bag of Bones by Stephen King

Sara backed away from Son, shaking her ungirdled, unbustled fanny and laughing. He strolled back to his spot and she turned to the crowd as the band played the turnaround. She sang the next verse looking directly at me.

‘Before you start in fishin

you better check your line.

Said before you start in fishin, honey,

you better check on your line.

I’ll pull on yours, darling,

and you best tug on mine.’

The crowd roared happily. In my arms, Kyra was shaking harder than ever. ‘I’m scared, Mike,’

she said. ‘I don’t like that lady. She’s a scary lady. She stole Mattie’s dress. I want to go home.’

It was as if Sara heard her, even over the rip and ram of the music. Her head cocked back on her neck, her lips peeled open, and she laughed at the sky. Her teeth were big and yellow. They looked like the teeth of a hungry animal, and I decided I agreed with Kyra: she was a scary lady.

‘Okay, hon,’ I murmured in Ki’s ear. ‘We’re out of here.’

But before I could move, the sense of the woman — I don’t know how else to say it — fell upon me and held me. Now I understood what had shot past me in the kitchen to knock away the CARLADEAN letters; the chill was the same. It was almost like identifying a person by the sound of their walk.

She led the band to the turnaround once more, then into another verse. Not one you’d find in any written version of the song, though:

‘I ain’t gonna hurt her, honey,

not for all the treasure in the world’.

Said I wouldn’t hurt your baby,

not for diamonds or for pearls

Only one black-hearted bastard

dare to touch that little girl.’

The crowd roared as if it were the funniest thing they’d ever heard, but Kyra began to cry. Sara saw this and stuck out her breasts — much bigger breasts than Mattie’s — and shook them at her, laughing her trademark laugh as she did. There was a parodic coldness about this gesture . . . and an emptiness, too. A sadness. Yet I could feel no compassion for her. It was as if the heart had been

burned out of her and the sadness which remained was just another ghost, the memory of love haunting the bones of hate.

And how her laughing teeth leered.

Sara raised her arms over her head and this time shook it all the way down, as if reading my thoughts and mocking them. Just like jelly on a plate, as some other old song of the time has it. Her shadow wavered on the canvas backdrop, which was a painting of Fryeburg, and as I looked at it I realized I had found the Shape from my Manderley dreams. It was Sara. Sara was the Shape and always had been.

No, Mike. That’s close, but it’s not right.

Right or wrong, I’d had enough. I turned, putting my hand on the back of Ki’s head and urging her face down against my chest. Both her arms were around my neck now, clutching with panicky tightness.

I thought I’d have to bull my way back through the crowd — they had let me in easily enough, but they might be a lot less amenable to letting me back out. Don’t fuck with me, boys, I thought.

You don’t want to do that.

And they didn’t. On stage Son Tidwell had taken the band from E to G, someone began to bang a tambourine, and Sara went from ‘Fishin Blues’ to ‘Dog My Cats’ without a single pause. Out here, in front of the stage and below it, the crowd once more drew back from me and my little girl without looking at us or missing a beat as they clapped their work-swollen hands together. One young man with a port-wine stain swimming across the side of his face opened his mouth — at twenty he was already missing half his teeth — and hollered ‘Yee-HAW!’ around a melting glob of tobacco. It was Buddy Jellison from the Village Cafe, I realized . . . Buddy Jellison magically rolled back in age from sixty-eight to eighteen. Then I realized the hair was the wrong shade — light brown instead of black (although he was pushing seventy and looking it in every other way, Bud hadn’t a single white hair in his head). This was Buddy’s grandfather, maybe even his great-grandfather. I didn’t give a shit either way. I only wanted to get out of here.

‘Excuse me,’ I said, brushing by him.

‘There’s no town drunk here, you meddling son of a bitch,’ he said, never looking at me and never missing a beat as he clapped. ‘We all just take turns.’

It’s a dream after all, I thought. It’s a dream and that proves it.

But the smell of tobacco on his breath wasn’t a dream, the smell of the crowd wasn’t a dream, and the weight of the frightened child in my arms wasn’t a dream, either. My shirt was hot and wet where her face was pressed. She was crying.

‘Hey, Irish!’ Sara called from the stage, and her voice was so like Jo’s that I could have screamed.

She wanted me to turn back — I could feel her will working on the sides of my face like fingers —

but I wouldn’t do it.

I dodged around three farmers who were passing a ceramic bottle from hand to hand and then I was free of the crowd. The midway lay ahead, wide as Fifth Avenue, and at the end of it was the arch, the steps, The Street, the lake. Home. If I could get to The Street we’d be safe. I was sure of it.

‘Almost done, Irish!’ Sara shrieked after me. She sounded angry, but not too angry to laugh. ‘You gonna get what you want, sugar, all the comfort you need, but you want to let me finish my bi’ness.

Do you hear me, boy? Just stand clear! Mind me, now!’

I began to hurry back the way I had come, stroking Ki’s head, still holding her face against my shirt. Her straw hat fell off and when I grabbed for it, I got nothing but the ribbon, which pulled free of the brim. No matter. We had to get out of here.

On our left was the baseball pitch and some little boy shouting ‘Willy hit it over the fence, Ma!

Willy hit it over the fence!’ with monotonous, brain-croggling regularity. We passed the Bingo, where some woman howled that she had won the turkey, by glory, every number was covered with a button and she had won the turkey. Overhead, the sun dove behind a cloud and the day went dull.

Our shadows disappeared. The arch at the end of the midway drew closer with maddening slowness.

‘Are we home yet?’ Ki almost moaned. ‘I want to go home, Mike, please take me home to my mommy.’

‘I will,’ I said. ‘Everything’s going to be all right.’

We were passing the Test Your Strength pole, where the young man with the red hair was putting his shirt back on. He looked at me with stolid dislike — the instinctive mistrust of a native for an interloper, per-haps — and I realized I knew him, too. He’d have a grandson named Dickie who would, toward the end of the century to which this fair had been dedicated, own the All-Purpose Garage on Route 68.

A woman coming out of the quilting booth stopped and pointed at me. At the same moment her upper lip lifted in a dog’s snarl. I knew that face, too. From where? Somewhere around town. It didn’t matter, and I didn’t want to know even if it did.

‘We never should have come here,’ Ki moaned.

‘I know how you feel,’ I said. ‘But I don’t think we had any choice, hon. We — ‘

They came out of Freak Alley, perhaps twenty yards ahead. I saw them and stopped. There were seven in all, long-striding men dressed in cutters’ clothes, but four didn’t matter — those four looked faded and white and ghostly. They were sick fellows, maybe dead fellows, and no more dangerous than daguerreotypes. The other three, though, were real. As real as the rest of this place, anyway. The leader was an old man wearing a faded blue Union Army cap. He looked at me with eyes I knew. Eyes I had seen measuring me over the top of an oxygen mask.

‘Mike? Why we stoppin?’

‘It’s all right, Ki. Just keep your head down. This is all a dream. You’ll wake up tomorrow morning in your own bed.’

”Kay.’

The jacks spread across the midway hand to hand and boot to boot, blocking our way back to the arch and The Street. Old Blue-Cap was in the middle. The ones on either side of him were much younger, some by maybe as much as half a century. Two of the pale ones, the almost-not-there ones, were standing side-by-side to the old man’s right, and I wondered if I could burst through that part of their line. I thought they were no more flesh than the thing which had thumped the insulation of the cellar wall . . . but what if I was wrong?