Bag of Bones

by Стивен Кинг

  Not efficient enough. But one of the kitchen steak knives would do. If I filled the washbasin with water that was really hot, I wouldn’t even feel it. A letter T on each arm, the top bar drawn across the wrists-For a moment I came out of the zone. A voice—my own speaking as some combination of Jo and Mattie—screamed: What are you thinking about? Oh Mike, what in God’s name are you thinking about? Then the thunder boomed, the lights flickered, and the rain began to pour down again, driven by the wind. I went back into that place where everything was clear, my course indisputable. Let it all end-the sorrow, the hurt, the fear. I didn’t want to think anymore about how Mattie had danced with her toes on the Frisbee as if it were a spotlight. I didn’t want to be there when Kyra woke up, didn’t want to see the misery fill her eyes. I didn’t want to get through the night ahead, the day that was coming beyond it, or the day that was coming after that. They were all cars on the same old mystery train. Life was a sickness. I was going to give her a nice warm bath and cure her of it. I raised my arms. In the medicine cabinet mirror a murky figure—a Shape—raised its own in a kind of jocular greeting. It was me. It had been me all along, and that was all right. That was just fine.

  I dropped to one knee and checked the water. It was coming in nice and warm. Good. Even if the generator quit now, it would be fine. The tub was an old one, a deep one. As I walked down to the kitchen to get the knife, I thought about climbing in with her after I had finished cutting my wrists in the hotter water of the basin. No, I decided. It might be misinterpreted by the people who would come here later on, people with nasty minds and nastier assumptions. The ones who’d come when the storm was over and the trees across the road cleared away. No, after her bath I would dry her and put her back in bed with Strickland in her hand. I’d sit across the room from her, in the rocking chair by the bedroom windows. I would spread some towels in my lap to keep as much of the blood off my pants as I could, and eventually I would go to sleep, too.

  Bunter’s bell was still ringing. Much louder now. It was getting on my nerves, and if it kept on that way it might even wake the baby. I decided to pull it down and silence it for good. I crossed the room, and as I did a strong gust of air blew past me. It wasn’t a draft from the broken kitchen window; this was that warm subway-air again. It blew the %ugh $tuff crossword book onto the floor, but the paperweight on the manuscript kept the loose pages from following. As I looked in that direction, Bunter’s bell fell silent. A voice sighed across the dim room. Words I couldn’t make out. And what did they matter? What did one more manifestation—one more blast of hot air from the Great Beyond—matter? Thunder rolled and the sigh came again. This time, as the generator died and the lights went out, plunging the room into gray shadow, I got one word in the clear:

  Nineteen.

  I turned on my heels, making a nearly complete circle. I finished up looking across the shadowy room at the manuscript of My Childhood Friend. Suddenly the light broke. Understanding arrived. Not the crossword book. Not the phone book, either. My book. My manuscript.

  I crossed to it, vaguely aware that the water had stopped running into the tub in the north-wing bathroom. When the generator died, the pump had quit. That was all right, it would be plenty deep enough already.

  And warm. I would give Kyra her bath, but first there was something I had to do. I had to go down nineteen, and after that I just might have to go down ninety-two. And I could. I had completed just over a hundred and twenty pages of manuscript, so I could. I grabbed the battery-powered lantern from the top of the cabinet where I still kept several hundred actual vinyl records, clicked it on, and set it on the table. It cast a white circle of radiance on the manuscript—in the gloom of that afternoon it was as bright as a spotlight.

  On page nineteen of My Childhood Friend, Tiffi Taylor—the call-girl who had re-invented herself as Regina Whiting—was sitting in her studio with Andy Drake, reliving the day that John Sanborn (the alias under which John Shackleford had been getting by) saved her three-year-old daughter, Karen. This is the passage I read as the thunder boomed and the rain slashed against the sliding door giving on the deck:

  FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 19

  over that way, I was sure of it,” she said, “but when I couldn’t see her anywhere, I went to look in the hot tub.” She lit a cigarette. “What I saw made me feel like screaming, Andy—Karen was underwater. All that was out was her hand… the nails were turning purple. After that… I guess I dived in, but I don’t remember; I was zoned out. Everything from then on is like a dream where stuff runs together in your mind. The yard-guy—Sanborn—shoved me aide and dived. His foot hit me in the throat and I couldn’t swallow for a week. He yanked up on Karen’s arm. I thought he’d pull it off her damn shoulder, but he got her. He got her.”

  In the gloom, Drake saw she was weeping. “God. Oh God, I thought she was dead. I was sure she was.”

  I knew at once, but laid my steno pad along the left margin of the manuscript so I could see it better. Reading down, as you’d read a vertical crossword-puzzle answer, the first letter of each line spelled the message which had been there almost since I began the book: owls under stud 0

  Then, allowing for the indent next-to-last line from the bottom: owls under studio Bill Dean, my caretaker, is sitting behind the wheel of his truck. He has accomplished his two purposes in coming here-welcoming me back to the TR and warning me off Mattie Devore. Now he’s ready to go. He smiles at me, displaying those big false teeth, those Roebuckers. “If you get a chance, you ought to look r the owls,” he tells me. I ask him what Jo would have wanted with a couple of plastic owls and he replies that they keep the crows from shitting up the woodwork. I accept that, I have other things to think about, but still… “It was like she’d come down to do that errand special,” he says. It never crosses my mind—not then, at least that in Indian lklore, owls have another purpose.” they are said to keep evil spirits away. If Jo knew that plastic owls would scare the crows off, she would have known that. It was just the sort of inj3rmation she picked up and tucked away. My inquisitive wij. My brilliant scatterbrain.

  Thunder rolled. Lightning ate at the clouds like spills of bright acid.

  I stood by the dining-room table with the manuscript in my unsteady hands.

  “Christ, Jo,” I whispered. “What did you find out?” And why didn’t you tell me? But I thought I knew the answer to that. She hadn’t told me because I was somehow like Max Devore; his great-grandfather and my own had shit in the same pit. It didn’t make any sense, but there it was.

  And she hadn’t told her own brother, either. I took a weird kind of comfort from that. I began to leaf through the manuscript, my skin crawling. Andy Drake rarely frowned in Michael Noonan’s My Childhood Friend. He scowled instead, because there’s an owl in every scowl.

  Before coming to Florida, John Shackleford had been living in Studio City, California. Drake’s first meeting with Regina Whiting occurred in her studio. Ray Garraty’s last-known address was the Studio Apartments in Key Largo. Regina Whiting’s best friend was Steffie Underwood.

  Steffi’s husband was Towle Underwood—there was a good one, two for the price of one. Owls under studio. It was everywhere, on every page, just like the K-names in the telephone book. A kind of monument, this one built—I was sure of it—not by Sara Tidwell but by Johanna Arlen Noonan. My wife passing messages behind the guard’s back, praying with all her considerable heart that I would see and understand. On page ninety-two Shackleford was talking to Drake in the prison visitors’

  room—sitting with his wrists between his knees, looking down at the chain running between his ankles, refusing to make eye-contact with Drake.

  FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 92

  only thing I got to say. Anything else, fuck, what good would it do?

  Life’s a game, and I lost. You want me to tell you that I yanked some little kid out of the water, pulled her up, got her motor going again? I did, but not because I’m a hero or a saint…”

  Ther
e was more but no need to read it. The message, owls under studio, ran down the margin just as it had on page nineteen. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I’d finally beaten it or found a way around it. Jo had dissolved it. Jo had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher.

  When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you. So had Jo helped me. I riffled through the manuscript and saw the key words everywhere, sometimes placed so you could actually read them stacked on different lines, one above the other. How hard she had tried to tell me this. .

  and I had no intention of doing anything else until I found out why. I dropped the manuscript back on the table, but before I could re-anchor it, a furious gust of freezing air blew past me, lifting the pages and scattering them everywhere in a cyclone. If that force could have ripped them to shreds, I’m sure that it would have. No./ it cried as I grabbed the lantern’s handle. No, finish the job./ Wind blew around my face in chill gusts—it was as if someone I couldn’t quite see was standing right in front of me and breathing in my face, retreating as I moved forward, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs. I hung the lantern over my arm, held my hands out in front of me, and clapped them together sharply. The cold puffs in my face ceased. There was now only the random swirling air coming in through the partially plugged kitchen window. “She’s sleeping,” I said to what I knew was still there, silently watching. “There’s time.” I went out the back door and the wind took me at once, making me stagger sideways, almost knocking me over. And in the wavering trees I saw green faces, the faces of the dead. Devore’s was there, and Royce’s, and Son Tidwell’s. Most of all I saw Sara’s.

  Everywhere Sara.

  No! Go back! You don’t need no truck with no owls, sugar! Go back!

  Finish the job! Do what you came Jr!

  “I don’t know what I came for,” I said. “And until I find out, I’m not doing anything.”

  The wind screamed as if in offense, and a huge branch split off the pine standing to the right of the house. It fell on top of my Chevrolet in a spray of water, denting the roof before rolling off on my side.

  Clapping my hands out here would be every bit as useful as King Canute commanding the tide to turn. This was her world, not mine… and only the edge of it, at that. Every step closer to The Street and the lake would bring me closer to that world’s heart, where time was thin and spirits ruled. Oh dear God, what had happened to cause this? The path to Jo’s studio had turned into a creek. I got a dozen steps down it before a rock turned under my foot and I fell heavily on my side. Lightning zigged across the sky, there was the crack of another breaking branch, and then something was falling toward me. I put my hands up to shield my face and rolled to the right, off the path. The branch splashed to the ground just behind me, and I tumbled halfway down a slope that was slick with soaked needles. At last I was able to pull myself to my feet. The branch on the path was even bigger than the one which had landed on the roof of the car. If it had struck me, it likely would have bashed in my skull.

  Go back! A hissing, spiteful wind through the trees.

  Finish it! The slobbering, guttural voice of the lake slamming into the rocks and the bank below The Street.

  Mind your business! That was the very house itself, groaning on its foundations. Mind your business and let me mind mine!

  But Kyra was my business. Kyra was my daughter.

  I picked up the lantern. The housing was cracked but the bulb glowed bright and steady—that was one for the home team. Bent over against the howling wind, hand raised to ward off more falling branches, I slipped and stumbled my way down the hill to my dead wife’s studio.

  C bi;P T R At first the door wouldn’t open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn’t locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood… or had something been shoved up against it? I drew back, crouched a little, and hit the door with my shoulder. This time there was some slight give.

  It was her. Sara. Standing on the other side of the door and trying to hold it shut against me. How could she do that? How, in God’s name? She was a fucking ghost!

  I thought of the BAMM CONSTRUCTION pickup… and as if thought were conjuration I could almost see it out there at the end of Lane Forty-two, parked by the highway. The old ladies’ sedan was behind it, and three or four other cars were now behind them. All of them with their windshield wipers flopping back and forth, their headlights cutting feeble cones through the downpour. They were lined up on the shoulder like cars at a yard sale. There was no yard sale here, only the old-timers sitting silently in their cars. Old-timers who were in the zone just like I was. Old-timers sending in the vibe.

  She was drawing on them. Stealing from them. She’d done the same with Devore—and me too, of course. Many of the manifestations I’d experienced since coming back had likely been created from my own psychic energy. It was amusing when you thought of it. Or maybe “terrifying” was the word I was actually looking for. “Jo, help me,” I said in the pouring rain. Lightning flashed, turning the torrents a bright brief silver. “If you ever loved me, help me now.” I drew back and hit the door again. This time there was no resistance at all and I went hurtling in, catching my shin on the jamb and falling to my knees.

  I held onto the lantern, though. There was a moment of silence. In it I felt forces and presences gathering themselves. In that moment nothing seemed to move, although behind me, in the woods Jo had loved to ramble—with me or without me—the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to howl, a merciless gardener pruning its way through the trees that were dead and almost dead, doing the work of ten gentler years in one turbulent hour. Then the door slammed shut and it began. I saw everything in the glow of the flashlight, which I had turned on without even realizing it, but at first I didn’t know exactly what I was seeing, other than the destruction by poltergeist of my wife’s beloved crafts and treasures. The framed afghan square tore itself off the wall and flew from one side of the studio to the other, the black oak frame breaking apart. The heads popped off the dolls poking out of the baby collages like champagne corks at a party. The hanging light-globe shattered, showering me with fragments of glass. A wind began to blow—a cold one—and was quickly joined and whirled into a cyclone by one which was warmer, almost hot. They rolled past me as if in imitation of the larger storm outside. The Sara Laughs head on the bookcase, the one which appeared to be constructed of toothpicks and lollipop sticks, exploded in a cloud of wood-splinters. The kayak paddle leaning against the wall rose into the air, rowed furiously at nothing, then launched itself at me like a spear. I threw myself flat on the green rag rug to avoid it, and felt bits of broken glass from the shattered light-globe cut into the palm of my hand as I came down. I felt something else, as well—a ridge of something beneath the rug. The paddle hit the far wall hard enough to split into two pieces.

  Now the banjo my wife had never been able to master rose in the air, revolved twice, and played a bright rattle of notes that were out of tune but nonetheless unmistakable—wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten. The phrase ended with a vicious BLUNK!

  that broke all five strings. The banjo whirled itself a third time, its bright steel fittings reflecting fishscale runs of light on the study walls, and then beat itself to death against the floor, the drum shattering and the tuning pegs snapping off like teeth. The sound of moving air began to-how do I express this? — toj3cus somehow, until it wasn’t the sound of air but the sound of
voices—pant-ing, unearthly voices full of fury. They would have screamed if they’d had vocal cords to scream with. Dusty air swirled up in the beam of my flashlight, making helix shapes that danced together, then reeled apart again. For just a moment I heard Sara’s snarling, smoke-broken voice: “Git out, bitch/You git on out/This ain’t none o/yours—” And then a curious insubstantial thud, as if air had collided with air. This was followed by a rushing wind-tunnel shriek that I recognized: I’d heard it in the middle of the night. Jo was screaming. Sara was hurting her, Sara was punishing her for presuming to interfere, and Jo was screaming. “No!” I shouted, getting to my feet. “Leave her alone! Leave her be!” I advanced into the room, swinging the lantern in front of my face as if I could beat her away with it. Stoppered bottles stormed past me—some contained dried flowers, some carefully sectioned mushrooms, some woods-herbs.

  They shattered against the far wall with a brittle xylophone sound. None of them struck me; it was as if an unseen hand guided them away. Then Jo’s rolltop desk rose into the air. It must have weighed at least four hundred pounds with its drawers loaded as they were, but it floated like a feather, nodding first one way and then dipping the other in the opposing currents of air. Jo screamed again, this time in anger rather than pain, and I staggered backward against the closed door with a feeling that I had been scooped hollow. Sara wasn’t the only one who could steal the energy of the living, it appeared. White semeny stuff ectoplasm, I guess—spilled from the desk’s pigeonholes in a dozen little streams, and the desk suddenly launched itself across the room. It flew almost too fast to follow with the eye. Anyone standing in front of it would have been smashed flat There was a head-splitting shriek of protest and agony—Sara this time, I knew it was—and then the desk struck the wall, breaking through it and letting in the rain and the wind. The rolltop snapped loose of its slot and hung like a jointed tongue. All the drawers shot out. Spools of thread, skeins of yarn, little flora/fauna identification books and woods guides, thimbles, notebooks, knitting needles, dried-up Magic Markers—Jo’s early remains, Ki might have called them. They flew everywhere like bones and bits of hair cruelly scattered from a disinterred coffin. “Stop it,” I croaked. “Stop it, both of you. That’s enough.” But there was no need to tell them. Except for the furious beat of the storm, I was alone in the ruins of my wife’s studio. The battle was over. At least for the time being.