Bag of Bones

by Стивен Кинг

  “That is the weirdest thing,” she said.

  “They’re gone.”

  “The fridgeafator people?”

  “I don’t know about them, but the magnetic letters you gave her sure are. When I asked Ki what she did with them, she started crying and said Allamagoosalum took them. She said he ate them in the middle of the night, while everyone was sleeping, for a snack.”

  “Allama-wh0-salum?’ “Allamagoosalum,” Mattie said, sounding wearily amused. “Another little legacy from her grandfather. It’s a corruption of the Micmac word for ’boogeyman’ or ’demon’—I looked it up at the library. Kyra had a good many nightmares about demons and wendigos and the allama-goosalum late last winter and this spring.”

  “What a sweet old grandpa he was,” I said sentimentally.

  “Right, a real pip. She was miserable over losing the letters; I barely got her calmed down before her ride to V.B.S. came. Ki wants to know if you’ll come to Final Exercises on Friday afternoon, by the way. She and her friend Billy Turgeon are going to flannelboard the story of baby Moses.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said… but of course I did. We all did.

  ’gkny idea where her letters might have gone, Mike?”

  “No.”

  “Yours are still okay?”

  “Mine are fine, but of course mine don’t spell anything,” I said, looking at the empty door of my own fridgeafator. There was sweat on my forehead. I could feel it creeping down into my eyebrows like oil.

  “Did you… I don’t know… sense anything?”

  “You mean did I maybe hear the evil alphabet-thief as he slid through the window?”

  “You know what I mean.”

  “I suppose so.” A pause “I thought I heard something in the night, okay? About three this morning, actually. I got up and went into the hall. Nothing was there. But… you know how hot it’s been lately?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, not in my trailer, not last night. It was cold as ice. I swear I could almost see my breath.” I believed her. After all, I had seen mine.

  “Were the letters on the front of the fridge then?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t go up the hall far enough to see into the kitchen. I took one look around and then went back to bed. I almost ran back to bed.

  Sometimes bed feels safer, you know?” She laughed nervously. “It’s a kid thing. Covers are boogeyman kryptonite. Only at first, when I got in…

  I don’t know… I thought someone was in there already. Like someone had been hiding on the floor underneath and then… when I went to check the hall…, they got in. Not a nice someone, either.” Give me my dust-catcher, I thought, and shuddered. “What?”

  Mattie asked sharply. “What did you say?”

  “I asked who did you think it was? What was the first name that came into your mind?”

  “Devore,” she said. “Him. But there was no one there.” A pause. “I wish you’d been there.”

  “I do, too.”

  “I’m glad. Mike, do you have any ideas at all about this? Because it’s very freaky.”

  “I think maybe…” For a moment I was on the verge of telling her what had happened to my own letters. But if I started talking, where would it stop? And how much could she be expected to believe?”… maybe Ki took the letters herself. Went walking in her sleep and chucked them under the trailer or something. Do you think that could be?”

  “I think I like the idea of Kyra strolling around in her sleep even less than the idea of ghosts with cold breath taking the letters off the fridge,” Mattie said. “Take her to bed with you tonight,” I said, and felt her thought come back like an arrow: I’d rather take you. What she said, after a brief pause, was: “Will you come by today?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. She was noshing on flavored yogurt as we talked, eating it in little nipping bites. “You’ll see me tomorrow, though. At the party.”

  “I hope we get to eat before the thunderstorms. They’re supposed to be bad.”

  “I’m sure we will.”

  “And are you still thinking? I only ask because I dreamed of you when I finally fell asleep again. I dreamed of you kissing me.”

  “I’m still thinking,” I said. “Thinking hard.”

  But in fact I don’t remember thinking about anything very hard that day.

  What I remember is drifting further and further into that zone I’ve explained so badly. Near dusk I went for a long walk in spite of the heat—all the way out to where Lane Forty-two joins the highway. Coming back I stopped on the edge of Tidwell’s Meadow, watching the light fade out of the sky and listening to thunder rumble somewhere over New Hampshire. Once more there was that sense of how thin reality was, not just here but everywhere; how it was stretched like skin over the blood and tissue of a body we can never know clearly in this life. I looked at trees and saw arms; I looked at bushes and saw faces. Ghosts, Mattie had said. Ghosts with cold breath.

  Time was also thin, it seemed to me. Kyra and I had really been at the Fryeburg Fair—some version of it, anyway; we had really visited the year 1900. And at the foot of the meadow the Red-Tops were almost there now, as they once had been, in their neat little cabins. I could almost hear the sound of their guitars, the murmur of their voices and laughter; I could almost see the gleam of their lanterns and smell their beef and pork frying. “Say baby, do you remember me?” one of her songs went, “in I ain’t your honey like I used to be.”

  Something rattled in the underbrush to my left. I turned that way, expecting to see Sara step out of the woods wearing Mattie’s dress and Mattie’s white sneakers. In this gloom, they would seem almost to float by themselves, until she got close to me…

  There was no one there, of course, it had undoubtedly been nothing but Chuck the Woodchuck headed home after a hard day at the office, but I no longer wanted to be out here, watching as the light drained out of the day and the mist came up from the ground. I turned for home.

  Instead of going into the house when I got back, I made my way along the path to Jo’s studio, where I hadn’t been since the night I had taken my IBM back in a dream. My way was lit by intermittent flashes of heat lightning.

  The studio was hot but not stale. I could smell a peppery aroma that was actually pleasant, and wondered if it might be some of Jo’s herbs. There was an air conditioner out here, and it worked—I turned it on and then just stood in front of it a little while. So much cold air on my overheated body was probably unhealthy, but it felt wonderful.

  I didn’t feel very wonderful otherwise, however. I looked around with a growing sense of something too heavy to be mere sadness; it felt like despair. I think it was caused by the contrast between how little of Jo was left in Sara Laughs and how much of her was still out here. I imagined our marriage as a kind of playhouse—and isn’t that what marriage is, in large part? playing house? — where only half the stuff was held down. Held down by little magnets or hidden cables. Something had come along and picked up our playhouse by one corner—easiest thing in the world, and I supposed I should be grateful that the something hadn’t decided to draw back its foot and kick the poor thing all the way over. It just picked up that one corner, you see. My stuff stayed put, but all of Jo’s had slid…

  Out of the house and down here.

  “Jo?” I asked, and sat down in her chair. There was no answer. No thumps on the wall. No crows or owls calling from the woods. I put my hand on her desk, where the typewriter had been, and slipped my hand across it, picking up a film of dust.

  “I miss you, honey,” I said, and began to cry.

  When the tears were over—again—I wiped my face with the tail of my tee-shirt like a little kid, then just looked around. There was the picture of Sara Tidwell on her desk and a photo I didn’t remember on the wall—this latter was old, sepia-tinted, and woodsy. Its focal point was a man-high birchwood cross in a little clearing on a slope above the lake. That clearing was gone from the geography now, most likely,
long since filled in by trees.

  I looked at her jars of herbs and mushroom sections, her filing cabi nets, her sections of afghan. The green rag rug on the floor. The pot of pencils on the desk, pencils she had touched and used. I held one of them poised over a blank sheet of paper for a moment or two, but nothing happened. I had a sense of life in this room, and a sense of being watched… but not a sense of being helped. “I know some of it but not enough,” I said. “Of all the things I don’t know, maybe the one that matters most is who wrote ’help her’ on the fridge. Was it you, Jo?” No answer. I sat awhile longer—hoping against hope, I suppose—then got up, turned off the air conditioning, turned off the lights, and went back to the house, walking in soft bright stutters of unfocused lightning. I sat on the deck for a little while, watching the night. At some point I realized I’d taken the length of blue silk ribbon out of my pocket and was winding it nervously back and forth between my fingers, making half-assed cat’s cradles. Had it really come from the year 19007

  The idea seemed perfectly crazy and perfectly sane at the same time. The night hung hot and hushed. I imagined old folks all over the TR—perhaps in Motton and Harlow, too—laying out their funeral clothes for tomorrow. In the doublewide trailer on Wasp Hill Road, Ki was sitting on the floor, watching a videotape of The Jungle Book—Baloo and Mowgli were singing “The Bare Necessities.” Mattie was on the couch with her feet up, reading the new Mary Higgins Clark and singing along. Both were wearing shorty pajamas, Ki’s pink, Mattie’s white. After a little while I lost my sense of them; it faded the way radio signals sometimes do late at night. I went into the north bedroom, undressed, and crawled onto the top sheet of my unmade bed. I fell asleep almost at once. I woke in the middle of the night with someone running a hot finger up and down the middle of my back. I rolled over and when the lightning flashed, I saw there was a woman in bed with me. It was Sara Tid-well.

  She was grinning. There were no pupils in her eyes. “Oh sugar, I’m almost back,” she whispered in the dark. I had a sense of her reaching out for me again, but when the next flash of lightning came, that side of the bed was empty.

  Inspiration isn’t always a matter of ghosts moving magnets around on refrigerator doors, and on Tuesday morning I had a flash that was a beaut. It came while I was shaving and thinking about nothing more than remembering the beer for the party. And like the best inspirations, it came out of nowhere at all. I hurried into the living room, not quite running, wiping the shaving cream off my face with a towel as I went. I glanced briefly at the %ugh Stuff crossword collection lying on top of my manuscript. That had been where I’d gone first in an effort to decipher “go down nineteen” and “go down ninety-two.” Not an unreasonable starting-point, but what did %ugh Stuff have to do with TR-90? I had purchased the book at Mr. Paperback in Derry, and of the thirty or so puzzles I’d completed, I’d done all but half a dozen in Derry. TR ghosts could hardly be expected to show an interest in my Derry crossword collection. The telephone book, on the other hand-I snatched it off the dining-room table. Although it covered the whole southern part of Castle County-Motton, Harlow, and Kash-wakamak as well as the TR—it was pretty thin. The first thing I did was check the white pages to see if there were at least ninety-two. There were. The Y’s and Z’s finished up on page ninety-seven. This was the answer. Had to be. “I got it, didn’t I?” I asked Bunter. “This is it.”

  Nothing. Not even a tinkle from the bell. “Fuck you—what does a stuffed moosehead know about a telephone book?” Go down nineteen. I turned to page nineteen of the telephone book, where the letter IF was prominently showcased. I began to slip my finger down the first column and as it went, my excitement faded. The nineteenth name on page nineteen was Harold Failles. It meant nothing to me. There were also Feltons and Fenners, a Filkersham and several Finneys, half a dozen Flahertys and more Fosses than you could shake a stick at. The last name on page nineteen was Framingham. It also meant nothing to me, but-Framingham, Kenneth P. I stared at that for a moment. A realization began to dawn.

  It had nothing to do with the refrigerator messages. You’re not seeing what you think you’re seeing, I thought. This is like when you buy a blue Buick-“You see blue Buicks everywhere,” I said. “Practically got to kick em out of your way. Yeah, that’s it.” But my hands were shaking as I turned to page ninety-two. Here were the T’s of southern Castle County, along with a few U’s like Alton Ubeck and Catherine Udell just to round things out. I didn’t bother checking the ninety-second entry on the page; the phone book wasn’t the key to the magnetic crosspatches after all. It did, however, suggest something enormous. I closed the book, just held it in my hands for a moment (happy folks with blueberry rakes on the front cover), then opened it at random, this time to the M’s. And once you knew what you were looking for, it jumped right out at you. All those K’s. Oh, there were Stevens and Johns and Marthas; there was Meserve, G… and Messier, V… and Jayhouse, T. And yet, again and again, I saw the initial K where people had exercised their right not to list their first name in the book. There were at least twenty K-initials on page fifty alone, and another dozen C-initials. As for the actual names themselves…

  There were twelve Kenneths on this random page in the M-section, including three Kenneth Moores and two Kenneth Munters. There were four Catherines and two Katherines. There were a Casey, a Kiana, and a Kiefer. “Holy Christ, it’s like fallout,” I whispered. I thumbed through the book, not able to believe what I was seeing and seeing it anyway.

  Kenneths, Katherines, and Keiths were everywhere. I also saw Kimberly, Kim, and Kym. There were Cammie, Kia (yes, and we had thought ourselves so original), Kiah, Kendra, Kaela, Keil, and Kyle. Kirby and Kirk. There was a woman named Kissy Bowden, and a man named Kito Rennie—Kito, the same name as one of Kyra’s fridgeafator people. And everywhere, outnumbering such usually common initials as S and T and E, were those K’s. My eyes danced with them. I turned to look at the clock-didn’t want to stand John Storrow up at the airport, Christ no—and there was no clock there. Of course not. Old Krazy Kat had popped his peepers during a psychic event. I gave a loud, braying laugh that scared me a little—it wasn’t particularly sane. “Get hold of yourself, Mike,” I said. “Take a deep breath, son.” I took the breath. Held it. Let it out.

  Checked the digital readout on the microwave. Quarter past eight. Plenty of time for John. I turned back to the telephone book and began to riffle rapidly through it. I’d had a second inspiration—not a megawatt blast like the first one, but a lot more accurate, it turned out.

  Western Maine is a relatively isolated area—it’s a little like the hill country of the border South—but there has always been at least some inflow of folks from away (“fiatlanders” is the term the locals use when they are feeling contemptuous), and in the last quarter of the century it has become a popular area for active seniors who want to fish and ski their way through retirement. The phone book goes a long way toward separating the newbies from the long-time residents. Babickis, Parettis, O’Quindlans, Donahues, Smolnacks, Dvoraks, Blindermeyers—all from away.

  All fiatlanders. Jalberts, Meserves, Pillsburys, Spruces, Ther-riaults, Perraults, Stanchfields, Starbirds, Dubays—all from Castle County. You see what I’m saying, don’t you? When you see a whole column of Bowies on page twelve, you know that those folks have been around long enough to relax and really spread those Bowie genes.

  There were a few K-initials and K-names among the Parettis and the Smolnacks, but only a few. The heavy concentrations were all attached to families that had been here long enough to absorb the atmosphere. To breathe the fallout. Except it wasn’t radiation, exactly, it l suddenly imagined a black headstone taller than the tallest tree on the lake, a monolith which cast its shadow over half of Castle County. This picture was so clear and so terrible that I covered my eyes, dropping the phone book on the table. I backed away from it, shuddering. Hiding my eyes actually seemed to enhance the image further: a grave-marker so enormous it blotted out the sun
; TR-90 lay at its foot like a funeral bouquet.

  Sara Tidwell’s son had drowned in Dark Score Lake. . or been drowned in it. But she had marked his passing. Memorialized it. I wondered if anyone else in town had ever noticed what I just had. I didn’t suppose it was all that likely; when you open a telephone book you’re looking for a specific name in most cases, not reading whole pages line by line.

  I wondered if Jo had noticed—if she’d known that almost every longtime family in this part of the world had, in one way or another, named at least one child after Sara Tidwell’s dead son.

  Jo wasn’t stupid. I thought she probably had. I returned to the bathroom, relathered, started again from scratch. When I finished, I went back to the phone and picked it up. I poked in three numbers, then stopped, looking out at the lake. Mattie and Ki were up and in the kitchen, both of them wearing aprons, both of them in a fine froth of excitement. There was going to be a party! They would wear pretty new summer clothes, and there would be music from Mat-tie’s boombox CD player! Ki was helping Mattie make biscuits for strewberry snortcake, and while the biscuits were baking they would make salads. If I called Mattie up and said Pack a couple of bags, you and Ki are going to spend a week at Disney World, Mattie would assume I was joking, then tell me to hurry up and finish getting dressed so I’d be at the airport when John’s plane landed. If I pressed, she’d remind me that Lindy had offered her her old job back, but the offer would close in a hurry if Mattie didn’t show up promptly at two P.M. on Friday. If I continued to press, she would just say no.

  Because I wasn’t the only one in the zone, was I? I wasn’t the only one who was really feeling it.

  I returned the phone to its recharging cradle, then went back into the north bedroom. By the time I’d finished dressing, my fresh shirt was already feeling wilted under the arms; it was as hot that morning as it had been for the last week, maybe even hotter. But I’d be in plenty of time to meet the plane. I had never felt less like partying, but I’d be there. Mikey on the spot, that was me. Mikey on the goddam spot.