Bag of Bones

by Стивен Кинг

  Ahead of me, a leaf-heavy branch dropped into the road. I ran over it and listened to it thunk and scrape and roll against the Chevy’s undercarriage. Please, nothing bigger, I thought… or maybe I was praying. Please let me get to the house. Please let us get to the house.

  By the time I reached the driveway the wind was howling a hurri cane.

  The writhing trees and pelting rain made the entire world seem on the verge of wavering into insubstantial gruel. The driveway’s slope had turned into a river, but I nosed the Chevy down it with no hesitation—we couldn’t stay out here; if a big tree fell on the car, we’d be crushed like bugs in a Dixie cup.

  I knew better than to use the brakes—the car would have heeled sideways and perhaps have been swept right down the slope toward the lake, rolling over and over as it went. Instead I dropped the transmission into low range, toed two notches into the emergency brake, and let the engine pull us down with the rain sheeting against the windshield and turning the log bulk of the house into a phantom. Incredibly, some of the lights were still on, shining like bathysphere portholes in nine feet of water. The generator was working, then… at least for the time being.

  Lightning threw a lance across the lake, green-blue fire illuminating a black well of water with its surface lashed into surging whitecaps. One of the hundred-year-old pines which had stood to the left of the railroad-tie steps now lay with half its length in the water. Somewhere behind us another tree went over with a vast crash. Kyra covered her ears.

  “It’s all right, honey,” I said. “We’re here, we made it.”

  I turned off the engine and killed the lights. Without them I could see little; almost all the day had gone out of the day. I tried to open my door and at first couldn’t. I pushed harder and it not only opened, it was ripped right out of my hand. I got out and in a brilliant stroke of lightning saw Kyra crawling across the seat toward me, her face white with panic, her eyes huge and brimming with terror. My door swung back and hit me in the ass hard enough to hurt. I ignored it, gathered Ki into my arms, and turned with her. Cold rain drenched us both in an instant. Except it really wasn’t like rain at all; it was like stepping under a waterfall.

  “My doggy!” Ki shrieked. Shriek or not, I could hardly hear her. I could see her face, though, and her empty hands. “Stricken! I drop Stricken!”

  I looked around and yes, there he was, floating down the macadam of the driveway and past the stoop. A little farther on, the rushing water spilled off the paving and down the slope; if Strickland went with the flow, he’d probably end up in the woods somewhere. Or all the way down to the lake.

  “Stricken!” Ki sobbed. “My DOGGY!”

  Suddenly nothing mattered to either of us but that stupid stuffed toy. I chased down the driveway after it with Ki in my arms, oblivious of the rain and wind and brilliant flashes of lightning. And yet it was going to beat me to the slope—the water in which it was caught was running too fast for me to catch up.

  What snagged it at the edge of the paving was a trio of sunflowers waving wildly in the wind. They looked like God-transported worshippers at a revival meeting: Is, Jeesus! Thankya Lawd! They also looked familiar. It was of course impossible that they should be the same three sunflowers which had been growing up through the boards of the stoop in my dream (and in the photograph Bill Dean had taken before I came back), and yet it was them; beyond doubt it was them. Three sunflowers like the three weird sisters in Macbeth, three sunflowers with faces like searchlights. I had come back to Sara Laughs; I was in the zone; I had returned to my dream and this time it had possessed me.

  “Stricken!” Ki bending and thrashing in my arms, both of us too slippery for safety. “Please, Mike, please!”

  Thunder exploded overhead like a basket of nitro. We both screamed. I dropped to one knee and snatched up the little stuffed dog. Kyra clutched it, covered it with frantic kisses. I lurched to my feet as another thunderclap sounded, this one seeming to run through the air like some crazy liquid bullwhip. I looked at the sunflowers, and they seemed to look back at me—Hello, Irish, it’s been a long time, what do you say? Then, resettling Ki in my arms as well as I could, I turned and slogged for the house. It wasn’t easy; the water in the driveway was now ankle-deep and full of melting hailstones. A branch flew past us and landed pretty much where I’d knelt to pick up Strickland. There was a crash and a series of thuds as a bigger branch struck the roof and went rolling down it.

  I ran onto the back stoop, half-expecting the Shape to come rushing out to greet us, raising its baggy not-arms in gruesome good fellowship, but there was no Shape. There was only the storm, and that was enough.

  Ki was clutching the dog tightly, and I saw with no surprise at all that its wetting, combined with the dirt from all those hours of outside play, had turned Strickland black. It was what I had seen in my dream after all.

  Too late now. There was nowhere else to go, no other shelter from the storm. I opened the door and brought Kyra Devore inside Sara Laughs.

  The central portion of Sara—the heart of the house—had stood for almost a hundred years and had seen its share of storms. The one that fell on the lakes region that July afternoon might have been the worst of them, but I knew as soon as we were inside, both of us gasping like people who have narrowly escaped drowning, that it would almost certainly withstand this one as well. The log walls were so thick it was almost like stepping into some sort of vault. The storm’s crash and bash became a noisy drone punctuated by thunderclaps and the occasional loud thud of a branch falling on the roof. Somewhere—in the basement, I guess—a door had come loose and was clapping back and forth. It sounded like a starter’s pistol. The kitchen window had been broken by the topple of a small tree. Its needly tip poked in over the stove, making shadows on the counter and the stove-burners as it swayed. I thought of breaking it off and decided not to. At least it was plugging the hole.

  I carried Ki into the living room and we looked out at the lake, black water prinked up in surreal points under a black sky. Lightning flashed almost constantly, revealing a ring of woods that danced and swayed in a frenzy all around the lake. As solid as the house was, it was groaning deeply within itself as the wind pummelled it and tried to push it down the hill.

  There was a soft, steady chiming. Kyra lifted her head from my shoulder and looked around.

  “You have a moose,” she said. “Yes, that’s Bunter.”

  “Does he bite?”

  “No, honey, he can’t bite. He’s like a… like a doll, I suppose.”

  “Why is his bell ringing?”

  “He’s glad we’re here. He’s glad we made it.”

  I saw her want to be happy, and then I saw her realizing that Mattie wasn’t here to be happy with. I saw the idea that Mattie would never be here to be happy with glimmer in her mind… and felt her push it away.

  Over our heads something huge crashed down on the roof, the lights flickered, and Ki began to weep again.

  “No, honey,’, I said, and began to walk with her. “No, honey, no, Ki, don’t. Don’t, honey, don’t.”

  “I want my mommy! I want my Mattie!”

  I walked her the way I think you’re supposed to walk babies who have colic. She understood too much for a three-year-old, and her suffering was consequently more terrible than any three-year-old should have to bear. So I held her in my arms and walked her, her shorts damp with urine and rainwater under my hands, her arms fever-hot around my neck, her cheeks slathered with snot and tears, her hair a soaked clump from our brief dash through the downpour, her breath acetone, her toy a strangulated black clump that sent dirty water trickling over her knuckles. I walked her. Back and forth we went through Sara’s living room, back and forth through dim light thrown by the overhead and one lamp. Generator light is never quite steady, never quite still—it seems to breathe and sigh. Back and forth through the ceaseless low chiming of Bunter’s bell, like music from that world we sometimes touch but never really see. Back and forth beneath the sound
of the storm. I think I sang to her and I know I touched her with my mind and we went deeper and deeper into that zone together. Above us the clouds ran and the rain pelted, dousing the fires the lightning had started in the woods. The house groaned and the air eddied with gusts coming in through the broken kitchen window, but through it all there was a feeling of rueful safety.

  A feeling of coming home.

  At last her tears began to taper off. She lay with her cheek and the weight of her heavy head on my shoulder, and when we passed the lakeside windows I could see her eyes looking out into the silver-dark storm, wide and unblinking. Carrying her was a tall man with thinning hair. I realized I could see the dining-room table right through us. Our reflections are ghosts already, I thought.

  “Ki? Can you eat something?”

  “Not hung’y.”

  “Can you drink a glass of milk?”

  “No, cocoa. I cold.”

  “Yes, of course you are. And I have cocoa.”

  I tried to put her down and she held on with panicky tightness, scrambling against me with her plump little thighs. I hoisted her back up again, this time settling her against my hip, and she subsided.

  “Who’s here?” she asked. She had begun to shiver. “Who’s here ’sides us?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There’s a boy,” she said. “I saw him there.” She pointed Strickland toward the sliding glass door which gave on the deck (all the chairs out there had been overturned and thrown into the corners; one of the set was missing, apparently blown right over the rail). “He was black like on that funny show me and Mattie watch. There are other black people, too. A lady in a big hat. A man in blue pants. The rest are hard to see.

  But they watch. They watch us. Don’t you see them?”

  “They can’t hurt us.”

  “Are you sure? Are you, are you?”

  I didn’t answer.

  I found a box of Swiss Miss hiding behind the flour cannister, tore open one of the packets, and dumped it into a cup. Thunder exploded overhead.

  Ki jumped in my arms and let out a long, miserable wail. I hugged her, kissed her cheek.

  “Don’t put me down, Mike, I scared.”

  “I won’t put you down. You’re my good girl.”

  “I scared of the boy and the blue-pants man and the lady. I think it’s the lady who wore Mattie’s dress. Are they ghosties?’

  “Yes.”

  “Are they bad, like the men who chased us at the fair? Are they?”

  “I don’t really know, Ki, and that’s the truth.”

  “But we’ll find out.”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what you thought. “But we’ll find out.’”

  “Yes,” I said. “I guess that’s what I was thinking. Something like that.”

  I took her down to the master bedroom while the water heated in the kettle, thinking there had to be something left of Jo’s I could pop her into, but all of the drawers in Jo’s bureau were empty. So was her side of the closet. I stood Ki on the big double bed where I had not so much as taken a nap since coming back, took off her clothes, carried her into the bathroom, and wrapped her in a bathtowel. She hugged it around herself, shaking and blue-lipped. I used another one to dry her hair as best I could. During all of this, she never let go of the stuffed dog, which was now beginning to bleed stuffing from its seams.

  I opened the medicine cabinet, pawed through it, and found what I was looking for on the top shelf: the Benadryl Jo had kept around for her ragweed allergy. I thought of checking the expiration date on the bottom of the box, then almost laughed out loud. What difference did that make?

  I stood Ki on the closed toilet seat and let her hold on around my neck while I stripped the childproof backing from four of the little pink-and-white caplets. Then I rinsed out the tooth-glass and filled it with cold water. While I was doing this I saw movement in the bathroom mirror, which reflected the doorway and the master bedroom beyond. I told myself that I was only seeing the shadows of windblown trees. I offered the caplets to Ki. She reached for them, then hesitated. “Go on,” I said. “It’s medicine.”

  “What kind?” she asked. Her small hand was still poised over the little cluster of caplets.

  “Sadness medicine,” I said. “Can you swallow pills, Ki?”

  “Sure. I taught myself when I was two.”

  She hesitated a moment longer—looking at me and looking into me, I think, ascertaining that I was telling her something I really believed.

  What she saw or felt must have satisfied her, because she took the caplets and put them in her mouth, one after another. She swallowed them with little birdie-sips from the glass, then said: “I still feel sad, Mike.”

  “It takes awhile for them to work.”

  I rummaged in my shirt drawer and found an old Harley-Davidson tee that had shrunk. It was still miles too big for her, but when I tied a knot in one side it made a kind of sarong that kept slipping off one of her shoulders. It was almost cute.

  I carry a comb in my back pocket. I took it out and combed her hair back from her forehead and her temples. She was starting to look put together again, but there was still something missing. Something that was connected in my mind with Royce Merrill. That was crazy, though…

  wasn’t it?

  “Mike? What cane? What cane are you thinking about it?”

  Then it came to me. “A candy cane,” I said. “The kind with stripes.”

  From my pocket I took the two white ribbons. Their red edges looked almost raw in the uncertain light. “Like these.” I tied her hair back in two little ponytails. Now she had her ribbons; she had her black dog; the sunflowers had relocated a few feet north, but they were there.

  Everything was more or less the way it was supposed to be.

  Thunder blasted, somewhere close a tree fell, and the lights went out.

  After five seconds of dark-gray shadows, they came on again. I carried Ki back to the kitchen, and when we passed the cellar door, something laughed behind it. I heard it; Ki did, too. I could see it in her eyes.

  “Take care of me,” she said. “Take care of me cause I’m just a little guy. You promised.”

  “I will.”

  “I love you, Mike.”

  “I love you, too, Ki.”

  The kettle was huffing. I filled the cup to the halfway mark with hot water, then topped it up with milk, cooling it off and making it richer.

  I took Kyra over to the couch. As we passed the dining-room table I glanced at the IBM typewriter and at the manuscript with the cross-word-puzzle book lying on top of it. Those things looked vaguely foolish and somehow sad, like gadgets that never worked very well and now do not work at all.

  Lightning lit up the entire sky, scouring the room with purple light. In that glare the laboring trees looked like screaming fingers, and as the light raced across the sliding glass door to the deck I saw a woman standing behind us, by the woodstove. She was indeed wearing a straw hat, with a brim the size of a cartwheel.

  “What do you mean, the river is almost in the sea?” Ki asked.

  I sat down and handed her the cup. “Drink that up.”

  “Why did the men hurt my mommy? Didn’t they want her to have a good time?”

  “I guess not,” I said. I began to cry. I held her on my lap, wiping away the tears with the backs of my hands.

  “You should have taken some sad-pills, too,” Ki said. She held out her cocoa. Her hair ribbons, which I had tied in big sloppy bows, bobbed.

  “Here. Drink some.”

  I drank some. From the north end of the house came another grinding, crackling crash. The low rumble of the generator stuttered and the house went gray again. Shadows raced across Ki’s small face.

  “Hold on,” I told her. “Try not to be scared. Maybe the lights will come back.” A moment later they did, although now I could hear a hoarse, uneven note in the gennie’s roar and the flicker of the lights was much more noticeable.

  “
Tell me a story,” she said. “Tell me about Cinderbell.”

  “Cinderella.”

  “Yeah, her.”

  “All right, but storyguys get paid.” I pursed my lips and made sipping sounds.

  She held the cup out. The cocoa was sweet and good. The sensation of being watched was heavy and not sweet at all, but let them watch. Let them watch while they could.

  “There was this pretty girl named Cinderella—”

  “Once upon a time! That’s how it starts! That’s how they all start!”

  “That’s right, I forgot. Once upon a time there was this pretty girl named Cinderella, who had two mean stepsisters. Their names were… do you remember?”

  “Tammy Faye and Vanna.”

  “Yeah, the Queens of Hairspray. And they made Cinderella do all the really unpleasant chores, like sweeping out the fireplace and cleaning up the dogpoop in the back yard. Now it just so happened that the noted rock band Oasis was going to play a gig at the palace, and although all the girls had been invited…”

  I got as far as the part about the fairy godmother catching the mice and turning them into a Mercedes limousine before the Benadryl took effect.

  It really was a medicine for sadness; when I looked down, Ki was fast asleep in the crook of my arm with her cocoa cup listing radically to port. I plucked it from her fingers and put it on the coffee-table, then brushed her drying hair off her forehead.

  “Ki?”

  Nothing. She’d gone to the land of Noddy-Blinky. It probably helped that her afternoon nap had ended almost before it got started. I picked her up and carried her down to the north bedroom, her feet bouncing limply in the air and the hem of the Harley shirt flipping around her knees. I put her on the bed and pulled the duvet up to her chin. Thunder boomed like artillery fire, but she didn’t even stir. Exhaustion, grief, Benadryl. . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good. I bent over and kissed her cheek, which had finally begun to cool. “I’ll take care of you,” I said. “I promised, and I will.” As if hearing me, Ki turned on her side, put the hand holding Strick-land under her jaw, and made a soft sighing sound. Her lashes were dark soot against her cheeks, in startling contrast to her light hair. Looking at her I felt myself swept by love, shaken by it the way one is shaken by a sickness. Take care of me, I’m just a little guy. “I will, Ki-bird,” I said. I went into the bathroom and began filling the tub, as I had once filled it in my sleep. She would sleep through it all if I could get enough warm water before the generator quit entirely. I wished I had a bath-toy to give her in case she did wake up, something like Wilhelm the Spouting Whale, but she’d have her dog, and she probably wouldn’t wake up, anyway. No freezing baptism under a handpump for Kyra. I was not cruel, and I was not crazy. I had only disposable razors in the medicine cabinet, no good for the other job ahead of me.