Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . . As I stood there, hushed and still, I could swear that the house was not an empty shell but lived and breathed as it had lived before. Rebecca, DAPHNE DU MAURIER

Dead people put on weight, it seems to me; both in their flesh and in our minds, they put on weight.

Ironically, one of the books that kept me from going higher was Steel Machine, by Thad Beaumont (writing as George Stark). The Beaumonts had a summer place in Castle Rock back in those days, not even fifty miles south of our place on Dark Score Lake. Thad’s dead now. Suicide. I don’t know if it had anything to do with writer’s block or not.

(not Maugham that night but William Denbrough, one of her contemporary favorites).

Even one of William Denbrough’s famous Creatures from Beyond the Universe, now hiding under the porch and watching me approach with glittering, pus-rimmed eyes.

No human instinct is more powerful than the sex-drive when it is fully aroused, and its awakening images are emotional tattoos that never leave us.

Exhaustion, grief, Benadryl . . . they had taken her deep, taken her beyond ghosts and sorrow, and that was good.

Nineteen.