Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

Give me that, Jo had snarled in my dream of her. In the dream she hadn’t looked like Jo at all, she’d looked like some other woman, maybe like the one in the Book of Proverbs, the strange woman whose lips were as honey but whose heart was full of gall and wormwood. A strange woman with fingers as cold as twigs after a frost. Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher.

The magnets were back in a circle again, but this time four letters and one number had been pulled into the center and lined up there. They spelled a single lower-case word: hel1o

“Hello,” I said, and opened the fridge to get a soda. “Whoever or whatever you are, hello.”

I turned off the light and lay back down with my eyes open, waiting for Bunter’s bell to ring or the childish sobbing to start. I was still listening when I fell asleep.

“Your actual lines are, ‘Let me give you a piece of advice—don’t fuck with Mr. Devore or he’ll squash you like a bug.’ ”

“You can say stuff like that ’cause you’re a writer.”

If the front of my Kenmore was going to become a Ouija board, I’d need a good supply of letters. Especially vowels.

“If the front of my Kenmore was going to become a Ouija board, I’d need a good supply of letters. Especially vowels.” —Stephen King, “Bag of Bones” (1998)

All at once I decided I wanted to do more with the summer than worry about ghosts, crying kids, and what my wife had been up to four or five years ago . . . if, in fact, she had been up to anything.

I stuck with the Devores, mentioning nothing about voices, crying children, or thumps in the dark.

“Is it paternity?” he asked, sounding both respectful and afraid. “No, custody.” I thought about telling him to get the whole story from the Lawyer to Be Named Later, but Harold deserved better . . . and would demand to hear my version sooner or later anyway, no matter what the lawyer told him. I gave him an account of my Fourth of July morning and its aftermath. I stuck with the Devores, mentioning nothing about voices, crying children, or thumps in the dark. Harold only interrupted once, and that was when he realized who the villain of the piece was.

Remind her that she couldn’t afford to be proud.

If she really balks, you know what to do, don’t you? Of course. Remind her that she couldn’t afford to be proud. That she couldn’t afford to go all Yankee, refusing charity from Michael Noonan, author of Being Two, The Red-Shirt Man, and the soon-to-be-published Helen’s Promise. Remind her that she could have her pride or her daughter, but likely not both. Hey, Mattie, pick one.

My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers.

During my hike back down the lane to the house, I tried to think about nothing at all. My first editor used to say that eighty-five per cent of what goes on in a novelist’s head is none of his business, a sentiment I’ve never believed should be restricted to just writers. So-called higher thought is, by and large, highly overrated. When trouble comes and steps have to be taken, I find it’s generally better to just stand aside and let the boys in the basement do their work. That’s blue-collar labor down there, nonunion guys with lots of muscles and tattoos. Instinct is their specialty, and they refer problems upstairs for actual cogitation only as a last resort.

I think novelists may come equipped with a certain number of stories to tell—they’re built into the software. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.”

“You’ve retired?” she asked, sounding calm and remarkably unhorrified. “Or is it writer’s block?” “Well, it’s certainly not chosen retirement.” I realized the conversation had taken a rather amusing turn. I’d come primarily to sell her on John Storrow—to shove John Storrow down her throat, if that was what it took—and instead I was for the first time discussing my inability to work. For the first time with anyone. “So it’s a block.” “I used to think so, but now I’m not so sure. I think novelists may come equipped with a certain number of stories to tell—they’re built into the software. And when they’re gone, they’re gone.” “I doubt that,” she said. “Maybe you’ll write now that you’re down here. Maybe that’s part of the reason you came back.” “Maybe you’re right.”

I’ve woken up several times lately, sure that I wasn’t in the bedroom alone. Once when I was sure I wasn’t in the bed alone.

“The custody case is only part of it,” she said. “I’m scared just to be here, on the TR. It started early this summer, long after I knew Devore meant to get Ki away from me if he could. And it’s getting worse. In a way it’s like watching thunderheads gather over New Hampshire and then come piling across the lake. I can’t put it any better than that, except . . .” She shifted, crossing her legs and then bending forward to pull the skirt of her dress against the line of her shin, as if she were cold. “Except that I’ve woken up several times lately, sure that I wasn’t in the bedroom alone. Once when I was sure I wasn’t in the bed alone. Sometimes it’s just a feeling—like a headache, only in your nerves—and sometimes I think I can hear whispering, or crying. I made a cake one night—about two weeks ago, this was—and forgot to put the flour away. The next morning the cannister was overturned, and the flour was spilled on the counter. Someone had written ‘hello’ in it. I thought at first it was Ki, but she said she didn’t do it. Besides, it wasn’t her printing, hers is all straggly. I don’t know if she could even write hello. Hi, maybe, but . . . Mike, you don’t think he could be sending someone around to try and freak me out, do you? I mean that’s just stupid, right?”

“Maybe it’s ghosts,”

“Maybe it’s ghosts,” she said, and smiled in an uncertain way that was more frightened than amused.

I didn’t like Mattie’s quiet; it seemed like the prelude to an explosion. A Yankee explosion.

if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them.”

maybe I saved her life the other day when I grabbed her out of the road. We’ll never know for sure, but maybe I did. You know what the Chinese say about something like that?” I didn’t expect an answer, the question was more rhetorical than real, but she surprised me. Not for the last time, either. “That if you save someone’s life, you’re responsible for them.”

I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once.

I caught the measles when I was eight, and I was very ill. “I thought you were going to die,” my father told me once, and he was not a man given to exaggeration. He told me about how he and my mother had dunked me in a tub of cold water one night, both of them at least half-convinced the shock of it would stop my heart, but both of them completely convinced that I’d burn up before their eyes if they didn’t do something. I had begun to speak in a loud, monotonously discursive voice about the bright figures I saw in the room—angels come to bear me away, my terrified mother was sure—and the last time my father took my temperature before the cold plunge, he said that the mercury on the old Johnson & Johnson rectal thermometer had stood at a hundred and six degrees. After that, he said, he didn’t dare take it anymore. I don’t remember any bright figures, but I remember a strange period of time that was like being in a funhouse corridor where several different movies were showing at once. The world grew elastic, bulging in places where it had never bulged before, wavering in places where it had always been solid. People—most of them seeming impossibly tall—darted in and out of my room on scissoring, cartoonish legs. Their words all came out booming, with instant echoes. Someone shook a pair of baby-shoes in my face. I seem to remember my brother, Siddy, sticking his hand into his shirt and making repeated arm-fart noises. Continuity broke down. Everything came in segments, weird wieners on a poison string.

It was as if I had found a secret passage hidden just beyond the wall of the world and went crawling along it.

“You know we’re goin back to MANderley, We’re gonna dance on the SANderley, I’m gonna sing with the BANderley, We gonna ball all we CANderley— Ball me, baby, yeah!”

First there was music. Not Dixieland, because there were no horns, but like Dixieland. A primitive, reeling kind of bebop. Three or four acoustic guitars, a harmonica, a stand-up bass (or maybe a pair). Behind all of this was a hard, happy drumming that didn’t sound as if it was coming from a real drum; it sounded as if someone with a lot of percussive talent was whopping on a bunch of boxes. Then a woman’s voice joined in—a contralto voice, not quite mannish, roughing over the high notes. It was laughing and urgent and ominous all at the same time, and I knew at once that I was hearing Sara Tidwell, who had never cut a record in her life. I was hearing Sara Laughs, and man, she was rocking. “You know we’re goin back to MANderley, We’re gonna dance on the SANderley, I’m gonna sing with the BANderley, We gonna ball all we CANderley— Ball me, baby, yeah!” The basses—yes, there were two—broke out in a barnyard shuffle like the break in Elvis’s version of “Baby Let’s Play House,” and then there was a guitar solo: Son Tidwell playing that chickenscratch thing.

I could hear Sara shouting out the lyric, laughing her way through it as though it were the funniest thing she’d ever heard, all that Manderley-sanderley-canderley stuff, but I could no longer make out the individual words.

The shadow-shape falling on the door wasn’t quite human.

The shadow on the door raised its arms. “It ain’t nuthin but a barn-dance sugar!” Sara Tidwell’s laughing, furious voice sang. “It ain’t nuthin but a round-and-round!”

The man who’d been standing on the path was gone but he had left a plastic owl to mark his place.

I looked out at the swimming float. Jo stood there. She must have just climbed out of the water, because she was still dripping and her hair was plastered against her cheeks. She was wearing the two-piece swimsuit from the photo I’d found, gray with red piping.

“You’re not Jo,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Who was the guy at the game?” I panted. “Who was he, Jo?” “No one in particular, Irish. Just another bag of bones.”

Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current.

All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead—mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders.

Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed—a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman.

The typewriter—thirty or so pounds of IBM Selectric—was shaking back and forth in my arms. I could feel my muscles twanging like guitar strings.

“I don’t believe these lies,” I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together.

“I don’t believe these lies,” I heard myself say, and as though it were an incantation, I was slapped back together. That isn’t exactly what happened, but it’s the only way of saying that seems to come close to whatever did. There were three of me—one on the float, one in the north bedroom, one on the path—and each one felt that hard slap, as if the wind had grown a fist. There was rushing blackness, and in it the steady silver shaking of Bunter’s bell. Then it faded, and I faded with it. For a little while I was nowhere at all.

It felt as real as any of the things I’d experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.

Then I remembered the blood-soaked sheet in the north bedroom, and the stuffed animal lying on its side in the middle of it. There was no sense of relief attached to the memory, that thank-God-it-was-only-a-dream feeling you get after a particularly nasty nightmare. It felt as real as any of the things I’d experienced in my measles fever-delirium . . . and all those things had been real, just distorted by my overheated brain.

I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout.

I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work . . . if I could work. I’d work in there even if the temperature beneath the roofpeak built to a hundred and twenty degrees . . . which, by three in the afternoon, it just might.

I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon.

I opened the office door, carried the typewriter in, and put it in its old place beneath the poster of Richard Nixon. I pulled the pink slip out of the roller, balled it up, and tossed it into the wastebasket. Then I picked up the Selectric’s plug and stuck it in the baseboard socket. My heart was beating hard and fast, the way it had when I was thirteen and climbing the ladder to the high board at the Y-pool. I had climbed that ladder three times when I was twelve and then slunk back down it again; once I turned thirteen, there could be no chickening out—I really had to do it.

I got my bare foot out of its landing zone just in time and barked a gust of loud, humorless laughter.

I lowered my hand and flicked the switch. The machine came on. The Courier ball did a preliminary twirl, like a ballet dancer standing in the wings, waiting to go on. I picked up a piece of paper, saw my sweaty fingers were leaving marks, and didn’t care. I rolled it into the machine, centered it, then wrote Chapter One and waited for the storm to break.

The ringing of the phone—or, more accurately, the way I received the ringing of the phone—was as familiar as the creaks of my chair or the hum of the old IBM Selectric. It seemed to come from far away at first, then to approach like a whistling train coming down on a crossing.

Perhaps sometimes ghosts were alive—minds and desires divorced from their bodies, unlocked impulses floating unseen. Ghosts from the id, spooks from low places.

Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men.

That thought called up another. Do what you want, they had said. Both of them. Do what you want. And that was a line I knew. While on Key Largo I’d read an Atlantic Monthly essay on pornography by some feminist. I wasn’t sure which one, only that it hadn’t been Naomi Wolf or Camille Paglia. This woman had been of the conservative stripe, and she had used that phrase. Sally Tisdale, maybe? Or was my mind just hearing echo-distortions of Sara Tidwell? Whoever it had been, she’d claimed that “do what I want” was the basis of erotica which appealed to women and “do what you want” was the basis of pornography which appealed to men. Women imagine speaking the former line in sexual situations; men imagine having the latter line spoken to them. And, the writer went on, when real-world sex goes bad—sometimes turning violent, sometimes shaming, sometimes just unsuccessful from the female partner’s point of view—porn is often the unindicted co-conspirator. The man is apt to round on the woman angrily and cry, “You wanted me to! Quit lying and admit it! You wanted me to!” The writer claimed it was what every man hoped to hear in the bedroom: Do what you want. Bite me, sodomize me, lick between my toes, drink wine out of my navel, give me a hairbrush and raise your ass for me to paddle, it doesn’t matter. Do what you want. The door is closed and we are here, but really only you are here, I am just a willing extension of your fantasies and only you are here. I have no wants of my own, no needs of my own, no taboos. Do what you want to this shadow, this fantasy, this ghost.

she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them.

I’d thought the essayist at least fifty per cent full of shit; the assumption that a man can find real sexual pleasure only by turning a woman into a kind of jackoff accessory says more about the observer than the participants. This lady had had a lot of jargon and a fair amount of wit, but underneath she was only saying what Somerset Maugham, Jo’s old favorite, had had Sadie Thompson say in “Rain,” a story written eighty years before: men are pigs, filthy, dirty pigs, all of them. But we are not pigs, as a rule, not beasts, or at least not unless we are pushed to the final extremity. And if we are pushed to it, the issue is rarely sex; it’s usually territory. I’ve heard feminists argue that to men sex and territory are interchangeable, and that is very far from the truth.

And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room.

I padded back to the office, opened the door, and behind me the telephone rang again. And here was another familiar sensation, back for a return visit after four years: that anger at the telephone, the urge to simply rip it out of the wall and fire it across the room. Why did the whole world have to call while I was writing? Why couldn’t they just . . . well . . . let me do what I wanted?

I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent without Jo, without friends, and without my work.

I cried in grief for the empty years I had spent without Jo, without friends, and without my work. I cried in gratitude because those workless years seemed to be over. It was too early to tell for sure—one swallow doesn’t make a summer and eight pages of hard copy don’t make a career resuscitation—but I thought it really might be so. And I cried out of fear, as well, as we do when some awful experience is finally over or when some terrible accident has been narrowly averted. I cried because I suddenly realized that I had been walking a white line ever since Jo died, walking straight down the middle of the road. By some miracle, I had been carried out of harm’s way. I had no idea who had done the carrying, but that was all right—it was a question that could wait for another day.

I cried it all out of me. Then I went on down to the lake and waded in. The cool water felt more than good on my overheated body; it felt like a resurrection.

“I am Kyra Devore’s guardian ad litem,” he said. “Do you know what that means, Mr. Noonan?” “I believe I do.” “It means,” Durgin rolled on, “that I’ve been appointed by Judge Rancourt to decide—if I can—where Kyra Devore’s best interests lie, should a custody judgment become necessary. Judge Rancourt would not, in such an event, be required to base his decision on my conclusions, but in many cases that is what happens.”

I felt lonely and content at the same time. I believe that is a rare kind of happiness.

That doesn’t say much for the old Wordsworthian idea of pastoral innocence and goodness,

“It’s just the TR,” I said absently. “There’s no real way to explain it. Do you actually believe Devore’s bribing everyone? That doesn’t say much for the old Wordsworthian idea of pastoral innocence and goodness, does it?”

the folks around here seem at least as honest as honest politicians.”

“He’s spreading money and using Osgood—maybe Footman, too—to spread stories. And the folks around here seem at least as honest as honest politicians.” “The ones who stay bought?”

Except the same ghost of a smile lurked in Son Tidwell’s eyes. The resemblance was remarkable. I had an idea that the two of them had been brother and sister, not man and wife.