Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

A fourth scream floated out of the dark, then Sara was silent. Breathless, the house breathed around me. Alive in the heat, aware in the faint sound of dawn thunder.

“Okay, here comes the chatterbox.” There was a rustling as the phone changed hands, then Ki was there. “I taggled you at the Fair, Mike! I taggled my own quartermack!” “Did you?” I asked. “That was quite a dream, wasn’t it, Ki?” There was a long silence at the other end. I could imagine Mattie wondering what had happened to her telephone chatterbox. At last Ki said in a hesitating voice: “You there too.” Tiu. “We saw the snake-dance ladies . . . the pole with the bell on top . . . we went in the spookyhouse . . . you fell down in the barrel! It wasn’t a dream . . . was it?” I could have convinced her that it was, but all at once that seemed like a bad idea, one that was dangerous in its own way. I said: “You had on a pretty hat and a pretty dress.” “Yeah!” Ki sounded enormously relieved. “And you had on—” “Kyra, stop. Listen to me.” She stopped at once. “It’s better if you don’t talk about that dream too much, I think. To your mom or to anyone except me.” “Except you.” “Yes. And the same with the refrigerator people. Okay?” “Okay. Mike, there was a lady in Mattie’s clothes.”

Just because Lindy Briggs offered you your old job back doesn’t mean everyone in town is suddenly your friend.”

Don’t ask me why I think that might be, because I have no satisfactory answer. It’s only a feeling, but since I got back on the TR, my feelings are different.”

work had always been my drug of choice,

And if Kyra and I were doing the old mind-meld thing, could not other people in TR-90 also be doing it, perhaps without even knowing it?

I was on the porch of the neat-as-ever-you-saw Cape Cod which stands at the top of Peabody Hill and looks all the way across New Hampshire and into Vermont’s back yard.

Something followed her to Derry,

Do you care about your soul, Mr. Noonan? God’s butterfly caught in a cocoon of flesh that will soon stink like mine?

A draft—not cold but warm, like the rush of air produced by a subway train on a summer night—buffeted past me. In it I heard a strange voice which seemed to be saying Bye-BY, bye-BY, bye-BY, as if wishing me a good trip home. Then, as it dawned on me that the voice was actually saying Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, Ki-Ki, something struck me and knocked me violently forward. It felt like a large soft fist. I buckled over the table, clawing at it to stay up, overturning the lazy susan with the salt and pepper shakers on it, the napkin holder, the little vase Mrs. M. had filled with daisies. The vase rolled off the table and shattered. The kitchen TV blared on, some politician talking about how inflation was on the march again. The CD player started up, drowning out the politician; it was the Rolling Stones doing a cover of Sara Tidwell’s “I Regret You, Baby.” Upstairs, one smoke alarm went off, then another, then a third. They were joined a moment later by the warble-whoop of the Chevy’s car alarm. The whole world was cacophony.

I had almost reached the bottom of the page when the cold descended again, that outer cold that was like sleet in January, chilling my skin and crackling the snot in my nose and sending two shuddery puffs of white air from my mouth. My hand clenched and the pencil snapped in two. Behind me, Bunter’s bell rang out one final furious convulsion before falling silent. Also from behind me came a peculiar double pop, like the sound of champagne corks being drawn. Then it was over. Whatever it had been or however many they had been, it was finished. I was alone again.

With the worst of the noise gone I could hear the TV cackling away in the kitchen. I went down, killed it, then froze with my hand still on the OFF button, looking at Jo’s annoying waggy-cat clock. Its tail had finally stopped switching, and its big plastic eyes lay on the floor. They had popped right out of its head.

“What string did he put on the money?” “That Mattie remain on the TR for one year following Devore’s death—until July 17, 1999. She can leave on day-trips, but she has to be tucked up in her TR-90 bed every night by nine o’clock, or else the legacy is forfeit. Did you ever hear such a bullshit thing in your life? Outside of some old George Sanders movie, that is?”

By the way, what’s going on with Ki’s fridgeafator people? Are they writing any new stuff?” “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-who-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 allamagoosalum 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 flannel-board the story of baby Moses.” “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said . . . but of course I did. We all did.

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, “Well I ain’t your honey like I used to be.”

—Can’t help. Can’t stay.

“Jo! Wait!” —Can’t help. Can’t stay. Words from another star system, barely glimpsed on a fading mouth. Now she was little more than eyes floating in the dark afternoon, eyes which seemed made of the lake behind them.

Sara Laughs had stood up to the storm very well—but something was wrong. There was something I could almost smell . . . and perhaps I did smell it, bitter and low. Lunacy may have its own wild-vetch aroma. It’s not the kind of thing I would ever care to research.

She came down here because The Street’s the way back to Warrington’s, and Warrington’s is where she’s been, all by herself, ever since she sent the boss’s body back to California in his private jet.

It seemed like forever, but I had an idea it hadn’t been long at all—less than five minutes, maybe.

“Go away! I don’t want you, white nana! Go away!”

Thunder rolled across the lake like a big mahogany ball, the sound echoing off the mountains.

I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, Mrs. M. had told me. They think it’s cute.

I’ve known a lot of folks name their kids alike, Mrs. M. had told me. They think it’s cute. Max Devore must have thought so, too, because he had named a son Roger and his daughter Rogette. Perhaps she’d come by the Whitmore part honestly—she might have been married in her younger years—but once the wig was gone, her antecedents were beyond argument. The woman tottering along the wet dock to finish the job was Kyra’s aunt.

’T’wasn’t the stawm of the century, chummy, and don’t you go thinkin that it was. Nossir.

you rarely win an argument with a genuine Yankee old-timer, never if it’s about the weather—but

I didn’t remember bringing the box up from the studio with me, but I suppose I might not have; I was pretty freaked. I also think it could have come up . . . kind of by itself. I do believe such things now; I have reason to.

In the woods the trees had stopped falling, but the wind still blew. Around the eaves of Sara Laughs it made a sound like ancient music.

“First off and most important, do you have the child? Kyra Devore?” “Yes.” “Where is she?” “I’ll be happy to show you.” We walked down the north-wing corridor and stood just outside the bedroom doorway, looking in. The duvet was pulled up to her chin and she was sleeping deeply. The stuffed dog was curled in one hand—we could just see its muddy tail poking out of her fist at one end and its nose poking out at the other. We stood there for a long time, neither of us saying anything, watching her sleep in the light of a summer evening. In the woods the trees had stopped falling, but the wind still blew. Around the eaves of Sara Laughs it made a sound like ancient music.

It snowed for Christmas—a polite six inches of powder that made the carollers working the streets of Sanford look like they belonged in It’s a Wonderful Life.

“I sometimes feel like a character in Bleak House. That’s the one where Dickens says that in court nobody wins but the lawyers.

I thought of the baying thing which Jo had managed to hold back while I poured the lye into that rotted roll of canvas. An Outsider, she had called it. I hadn’t gotten a clear look at it, and probably that was good. Probably that was very good.

On a couple of occasions I had awakened with a sensation Mattie had once mentioned—that there was someone in bed with me. But not a dangerous presence. On a couple of occasions I have smelled (or thought I have) Red perfume. And sometimes, even when the air is perfectly still, Bunter’s bell will shiver out a few notes. It’s as if something lonely wants to say hello.

“Why did she try to kill Kyra? I don’t understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwell’s hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have . . . why are you looking at me that way?”

“Why did she try to kill Kyra? I don’t understand that. If you broke Sara Tidwell’s hold on this earthly plane of ours when you dissolved her bones, the curse should have . . . why are you looking at me that way?” “You’d understand if you’d ever met Devore,” I said. “This is the man who lit the whole fucking TR on fire as a way of saying goodbye when he headed west to sunny California. I thought of him the second I pulled the wig off, thought they’d swapped identities somehow. Then I thought Oh no, it’s her all right, it’s Rogette, she’s just lost her hair somehow.” “And you were right. The chemo.” “I was also wrong. I know more about ghosts than I did, Frank. Maybe the most important thing is that what you see first, what you think first . . . that’s what’s usually true. It was him that day. Devore. He came back at the end. I’m sure of it. At the end it wasn’t about Sara, not for him. At the end it wasn’t even about Kyra. At the end it was about Scooter Larribee’s sled.”

“Probably it wasn’t Jared Devore or his logger-boys who set it, either—they didn’t want any more to do with Sara and Son’s people after the murders, they kept right clear of them.

“According to Jo’s notes, by then they never went near him. They reburied the bag of bones—without Jared Devore’s help—where I eventually dug it up. In the late fall or early winter of 1902, I think.”

“When the story starts going sour, bring on the man with the gun.” Raymond Chandler said that, or something like it—close enough for government work, kemo sabe.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme.

Murder is the worst kind of pornography, murder is let me do what I want taken to its final extreme. I believe that even make-believe murders should be taken seriously; maybe that’s another idea I got last summer. Perhaps I got it while Mattie was struggling in my arms, gushing blood from her smashed head and dying blind, still crying out for her daughter as she left this earth. To think I might have written such a hellishly convenient death in a book, ever, sickens me.

Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and while he was at the height of his narrative genius.

Thomas Hardy, who supposedly said that the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones, stopped writing novels himself after finishing Jude the Obscure and while he was at the height of his narrative genius. He went on writing poetry for another twenty years, and when someone asked him why he’d quit fiction he said he couldn’t understand why he had trucked with it so long in the first place. In retrospect it seemed silly to him, he said. Pointless. I know exactly what he meant. In the time between now and whenever the Outsider remembers me and decides to come back, there must be other things to do, things that mean more than those shadows. I think I could go back to clanking chains behind the Ghost House wall, but I have no interest in doing so. I’ve lost my taste for spooks. I like to imagine Mattie would think of Bartleby in Melville’s story. I’ve put down my scrivener’s pen. These days I prefer not to. Center Lovell, Maine: May 25th, 1997–February 6th, 1998