Bag of Bones

by Stephen King

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

My strength was robbed by grief.

The Penguin paperback did for me what the big gray coffin had not: it insisted she was dead.

And perhaps the greatest blessing was that we never knew how short the time was.

This is one of the most vivid memories I have, so clear I sometimes feel I could step right into it and live it all again.

“Well, then that’s all right, isn’t it?”

I poured a glass of champagne, let the foam settle, then picked it up. “I’m done, Jo,” I said as I sat there beneath the paddling fans. “So that’s all right, isn’t it?” There was no response. In light of all that came later, I think that’s worth repeating—there was no response. I didn’t sense, as I later did, that I was not alone in a room which appeared empty.

“Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.”

I drank too much, toasted Johanna’s memory too many times . . . and knew, somehow, that she’d be pleased to know I was doing it.

That was a hard, cold winter, lots of snow and in February a flu epidemic that did for an awful lot of Derry’s old folks. It took them the way a hard wind will take old trees after an ice storm. It missed me completely. I hadn’t so much as a case of the sniffles that winter.

Looking at the Word Six icon was suddenly like looking at the pictures of Jo I kept in my wallet. Studying those, I’d sometimes think that I would sell my immortal soul in order to have her back again . . . and on that day in March, I thought I would sell my soul to be able to write a story again. Go on and try it, then, a voice whispered. Maybe things have changed.

I felt the way you do when the dentist has gone a little heavy on the Novocain and flooded your lips and tongue as well as your bad tooth and the patch of gum surrounding it. If I tried to talk, I’d probably only flap and spread spit. Harold

I sat there for almost four hours, looking at everything and seeing nothing.

From the sticker I look back up into the sky, and there is Venus. I wish on her as I always do, I wish for Johanna with the dank and vaguely tremendous smell of the lake in my nose.

Except I can hear slobbering breath behind me in the growing gloom, and padding footsteps. The thing in the woods is now the thing in the driveway. It’s right behind me. If I turn around the sight of it will knock the sanity out of my head in a single roundhouse slap. Something with red eyes, something slumped and hungry. The house is my only hope of safety.

Another two or three steps, and I know. It’s a coffin, the one Frank Arlen dickered for . . . because, he said, the mortician was trying to stick it to me. It’s Jo’s coffin, and lying on its side with the top partway open, enough for me to see it’s empty.

It is human, this figure, and yet it’s not. It is a crumpled white thing with baggy arms upraised. There is no face where its face should be, and yet it is shrieking in a glottal, loonlike voice. It must be Johanna. She was able to escape her coffin, but not her winding shroud. She is all tangled up in it.

Only the loons will hear me. I have come again to Manderley, and this time I will never leave.

I was afraid that if I crawled out of my corner, the white thing would burst out of my bathroom, shrieking its dead shriek, eager to finish what it had started. I know I was shivering all over, and that I was cold and wet from the waist down, because my bladder had let go. I stayed there in the corner, gasping and wet, staring into the darkness, wondering if you could have a nightmare powerful enough in its imagery to drive you insane. I thought then (and think now) that I almost found out on that night in March.

There was no sleep for me the rest of that night, and the dream didn’t fade as dreams usually do upon waking. I lay on my side, the shivers slowly subsiding, thinking of her coffin there in the driveway, thinking that it made a kind of mad sense—Jo had loved Sara, and if she were to haunt anyplace, it would be there. But why would she want to hurt me? Why would my Jo ever want to hurt me? I could think of no reason.

“Spring’ll get here, I guess. Some years it gets a little lost, but it always seems to find its way back home.”

I opened my mouth to say what I always do when someone asks me if I’m all right, then wondered why I always felt I had to pull that tiresome Marlboro Man shit, just who I was trying to fool.

“No, nothing wrong,” I said, and then, because I sort of wanted to see how the words tasted coming out of my own mouth, I repeated them. “A vacation.” “Ayuh,” he said, smiling. “People do it all the time.”

People do it all the time. He was right about that; even people who couldn’t strictly afford to went on vacation. When they got tired. When they got all balled up in their own shit. When the world was too much with them, getting and spending.

I thought about Jo in her long red woods apron, coming to me with a hatful of black trumpet mushrooms, laughing and triumphant: “Nobody on the TR eats better than the Noonans tonight!” she’d cried. I thought of her painting her toenails, bent over between her own thighs in the way only women doing that particular piece of business can manage. I thought of her throwing a book at me because I laughed at some new haircut. I thought of her trying to learn how to play a breakdown on her banjo and of how she looked braless in a thin sweater. I thought of her crying and laughing and angry. I thought of her telling me it was crap, all that frustrated-artist crap.

I was drinking a lot, and maybe that was okay on Key Largo—hell, people were supposed to drink a lot on vacation, it was almost the law—but I’d been drinking too much even before I left. The kind of drinking that could get out of hand in no time at all. The kind that could get a man in trouble.

Did I want things to be all right again? Did I truly want that? A month or a year before I mightn’t have been sure, but now I was. The answer was yes. I wanted to move on—let go of my dead wife, rehab my heart, move on. But to do that, I’d have to go back. Back to the log house. Back to Sara Laughs.

part of me was still a writer, I guess, and a writer is a man who has taught his mind to misbehave.

Anger may be a normal stage of the grieving process—I’ve read that it is—but I was never angry at Johanna in the wake of her death until the day I found that picture.

Grief is like a drunken houseguest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.

I flipped back to the picture side. Three sunflowers, growing up through the boards of the stoop. Not two, not four, but three large sunflowers with faces like searchlights. Just like the ones in my dream.

Bookreaders are just as willing as anyone else to start out with the weather, but as a general rule they can actually go on from there.

through a bullhorn, but I was in trouble just the same. I had lost my place in things and couldn’t find it again. No surprise there; after all, life’s not a book.

It was a sense that reality was thin. I think it is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.

The sound of your voice when you’re alone can be either scary or reassuring.

Without a good book, even two days of rain in the woods can be enough to drive you bonkers.

As I stood in the foyer with no light but the flash and the glow falling in the windows from the bulb over the back stoop, I realized that the line between what I knew was real and what I knew was only my imagination had pretty much disappeared.

I hear voices in my head, and have for as long as I can remember. I don’t know if that’s part of the necessary equipment for being a writer or not; I’ve never asked another one. I never felt the need to, because I know all the voices I hear are versions of me. Still, they often seem like very real versions of other people, and none is more real to me—or more familiar—than Jo’s voice. Now that voice came, sounding interested, amused in an ironic but gentle way . . . and approving. Going to fight, Mike? “Yeah,” I said, standing there in the dark and picking out gleams of chrome with my flashlight. “Think so, babe.”

I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower.

Brenda Meserve had done a good job—a humane job—of removing these signs and signals, but she couldn’t get them all. Jo’s hardcover set of Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels still held pride of place at the center of the living-room bookcase. Jo had always called the moosehead over the fireplace Bunter, and once, for no reason I could remember (certainly it seemed a very un-Bunterlike accessory), she had hung a bell around the moose’s hairy neck. It hung there still, on a red velvet ribbon. Mrs. Meserve might have puzzled over that bell, wondering whether to leave it up or take it down, not knowing that when Jo and I made love on the living-room couch (and yes, we were often overcome there), we referred to the act as “ringing Bunter’s bell.”

any good marriage is secret territory, a necessary white space on society’s map. What others don’t know about it is what makes it yours.

I put my face in my hands and cried. I suppose it was the last of my mourning, but that made it no easier to bear. I cried until I thought something inside me would break if I didn’t stop. When it finally let me go, my face was drenched, I had the hiccups, and I thought I had never felt so tired in my life.

I put my face in the flowers and breathed deeply. They smelled good, like sunshine.

Sometimes—for me, at least—there’s a transitional bump between waking and sleeping. Not that night. I slipped away without knowing it, and woke the next morning with sunlight shining in through the window and the bedside lamp still on. There had been no dreams that I could remember, only a vague sensation that I had awakened sometime briefly in the night and heard a bell ringing, very thin and far away.

“Hi,” she said. “I go beach. Mummy ’on’t take me and I’m mad as hell.” She stamped her foot to show she knew as well as anybody what mad as hell was all about.

This is one of the strange midlife realities of my generation: we can’t touch a child who isn’t our own without fearing others will see something lecherous in our touching . . .

It was a Jeep Scout with mud splashed high up on both sides. The motor was growling like something up a tree and pissed off about it.

“Mattie go fast,” my new girlfriend said in a conversational, isn’t-this-interesting voice. She had one arm slung around my neck; we were chums, by God.

The driver’s door flew open; Mattie Devore flew out like a circus acrobat shot from a cannon, if you can imagine a circus acrobat dressed in old paisley shorts and a cotton smock top.

She was young, but I thought it was a mother’s terror and exhaustion I was looking at.