Bag of Bones (9 page)

“Harold, I can't talk about this now, and I
won't
talk about this now.”

“What's wrong? Why are you so upset? I thought you'd be pleased. Hell, I thought you'd be over the fucking moon.”

“There's nothing wrong. It's just a bad time for me to talk long-term contract. You'll have to pardon me, Harold. I have something coming out of the oven.”

“Can we at least discuss this next w—”

“
No,
” I said, and hung up. I think it was the first time in my adult life that I'd hung up on someone who wasn't a telephone salesman.

I had nothing coming out of the oven, of course, and I was too upset to even think about putting something in. I went into the living room instead, poured myself a short whiskey, and sat down in front of the TV. I sat there for almost four hours, looking at everything and seeing nothing. Outside, the storm continued cranking up. Tomorrow there would be trees down all over Derry and the world would look like an ice sculpture.

At quarter past nine the power went out, came back on for thirty seconds or so, then went out and stayed out. I took this as a suggestion to stop thinking about Harold's useless contract and how Jo would have chortled at the idea of nine million dollars. I got up, unplugged the blacked-out TV so it wouldn't come blaring on at two in the morning (I needn't have worried; the power was off in Derry for nearly two days), and went upstairs. I dropped my clothes at the foot of the bed, crawled in without even bothering to brush my teeth, and was asleep in less than five minutes. I don't know how long after that it was that the nightmare came.

*   *   *

It was the last dream I had in what I now think of as my “Manderley series,” the culminating dream. It was made even worse, I suppose, by the unrelievable blackness to which I awoke.

It started like the others. I'm walking up the lane, listening to the crickets and the loons, looking mostly at the darkening slot of sky overhead. I reach the
driveway, and here something
has
changed; someone has put a little sticker on the
SARA LAUGHS
sign. I lean closer and see it's a radio station sticker.
WBLM
, it says. 102.9,
PORTLAND'S ROCK AND ROLL BLIMP
.

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.

Something lumbers in the woods, rattling old leaves and breaking a branch. It sounds big.

Better get down there,
a voice in my head tells me.
Something has taken out a contract on you, Michael. A three-book contract, and that's the worst kind.

I can't move, I can never move, I can only stand here. I've got walker's block.

But that's just talk. I
can
walk. This time I
can
walk. I am delighted. I have had a major breakthrough. In the dream I think
This changes everything! This changes everything!

Down the driveway I walk, deeper and deeper into the clean but sour smell of pine, stepping over some of the fallen branches, kicking others out of the way. I raise my hand to brush the damp hair off my forehead and see the little scratch running across the back of it. I stop to look at it, curious.

No time for that,
the dream-voice says.
Get down there. You've got a book to write.

I can't write,
I reply.
That part's over. I'm on the back forty now.

No,
the voice says. There is something relentless about it that scares me.
You had writer's
walk,
not writer's
block,
and as you can see, it's gone. Now hurry up and get down there.

I'm afraid,
I tell the voice.

Afraid of what?

Well . . . what if Mrs. Danvers is down there?

The voice doesn't answer. It knows I'm not afraid of Rebecca de Winter's housekeeper, she's just a character in an old book, nothing but a bag of bones. So I begin walking again. I have no choice, it seems, but at every step my terror increases, and by the time I'm halfway down to the shadowy sprawling bulk of the log house, fear has sunk into my bones like fever. Something is wrong here, something is all twisted up.

I'll run away,
I think.
I'll run back the way I came, like the gingerbread man I'll run, run all the way back to Derry, if that's what it takes, and I'll never come here anymore.

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.

I walk on. The crowding bushes clutch like hands. In the light of a rising moon (the moon has never risen before in this dream, but I have never stayed in it this long before), the rustling leaves look like sardonic faces. I see winking eyes and smiling mouths. Below me are the black windows of the house and I know that there will be no power when I get inside, the storm has knocked the power out, I will flick the lightswitch up and down, up and down, until something reaches out and takes my wrist and pulls me like a lover deeper into the dark.

I am three quarters of the way down the driveway now. I can see the railroad-tie steps leading down to the lake, and I can see the float out there on the water, a black square in a track of moonlight. Bill Dean has put it out. I can also see an oblong something lying at the place where the driveway ends at the stoop. There has never been such an object before. What can it be?

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.

I think I want to scream. I think I mean to turn around and run back up the driveway—I will take my chances with the thing behind me. But before I can, the back door of Sara Laughs opens, and a terrible figure comes darting out into the growing darkness. 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.

How hideously
speedy
this creature is! It doesn't drift as one imagines ghosts drifting, but
races
across the stoop toward the driveway. It has been waiting down here during all the dreams when I had been frozen, and now that I have finally been able to walk down, it means to have me. I'll scream when it wraps me in its silk arms, and I will scream when I smell its rotting, bug-raddled flesh and see its dark staring eyes through the fine weave of the cloth. I will scream
as the sanity leaves my mind forever. I will scream . . . but there is no one out here to hear me. Only the loons will hear me. I have come again to Manderley, and this time I will never leave.

*   *   *

The shrieking white thing reached for me and I woke up on the floor of my bedroom, crying out in a cracked, horrified voice and slamming my head repeatedly against something. How long before I finally realized I was no longer asleep, that I wasn't at Sara Laughs? How long before I realized that I had fallen out of bed at some point and had crawled across the room in my sleep, that I was on my hands and knees in a corner, butting my head against the place where the walls came together, doing it over and over again like a lunatic in an asylum?

I didn't know, couldn't with the power out and the bedside clock dead. I know that at first I couldn't move out of the corner because it felt safer than the wider room would have done, and I know that for a long time the dream's force held me even after I woke up (mostly, I imagine, because I couldn't turn on a light and dispel its power). 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.

Finally I felt able to leave the corner. Halfway across the floor I pulled off my wet pajama pants, and when I did that, I got disoriented. What followed was a miserable and surreal five minutes in which I crawled aimlessly back and forth in my familiar bedroom, bumping into stuff and moaning each time I hit something with a blind, flailing hand. Each thing I touched at first seemed like that awful white thing. Nothing I touched felt like anything I knew. With the reassuring green numerals of the bedside clock gone and my sense of direction temporarily lost, I could have been crawling around a mosque in Addis Ababa.

At last I ran shoulder-first into the bed. I stood up, yanked the pillowcase off the extra pillow, and wiped my groin and upper legs with it. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets up, and lay there shivering, listening to the steady tick of sleet on the windows.

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.

Somehow the time passed, and there came a moment when I realized that the air had turned a dark shade of gray; the shapes of the furniture loomed in it like sentinels in fog. That was a little better. That was more like it. I would light the kitchen woodstove, I decided, and make strong coffee. Begin the work of getting this behind me.

I swung my legs out of bed and raised my hand to brush my sweat-damp hair off my forehead. I froze with the hand in front of my eyes. I must have scraped it while I was crawling, disoriented, in the dark and trying to find my way back to bed. There was a shallow, clotted cut across the back, just below the knuckles.

O
nce, when I was sixteen, a plane went supersonic directly over my head. I was walking in the woods when it happened, thinking of some story I was going to write, perhaps, or how great it would be if Doreen Fournier weakened some Friday night and let me take off her panties while we were parked at the end of Cushman Road.

In any case I was travelling far roads in my own mind, and when that boom went off, I was caught totally by surprise. I went flat on the leafy ground with my hands over my head and my heart drumming crazily, sure I'd reached the end of my life (and while I was still a virgin). In my forty years, that was the only thing which equalled the final dream of the “Manderley series” for utter terror.

I lay on the ground, waiting for the hammer to fall, and when thirty seconds or so passed and no hammer
did
fall, I began to realize it had just been some jet-jockey from the Brunswick Naval Air Station,
too eager to wait until he was out over the Atlantic before going to Mach 1. But, holy shit, who ever could have guessed that it would be so
loud
?

I got slowly to my feet and as I stood there with my heart finally slowing down, I realized I wasn't the only thing that had been scared witless by that sudden clear-sky boom. For the first time in my memory, the little patch of woods behind our house in Prout's Neck was entirely silent. I stood there in a dusty bar of sunlight, crumbled leaves all over my tee-shirt and jeans, holding my breath, listening. I had never heard a silence like it. Even on a cold day in January, the woods would have been full of conversation.

At last a finch sang. There were two or three seconds of silence, and then a jay replied. Another two or three seconds went by, and then a crow added his two cents' worth. A woodpecker began to hammer for grubs. A chipmunk bumbled through some underbrush on my left. A minute after I had stood up, the woods were fully alive with little noises again; it was back to business as usual, and I continued with my own. I never forgot that unexpected boom, though, or the deathly silence which followed it.

I thought of that June day often in the wake of the nightmare, and there was nothing so remarkable in that. Things had changed, somehow, or
could
change . . . but first comes silence while we assure ourselves that we are still unhurt and that the danger—if there
was
danger—is gone.

Derry was shut down for most of the following week, anyway. Ice and high winds caused a great deal of damage during the storm, and a sudden twenty-degree plunge in the temperature afterward
made the digging out hard and the cleanup slow. Added to that, the atmosphere after a March storm is always dour and pessimistic; we get them up this way every year (and two or three in April for good measure, if we're not lucky), but we never seem to expect them. Every time we get clouted, we take it personally.

On a day toward the end of that week, the weather finally started to break. I took advantage, going out for a cup of coffee and a mid-morning pastry at the little restaurant three doors down from the Rite Aid where Johanna did her last errand. I was sipping and chewing and working the newspaper crossword when someone asked, “Could I share your booth, Mr. Noonan? It's pretty crowded in here today.”

I looked up and saw an old man that I knew but couldn't quite place.