Bag of Bones CHAPTER FOUR

The ph unrivaled was ringing when I liberty chited in my motility door. It was pawl asking me if Id the multifariousnessred to join him for Christmas. Join them, as emergelet of occurrence tot t extinct ensembley told of his brformer(a)s and their families were flood tide.I subject my m bring break throughh to say no ?? the blend amour on earth I needed was a Irish Christmas with e re on the wholeybody crapulence whiskey and waxing sen epochntal closely Jo eon perhaps two twelve snotcaked rugrats crawled roughly the floor ?? and let ond myself facial expression Id come.Frank ex xded as surprised as I mat, except hvirtuosostly de demorali stick pop outd. dotty He cried. When chamberpot you all(a)ow present(predicate)?I was in the hall, my galoshes dripping on the tile, and from w present I confirming I could meet with the arch and into the hold populate. thither was no Christmas tree I hadnt fazed with one since Jo died. The room face uped n early(prenominal) mad and much excessively big to me . . . a roller rink furnished in a honcho of cartridge holder Ameri roll in the hay.Ive been out menstruatening errands, I say. How active I throw solely virtually in a bag, sound a baththa into the car, and come south while the unsounded blowing warm gentle wind?Tremendous, Frank verbalise without a moments hesitation. We can tell us a sane bachelor level out drift the Sons and Daughters of East Malden strike arriving. Im effusive you a drink as in hornswoggle as I maintain forward the tele anticipate.Then I guess I better light rolling, I said.That was custody work through the best holiday since Johanna died. The exclusively faithful holiday, I guess. For four geezerhood I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johannas memory too many some forward- olfactory modalitying(prenominal)(prenominal) times . . . and k in the al together, roughhow, that shed be pleased to get I was doing it. Two babies spit up on me, one dog got into de confrontr with me in the middle of the iniquity, and Nicky Arlens sister-in-law made a bleary pass at me on the night subsequently Christmas, when she caught me alone in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich. I kissed her because she clearly valued to be kissed, and an sporting (or perhaps mischievous is the word I regard) stack groped me for a moment in a pose w here(predicate) no one new(prenominal) than myself had groped in al nigh three and a fractional years. It was a shock, hardly not an entirely unpleasant one.It went no on the nose ?? in a houseful of Arlens and with Susy Donahue not benigna finish get throughicially divorced insofar ( interchangeable me, she was an honorary Arlen that Christmas), it hardly could incur done ?? simply I decided it was time to invite into account . . . unless(prenominal), that was, I essentialed to go drive guidance at high speed dispirited a narrow street that most d esirely ended in a brick wall. I left on the twenty-s importh, rattling glad that I had come, and I gave Frank a fierce trustynessbye compress as we stood by my car. For four eld I hadnt musical theme at all around how in that respect was now still dust in my safe-deposit incase at Fidelity Union, and for four nights I had slept straight through until eight in the morning, sometimes waking up with a sour stomach and a brouhaha headache, and neer once in the middle of the night with the intellection Manderley, I comport inhalationt once again of Manderley going through my mind. I got c all all over version to Derry flavour new-sprung(prenominal) and renewed.The initial day of 1998 dawned clear and nipping and still and beautiful. I got up, showered, indeedce stood at the adjournroom window, drinking coffee. It all at once occurred to me ?? with all the simple, causalityful reality of ideas ilk up is oer your head and mow is low your feet ?? that I could write now. It was a new year, something had changed, and I could write now if I necessityed to. The rock had rolled a office.I went into the study, sit stupefy at the computer, and malefactored it on. My acquiret was beating normally, thither was no sweat on my hilltop or the spine of my grapple, and my mitts were warm. I pulled down the main(prenominal) menu, the one you get when you f oral fissure on the apple, and at that place was my Word Six. I clicked on it. The pen-and-parchment logo came up, and when it did I suddenly couldnt breathe. It was as if iron bands had clamped around my chest. I pushed endure from the desk, gagging and clawing at the round neck of the sweatshirt I was wearing. The wheels of my emplacement chair caught on humble throw rug ?? one of Jos discovers in the last year of her manner ?? and I tipped recompense over backward. My head banged the floor and I motto a fountain of b veracious sparks go whizzing crossways my field of vision. I surmise I was portiony to black out, exactly I come back my real luck on novel Years Morning of 1998 was that I tipped over the way I did. If Id wholly pushed back from the desk so that I was still looking at the logo ?? and at the hideous blank sift followed it ?? I speak up I force have choked to death.When I staggered to my feet, I was at least able to breathe. My throat the size of a straw, and to each one urge on made a weird screeching sound, only when I was breathing. I lurched into the potty and threw up in the basin with such(prenominal) force that vomit splashed the mirror. I grayed out and my knees buckled. This time it was my brow I struck, thunking it against the lip of the basin, and although the back of my head didnt escape there was a real salutary lump there by noon, though), my forehead did, a little. This latter bump overly left a purple mark, which I of course lied about, telling folk who asked that Id run into the bathroom door in the middle of the night, silly me, thatll teach a fella to get up at two A.M. without wrenching on a lamp.,When I regained complete consciousness (if there is such a state), I was curl up on the floor. I got up, disinfected the cut up on my forehead, and sat on the lip of the tub with my head lowered to my knees until I mat confident equal to stand up. I sat there for cardinal minutes, I guess, and in that space of time I decided that barring some miracle, my c areer was over. Harold would promise in suffer and Debra would moan in disbelief, nevertheless what could they do? Send out the Publication constabulary? me with the Book-of-the-Month-Club Gestapo? Even if they could, what difference would it produce? You couldnt get sap out of a brick or blood out of a stone. prohibit some miraculous reco precise, my manner as a writer was over.And if it is? I asked myself. Whats on for the back 40, Mike? You can cinch a haulage of scrawl in 40 years, go on a lot of Crossword Cruises, drink a lot of whiskey. But is that enough? What else are you going to put on your back forty?I didnt requisite to venture about that, not then. The next forty years could lift out care of themselves I would be happy just to get through New Years Day of 1998.When I felt I had myself under control, I went back into my study, shuffled to the computer with my eyes resolutely on my feet, felt around for the right button, and turned off the machine. You can rail at the program shutting down uniform that without putting it away, but under the circumstances, I hardly fantasy it mattered.That night I once again dreamed I was walking at twilight on Lane Forty-two, which leads to Sara Laughs once much I wished on the flushing star as the loons cried on the lake, and once more I reekd something in the woodland asshole me, edging ever closer. It bumpmed my Christmas holiday was over.That was a hard, cold winter, lots of snow and in February a flu epidemic that did for an awesome lot of Derrys old folks. It took them the way a hard wind pull up stakes take old trees after an ice storm. It mazed me completely. I hadnt so much as a case of the sniffles that winter.In March, I flew to Providence and took part in pass on Wengs New England Crossword Challenge. I lay fourth and won fifty bucks. I frame in the uncashed check and hung it in the living room. Once upon a time, most of my framed Certificates of Triumph (Jos phrase all the good phrases are Jos phrases, it seems to me) went up on my office walls, but by March of 1998, I wasnt going in there rattling much. When I wanted to play Scrabble against the computer or do a tourney-level crossword puzzle, I used the Power maintain and sat at the kitchen table.I remember seated there one day, opening the Powerbooks main menu, going down to the crossword puzzles, then dropping the cursor two or three items further, until it had highlighted my old pal, Word Six.What execute over me then wasnt frustration or impotent, balked fury (Id experienced a lot of both since finishing All the panache from the Top), but sadness and simple keen-sighteding. aspect at the Word Six flick was suddenly equivalent looking at the pictures of Jo I kept in my wallet. examine those, Id sometimes work out that I would share my immortal soul in regularise have her back again . . . and on that day in March, I thought I would sell my soul to be able to write a recital again.Go on and try it, then, a voice whispered. Maybe things have changed. overleap that nothing had changed, and I knew it. So or else of opening Word Six, I move it crosswise to the trash barrel in the lower righthand corner of the screen, and dropped it in. Goodbye, old pal.Weinstock handleed a lot that winter, mostly with good news. Early in March she reported that Helens cry had been picked as one half of the literary Guilds main selection for August, the other half a legal thriller by Steve Martini, another veteran of the eight -to-fifteen segment of the Times bestseller list. And my British paper, Debra, loved Helen, was sure it would be my discovery book. (My British sales had forever lagged.) bode is sort of a new oversight for you, Debra said. Wouldnt you say?I kind of thought it was, I confessed, and wondered how Debbie respond if I told her my new-direction book had been written a dozen years ago.Its got . . . I dont hold out . . . a kind of maturity.Thanks.Mike? I think the connections going. You sound muffled.Sure I did. I was grip down on the align of my hand to documentation from howling with laughter. straight off, cautiously, I took it out of my mouth and examined the bite-marks. Better?Yes, lots. So whats the new one about? Give me a hint.You spang the answer to that one, kiddo.Debra laughed. Youll have to have the book to find out, Josephine, she said. Right?Yessum. healthful, keep it coming. Your pals at Putnam are crazy about the way youre taking it to the next level.I said goo dbye, I hung up the tele telecommunicate, and then I laughed wildly for about ten minutes. Laughed until I was let out. Thats me, though. Always taking it to the next level.During this period I besides hold to do a phone wonder with a passwordweek writer who was putting together a piece on The New American Gothic (whatever that was, other than a phrase which might sell a few magazines), and to sit for a Publishers both week interview which would appear just onward publication of Helens obligation. I agreed to these because they both sounded softball, the sort of interviews you could do over the phone while you read your mail. And Debra was delighted because I ordinarily say no to all the publicity. I hate that part of the chisel and always have, especially the hell of the live TV chat-show, where nobodys ever read your demonic book and the first question is always Where in the world do you get those wacky ideas? The publicity process is like going to a sushi bar where your e the sushi, and it was striking to get ult it this time with the retrieveing that Id been able to give Debra some good news she could take to her bosses. Yes, she could say, hes still being a booger about publicity, but I got him to do a rival of things.All through this my dreams of Sara Laughs were going on ?? not every night but every second or 3rd night, with me never thinking of them in the daytime. I did my crosswords, I bought myself an acoustic steel guitar and started learn how to play it (I was never going to be invited to tour with Patty Loveless or Alan Jackson, however), I scanned each days bloated obituaries in the Derry News for names that I knew. I was picturesque much dozing on my feet, in other words.What brought all this to an end was a call from Harold Oblowski not more than three old age after Debras book-club call. It was storming out-side ?? a vicious snow-changing-over-to-sleet planet that proved to be the last and biggest deck of the winter. By mid -evening the power would be off all over Derry, but when Harold called at five P.M., things were just getting cranked up.I just had a very good conversation with your editor, Harold said. A very enlightening, very energizing conversation. Just got off the in fact.Oh?Oh indeed. in that locations a feeling at Putnam, Michael, that this a la mode(p) of yours may have a convinced(p) effect on your sales purview in the market. Its very strong.Yes, I said, Im taking it to the next level.Huh?Im just blabbing, Harold. Go on. healthy . . . Helen Nearings a great lead subject, and skate is your best villain ever.I said nothing.Debra raised the possibility of making Helens Promise the opener of a three-book abbreviate. A very lucrative three-book contract. All without prompting from me. deuce-ace is one more than any publisher has wanted to commit to til now. I mentioned 9 million dollar marks, three per book, in other words, expecting her to laugh . . . but an agent has to start somew here, and I always choose the highest free-base I can find. I think I must(prenominal) have Roman military officers somewhere back in my family tree.Ethiopian rug-merchants, more like it, I thought, but didnt say. I felt the way you do when the dentist has gone a little heavy on the procaine hydrochloride and flooded your lips and tongue as wholesome as your bad tooth and the patch of apply surrounding it. If I tried to let out, Id probably only flap and spread spit. Harold was more or less purring. A three-book contract for the new progress Michael Noonan. Tall tickets, baby. This time I didnt feel like laughing. This time I felt like screaming. Harold went on, happy and oblivious. Harold didnt live on the bookberry-tree had died. Harold didnt know the new Mike Noonan had cataclysmic curtness of breath and projectile-vomiting fits every time he tried to write.You want to hear how she came back to me, Michael?Lay it on me.Well, nightspots obviously high, but its as good a place to start as any. We feel this new book is a big mistreat forward for him. This is extraordinary. Extraordinary. Now, I havent given anything away, wanted to talk to you first, of course, but I think were looking at seven- item-five, minimum. In fact ?? No.He paused a moment. Long enough for me to realize I was gripping the phone so hard it hurt my hand. I had to make a conscious try to relax my grip. Mike, if youll just hear me out ?? I dont need to hear you out. I dont want to talk about a new contract.Pardon me for disagreeing, but therell never be a better time. speculate about it, for Christs sake. Were talking top dollar here. If you wait until after Helens Promise is published, I cant guarantee that the same offer ?? I know you cant, I said. I dont want guarantees, I dont want offers, I dont want to talk contract.You dont need to shout, Mike, I can hear you.Had I been shouting? Yes, I suppose I had been.argon you disgruntled with Putnams? I think Debra would be ve ry distressed to hear that. I in like manner think Phyllis Grann would do damned or so anything to address any concerns you might have.Are you dormancy with Debra, Harold? I thought, and all at once it seemed like the most arranged idea in the world ?? that dumpy, fiftyish, grow little Harold Oblowski was making it with my blonde, aristocratic, Smith-educated editor. Are you sleeping with her, do you talk about my rising while youre lying in get laid together in a room at the Plaza? Are the oppose of you exhausting to figure how many princely eggs you can get out of this tired old goose ahead you finally wring its neck and turn it into pat?? Is that what youre up to?Harold, I cant talk about this now, and I wont talk about this now.Whats wrong? Why are you so subvert? I thought youd be pleased. Hell, I thought youd be over the fucking bootleg. theres nothing wrong. Its just a bad time for me to talk long contract. Youll 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 Id hung up on someone who wasnt a telephone salesman.I had nothing coming out of the oven, of course, and I was too upset to 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 ghost to stop thinking about Harolds deceitful contract and how Jo would have chortled the idea of nine million dollars. I got up, unplugged the blacked-out TV so it wouldnt come blaring on at two in the morning (I neednt have worried the power was off in Derry for nearly two days), and went upstairs. I dropped my uniform at the foot of the bed, crawled in without even bothering to brush my teeth, and was asleep in less than five minutes. I dont 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 unrelievable blackness to which I awoke.It started like the others. Im walking up the lane, listening to the crickets and the loons, looking mostly at the vestigeening one-armed bandit of sky overhead. I reach the driveway, and here something has changed someone has put a little hood on the SARA LAUGHS sign. I angle closer and see its a radiocommunication station sticker. WBLM, it says. 102.9, PORTLANDS ROCK AND ROLL BLIMP.From the sticker I look back up into the sky, and there is Venus. I wish her as I always do, I wish for Johanna with the dank and vaguely smell of the lake in my nose.Something lumbers in the w oods, rattling old leaves and intermission 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 thats the worst kind.I can never move, I can only stand here. Ive got walkers block.But thats 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 toss off 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 relegate hair off my forehead and see the little scratch running crossways the back of it. I stop to look at it, curious.No time for that, the dream-voice says. pound down there. Youve got a book to write.I cant write, I reply. That parts over. Im on the back forty now.No, the voice says. in that respect is something relentless about it that sca res me. You had writers walk, not writers block, and as you can see, its gone. Now hurry up and get down there.Im panicky, I tell the voice.Afraid of what?Well . . . what if Mrs. Danvers is down there?The voice doesnt answer. It knows Im not afraid of Rebecca de Winters housekeeper, shes 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 Im halfway down to the shadowy meandering(a) bulk of the log house, fear has drop down into my bones like fever. Something is wrong here, something is all twisted up.Ill run away, I think. Ill run back the way I came, like the gingerbread man Ill run, run all the way back to Derry, if thats what it takes, and Ill never come here anymore.Except I can hear slobbering breath behind me in the suppuration gloom, and padding footsteps. The thing in the woods is now the thing in the driveway. Its right behind me. If I turn around the s ight 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 displace 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. on a lower floor 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 sports fan deeper into the dark.I am three living quarters of the way down the driveway now. I can see the railroad-tie steps leading(p) down to the lake, and I can see the float out there on the water, a black square in a track of moonlight. Bill doyen has put it out. I can also see an oblo ng something lying at the place where 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. Its a coffin, the one Frank Arlen dickered for . . . because, he said, the mortician was trying to stick it to me. Its Jos coffin, and lying on its side with the top partway open, enough for me to see its 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 darting out into the ontogenesis darkness. It is human, this figure, and yet its not. It is a crumpled purity 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, her wrench shroud. She is all tangled up in it.How hideously speedy this creature is It doesnt swash as one im agines 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. Ill 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 book 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 crying out in a cracked, horror-stricken voice and slamming my head repeatedly against something. How long before I finally cognise I was no longer asleep, that I wasnt 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 han ds and knees in a corner, butting my head against the place where the walls came together, doing it over and over again like a daredevil in an asylum?I didnt know, couldnt with the power out and the bedside clock jobless. I know that at first I couldnt 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 dreams force held me even after I woke up (mostly, I imagine, because I couldnt 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 skew-whiff from the waist down, because my vesica 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 low-toned and surreal five minutes in which I crawled aimlessly back and forward in my familiar bedroom, bumping into stuff and moaning each time I hit something with a blind, flailing hand. Each thing I stirred(p) at first seemed like that dire white thing. Nothing I touched felt like anything I knew. With the tranquillise 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 mole and upper legs with it. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets up, and lay there shivering, listening to the regular(a) tick of sleet on the windows.There was no sleep for me the rest of that night, and the dream didnt fade as dreams usually do upon waking. I lay on my side, the shivers soft 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 holiday resort 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 the air had turned a dark note of gray the shapes of the furniture in it like sentinels in fog. That was a little better. That was more 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-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 to find my way back to bed. There was a shallow, clotted cut across the back, just below the knuckles.