Bag of Bones (57 page)

Twice more I came to choices, and each time I picked the opening through which I could hear Bunter's bell. As I stood before the second pair of doorways, I heard a voice somewhere in the dark say quite clearly: “No, the President's wife wasn't hit. That's his blood on her stockings.”

I walked on, then stopped when I realized my feet
and ankles no longer itched, that my thighs were no longer sweating into the longjohns. I was wearing the Jockey shorts I usually slept in. I looked up and saw I was in my own living room, threading my way carefully around the furniture as you do in the dark, trying like hell not to stub your stupid toe. I could see a little better; faint milky light was coming in through the windows. I reached the counter which separates the living room from the kitchen and looked over it at the waggy-cat clock. It was five past five.

I went to the sink and turned on the water. When I reached for a glass I saw I was still wearing the ribbon from Ki's straw hat on my wrist. I unwound it and put it on the counter between the coffee-maker and the kitchen TV. Then I drew myself some cold water, drank it down, and made my way cautiously along the north-wing corridor by the pallid yellow glow of the bathroom nightlight. I peed (
you
-rinated, I could hear Ki saying), then went into the bedroom. The sheets were rumpled, but the bed didn't have the orgiastic look of the morning after my dream of Sara, Mattie, and Jo. Why would it? I'd gotten out of it and had myself a little sleepwalk. An extraordinarily vivid dream of the Fryeburg Fair.

Except that was bullshit, and not just because I had the blue silk ribbon from Ki's hat. None of it had the quality of dreams on waking, where what seemed plausible becomes immediately ridiculous and all the colors—both those bright and those ominous—fade at once. I raised my hands to my face, cupped them over my nose, and breathed deeply. Pine. When I looked, I even saw a little smear of sap on one pinky finger.

I sat on the bed, thought about dictating what I'd just experienced into the Memo-Scriber, then flopped back on the pillows instead. I was too tired. Thunder rumbled. I closed my eyes, began to drift away, and then a scream ripped through the house. It was as sharp as the neck of a broken bottle. I sat up with a yell, clutching at my chest.

It was Jo. I had never heard her scream like that in our life together, but I knew who it was, just the same. “Stop hurting her!” I shouted into the darkness. “Whoever you are,
stop hurting her!
”

She screamed again, as if something with a knife, clamp, or hot poker took a malicious delight in disobeying me. It seemed to come from a distance this time, and her third scream, while just as agonized as the first two, was farther away still. They were diminishing as the little boy's sobbing had diminished.

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.

I
was finally able to get into the zone, but couldn't do anything once I got there. I keep a steno pad handy for notes—character lists, page references, date chronologies—and I doodled in there a little bit, but the sheet of paper in the IBM remained blank. There was no thundering heartbeat, no throbbing eyes or difficulty breathing—no panic attack, in other words—but there was no story, either. Andy Drake, John Shackleford, Ray Garraty, the beautiful Regina Whiting . . . they stood with their backs turned, refusing to speak or move. The manuscript was sitting in its accustomed place on the left side of the typewriter, the pages held down with a pretty chunk of quartz I'd found on the lane, but nothing was happening. Zilch.

I recognized an irony here, perhaps even a moral. For years I had fled the problems of the real world, escaping into various Narnias of my imagination. Now the real world had filled up with bewildering
thickets, there were things with teeth in some of them, and the wardrobe was locked against me.

Kyra,
I had printed, putting her name inside a scalloped shape that was supposed to be a cabbage rose. Below it I had drawn a piece of bread with a beret tipped rakishly on the top crust. Noonan's conception of French toast. The letters L.B. surrounded with curlicues. A shirt with a rudimentary duck on it. Beside this I had printed
QUACK QUACK.
Below
QUACK QUACK
I had written
Ought to fly away “Bon Voyage.
”

At another spot on the sheet I had written
Dean, Auster,
and
Devore.
They were the ones who had seemed the most there, the most dangerous. Because they had descendants? But surely all seven of those jacks must, mustn't they? In those days most families were whoppers. And where had
I
been? I had asked, but Devore hadn't wanted to say.

It didn't feel any more like a dream at nine-thirty on a sullenly hot Sunday morning. Which left exactly what? Visions? Time-travel? And if there was a purpose to such travel, what was it? What was the message, and who was trying to send it? I remembered clearly what I'd said just before passing from the dream in which I had sleepwalked out to Jo's studio and brought back my typewriter:
I don't believe these lies.
Nor would I now. Until I could see at least some of the truth, it might be safer to believe nothing at all.

At the top of the sheet upon which I was doodling, in heavily stroked letters, I printed the word
DANGER!
, then circled it. From the circle I drew an arrow to Kyra's name. From her name I drew an arrow to
Ought to fly away “Bon Voyage”
and added
MATTIE.

Below the bread wearing the beret I drew a little telephone. Above it I put a cartoon balloon with
R-R-RINGGG!
in it. As I finished this, the cordless phone rang. It was sitting on the deck rail. I circled
MATTIE
and picked up the phone.

“Mike?” She sounded excited. Happy. Relieved.

“Yeah,” I said. “How are you?”

“Great!” she said, and I circled L.B. on my pad.

“Lindy Briggs called ten minutes ago—I just got off the phone with her. Mike, she's giving me my job back! Isn't that wonderful?”

Sure. And wonderful how it would keep her in town. I crossed out
Ought to fly away “Bon Voyage,
” knowing that Mattie wouldn't go. Not now. And how could I ask her to? I thought again
If only I knew a little more . . .

“Mike? Are you—”

“It's very wonderful,” I said. In my mind's eye I could see her standing in the kitchen, drawing the kinked telephone cord through her fingers, her legs long and coltish below her denim shorts. I could see the shirt she was wearing, a white tee with a yellow duck paddling across the front. “I hope Lindy had the good grace to sound ashamed of herself.” I circled the tee-shirt I'd drawn.

“She did. And she was frank enough to kind of . . . well, disarm me. She said the Whitmore woman talked to her early last week. Was very frank and to the point, Lindy said. I was to be let go immediately. If that happened, the money, computer equipment, and software Devore funnelled into the library would keep coming. If it didn't, the flow of goods and money would stop immediately. She said she had to
balance the good of the community against what she knew was wrong . . . she said it was one of the toughest decisions she ever had to make . . .”

“Uh-huh.” On the pad my hand moved of its own volition like a planchette gliding over a Ouija board, printing the words
PLEASE CAN'T I PLEASE
. “There's probably some truth in it, but Mattie . . . how much do you suppose
Lindy
makes?”

“I don't know.”

“I bet it's more than any three other small-town librarians in the state of Maine combined.”

In the background I heard Ki: “Can I talk, Mattie? Can I talk to Mike? Please can't I please?”

“In a minute, hon.” Then, to me: “Maybe. All I know is that I have my job back, and I'm willing to let bygones be bygones.”

On the page, I drew a book. Then I drew a series of interlocked circles between it and the duck tee-shirt.

“Ki wants to talk to you,” Mattie said, laughing. “She says the two of you went to the Fryeburg Fair last night.”

“Whoa, you mean I had a date with a pretty girl and slept through it?”

“Seems that way. Are you ready for her?”

“Ready.”

“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.”

“I know,” I said. It was all right for her to talk, I was sure of it, but I asked anyway: “Where's Mattie now?”

“Waterin the flowers. We got lots of flowers, a billion at least. I have to clean up the table. It's a chore. I don't mind, though. I like chores. We had French toast. We always do on Sundays. It's yummy, 'specially with strawberry syrup.”

“I know,” I said, drawing an arrow to the piece of bread wearing the beret. “French toast is great. Ki, did you tell your mom about the lady in her dress?”

“No. I thought it might scare her.” She dropped her voice. “Here she comes!”

“That's all right . . . but we've got a secret, right?”

“Yes.”

“Now can I talk to Mattie again?”

“Okay.” Her voice moved off a little. “Mommy-bommy, Mike wants to talk to you.” Then she came back. “Will you bizzit us today? We could go on another picnic.”

“I can't today, Ki. I have to work.”

“Mattie never works on Sunday.”

“Well, when I'm writing a book, I write every day. I have to, or else I'll forget the story. Maybe we'll have a picnic on Tuesday, though. A barbecue picnic at your house.”

“Is it long 'til Tuesday?”

“Not too long. Day after tomorrow.”

“Is it long to write a book?”

“Medium-long.”

I could hear Mattie telling Ki to give her the phone.

“I will, just one more second. Mike?”

“I'm here, Ki.”

“I love you.”

I was both touched and terrified. For a moment I was sure my throat was going to lock up the way my chest used to when I tried to write. Then it cleared and I said, “Love you, too, Ki.”

“Here's Mattie.”

Again there was the rustly sound of the telephone changing hands, then Mattie said: “Did that refresh your recollection of your date with my daughter, sir?”

“Well,” I said, “it certainly refreshed hers.” There was a link between Mattie and me, but it didn't extend to this—I was sure of it.

She was laughing. I loved the way she sounded this
morning and I didn't want to bring her down . . . but I didn't want her mistaking the white line in the middle of the road for the crossmock, either.

“Mattie, you still need to be careful, okay? Just because Lindy Briggs offered you your old job back doesn't mean everyone in town is suddenly your friend.”

“I understand that,” she said. I thought again about asking if she'd consider taking Ki up to Derry for awhile—they could live in my house, stay for the duration of the summer if that was what it took for things to return to normal down here. Except she wouldn't do it. When it came to accepting my offer of high-priced New York legal talent, she'd had no choice. About this she did. Or thought she did, and how could I change her mind? I had no logic, no connected facts; all I had was a vague dark shape, like something lying beneath nine inches of snowblind ice.

“I want you to be careful of two men in particular,” I said. “One is Bill Dean. The other is Kenny Auster. He's the one—”

“—with the big dog who wears the neckerchief. He—”

“That's Booberry!” Ki called from the middle distance. “Booberry licked my facie!”

“Go out and play, hon,” Mattie said.

“I'm clearun the table.”

“You can finish later. Go on outside now.” There was a pause as she watched Ki go out the door, taking Strickland with her. Although the kid had left the trailer, Mattie still spoke in the lowered tone of someone who doesn't want to be overheard. “Are you trying to scare me?”

“No,” I said, drawing repeated circles around the word
DANGER.
“But I want you to be careful. Bill and Kenny may have been on Devore's team, like Footman and Osgood. 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.”

“What do you mean?”

“Are you wearing a tee-shirt with a duck on it?”

“How do you know that? Did Ki tell you?”