Bag of Bones (80 page)

“Sara thought she could use you to kill Kyra if Devore played out before he could get the job done—he was old and in bad health, after all. Jo gambled that you'd save her instead. That's what you think, isn't it?”

“Yes.”

“And she was right.”

“I couldn't have done it alone. From the night I dreamed about Sara singing, Jo was with me every step of the way. Sara couldn't make her quit.”

“No, she wasn't a quitter,” Frank agreed, and wiped at one eye. “What do you know about your twice-great-aunt? The one that married Auster?”

“Bridget Noonan Auster,” I said. “Bridey, to her friends. I asked my mother and she swears up and down she knows nothing, that Jo never asked her about Bridey, but I think she might be lying. The young woman was definitely the black sheep of the family—I can tell just by the sound of Mom's voice when the name comes up. I have no idea how she met Benton Auster. Let's say he was down in the Prout's Neck part of the world visiting friends and started flirting with her at a clambake. That's as likely as anything else. This was in 1884. She was eighteen, he was twenty-three. They got married, one of those hurry-up jobs. Harry, the one who actually drowned Kito Tidwell, came along six months later.”

“So he was barely seventeen when it happened,” Frank said. “Great God.”

“And by then his mother had gotten religion. His terror over what she'd think if she ever found out was part of the reason he did what he did. Any other questions, Frank? Because I'm really starting to fade.”

For several moments he said nothing—I had begun to think he was done when he said, “Two others. Do you mind?”

“I guess it's too late to back out now. What are they?”

“The Shape you spoke of. The Outsider. That troubles me.”

I said nothing. It troubled me, too.

“Do you think there's a chance it might come back?”

“It always does,” I said. “At the risk of sounding pompous, the Outsider eventually comes back for all of us, doesn't it? Because we're all bags of bones. And the Outsider . . . Frank, the Outsider wants what's in the bag.”

He mulled this over, then swallowed the rest of his Scotch at a gulp.

“You had one other question?”

“Yes,” he said. “Have you started writing again?”

*   *   *

I went upstairs a few minutes later, checked Ki, brushed my teeth, checked Ki again, then climbed into bed. From where I lay I was able to look out the window at the pale moon shining on the snow.

Have you started writing again?

No. Other than a rather lengthy essay on how I spent my summer vacation which I may show to Kyra in some later year, there's been nothing. I know that Harold is nervous, and sooner or later I suppose I'll have to call him and tell him what he already guesses: the machine which ran so sweet for so long has stopped. It isn't broken—this memoir came out with nary a gasp or missed heartbeat—but the machine has stopped, just the same. There's gas in the tank, the sparkplugs spark and the battery bats, but the wordygurdy stands there quiet in the middle of my head. I've put a tarp over it. It's served me well, you see, and I don't like to think of it getting dusty.

Some of it has to do with the way Mattie died. It occurred to me at some point this fall that I had written similar deaths in at least two of
my books, and popular fiction is heaped with other examples of the same thing. Have you set up a moral dilemma you don't know how to solve? Is the protagonist sexually attracted to a woman who is much too young for him, shall we say? Need a quick fix? Easiest thing in the world. “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. 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.

Or maybe I just wish there'd been a little more time.

I remember telling Ki it's best not to leave love letters around; what I thought but didn't say was that they can come back to haunt you. I am haunted anyway . . . but I will not willingly haunt myself, and when I closed my book of dreams I did so of my own free will. I think I could have poured lye over those dreams as well, but from that I stayed my hand.

I've seen things I never expected to see and felt things I never expected to feel—not the least of them what I felt and still feel for the child sleeping down the hall from me. She's my little guy now, I'm her big guy, and that's the important thing. Nothing else seems to matter half so much.

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

As he started writing
Bag of Bones
a decade ago, Stephen King looked at the calendar and saw the age of fifty staring back at him. A lot of years had passed since
Carrie
and
'Salem's Lot
and
The Stand
had launched him on the road to being one of America's most popular storytellers of all time.

I wanted to write at least one more really good scary story before hitting the big five-oh, but I wanted something else, as well: to tell a tale combining the romantic suspense of
Rebecca
and that sense of otherworldly terror that permeates
The Haunting
and
The Uninvited.
A ghost story, then, the summation of all I know about lust, secrets, and the unquiet dead. If I had to describe it, I'd call it a haunted love story.

Does Stephen King really believe in ghosts?

We all seem to understand that we do live in the middle of a mystery. We go through most of our lives saying, “I see faces in the bushes because of my imagination.” But every now and then we're forced to the idea that “maybe I see faces in the bushes because there really are faces in the bushes.” Things happen. I think we all know this. And it's one of the attractions of the genre, that it allows us for a little while to admit out loud, even if only within the scope of the room where we're reading the story, that things do happen that we don't ordinarily talk about. Our lives are studded with events like that. And somebody who does what I do,
we're the rational ones. We're the ones who are saying, “Let us take some of these events and put 'em in some kind of context.”

Has anything changed in the way Stephen King writes?

The short answer is that I probably care more about the people than the monsters these days. But a more accurate answer would be that I've gotten a little bit older. I'd like to think that as a person sees more of the world, there's a tendency to appreciate the subtleties of human behavior a little bit more and to appreciate contradictions between what people think and what they do, between what they think and what they say, and between what they say and what they do. Those are the delicious things that fiction is made out of.

In writing
Bag of Bones,
King also wanted to dig back into his native turf, lonely for Maine after forays into Nevada
(Desperation,
1996) and Louisiana
(The Green Mile,
1997).

I remember reading somewhere, maybe in a book by Edwin Arlington Robinson, who was a poet from Maine, that “a place is yours when you know where all the roads go.” I always come back to Maine; it feels like home. But for Mike Noonan, the grieving protagonist in
Bag of Bones,
the roads around his summer home of Sara Laughs take him into the buried secrets of a community.

When people from away come to Maine, we call 'em the flatlanders, you know. They have their summer cottages, they have their summer houses, and they see the outside and they take it back with them. They're skating on the surface of things. Anybody who lives in a community may know, for instance, that the nice young man who taught the children to swim has been busted for pot. That sweet old codger on the porch at the general store maybe has too much of an interest in little girls. . . . Could be this, could be that. And when we have secrets, when we have weaknesses, we hide them. I think that the smaller the community, the more the community is isolated from the wider world, the more the tendency is to say, “We take care of our own. We look after our own. When things go wrong, that's our business, that's not your business. You're from the outside.”
When I started
Bag of Bones,
I wanted to write a gothic novel. For me, that is a novel about secrets, about things that happened in the past and have been buried for quite a while. And then, like a buried body, they start to smell bad. If you believe in ghosts, in spooks, in things that go bump in the night, they start to move around a little bit and maybe they start to disturb your sleep. Certainly, if a community has a bad conscience, there are ghosts at work. And that's what I love. I love the idea of secrets, and secrets always find their way out.

Stephen King celebrated his 50th birthday, and
Bag of Bones
appeared shortly afterward, in November of 1998. His desire to write
“one more good scary story”
came close to being an augury. Before he turned fiftyone, King was struck by a van while walking along the road in western Maine. It could easily have been a fatal accident. His recovery was long and arduous
.
“I was in a lot of pain, but never so glad to be alive. Books never meant more to me, nor did writing.
“King returned to writing almost as soon as he was home from the hospital, working on the much beloved and widely admired
On Writing.

In the decade since, the stories have kept coming, in all shapes and sizes, including the amazing one-of-a-kind
Lisey's Story
and the final three novels in the Dark Tower epic that King had begun in the days before
Carrie. Duma Key,
his most recent novel, is a bedside companion to
Bag of Bones
(on the Florida rather than the Maine side).
Just After Sunset,
a rich collection of stories, makes its appearance this fall. Is King in the twilight zone?

Well, he's looking at the calendar and sees sixty staring him in the face, and he wants to write one more really good scary story. We hear it's very long like
It
or
The Stand
,
and once again, King returns to Maine as the setting. But the rest is a secret.

Secrets always find their way out.

from Stephen King's collection,
Just After Sunset

Halston thought the old man in the wheelchair looked sick, terrified, and ready to die. He had experience in seeing such things. Death was Halston's business; he had brought it to eighteen men and six women in his career as an independent hitter. He knew the death look.

The house—mansion, actually—was cold and quiet. The only sounds were the low snap of the fire on the big stone hearth and the low whine of the November wind outside.

“I want you to make a kill,” the old man said. His voice was quavery and high, peevish. “I understand that is what you do.”

“Who did you talk to?” Halston asked.

“With a man named Saul Loggia. He says you know him.”

Halston nodded. If Loggia was the go-between, it was all right. And if there was a bug in the room, anything the old man—Drogan—said was entrapment.

“Who do you want hit?”

Drogan pressed a button on the console built into the arm of his wheelchair and it buzzed forward. Close-up, Halston could smell the yellow odors of fear, age, and urine all mixed. They disgusted him, but he made no sign. His face was still and smooth.

“Your victim is right behind you,” Drogan said softly.

Halston moved quickly. His reflexes were his life and they were always set on a filed pin. He was off the couch, falling to one knee, turning, hand
inside his specially tailored sport coat, gripping the handle of the short-barrelled .45 hybrid that hung below his armpit in a spring-loaded holster that laid it in his palm at a touch. A moment later it was out and pointed at. . .a cat.

For a moment Halston and the cat stared at each other. It was a strange moment for Halston, who was an unimaginative man with no superstitions. For that one moment as he knelt on the floor with the gun pointed, he felt that he knew this cat, although if he had ever seen one with such unusual markings he surely would have remembered.