Bag of Bones by Stephen King Page A

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 thedriveway, 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