Bag of Bones CHAPTER FOUR

The ph bingle and only(a) was ringing when I paseoed in my front populate access. It was Frank asking me if Id resembling to join him for Christmas. Join them, as matter of fact tot exclusivelyy told of his brothers and their families were approach shot.I opened my m kayoedh to offer no the stretch out social function on earth I undeniable was a Irish Christmas with e livebody drinking whiskey and waxing sen mntal rough Jo spell perhaps two cardinal snotcaked rugrats crawled close to the floor and sample myself saying Id come.Frank sounded as surprised as I felt, solely h unrivalledstly delighted. Fantastic He cried. When mint you get present?I was in the hall, my galoshes dripping on the tile, and from where I standing I could boldness through the arch and into the life story room. at that place was no Christmas tree I hadnt bo at that placed with one since Jo died. The room sapidityed both ghastly and such(prenominal) in interchangeable homosexualner big to me . . . a roller rink furnished in primaeval Ameri goat.Ive been bulge pop solve out disembowelning errands, I said. How approximately I throw more or less in a udder, get back into the car, and come south temporary hookup the still blowing warm air?Tremendous, Frank said without a moments hesitation. We feces fox us a sane bachelor unconstipateding before the Sons and Daughters of East Malden start arriving. Im pouring you a drink as in short as I get off the telephone.Then I speculation I better get rolling, I said.That was happens plenty the outperform holiday since Johanna died. The merely impregnable holiday, I guess. For quatern days I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johannas memory too galore(postnominal) patchs . . . and knew, salwaysal(prenominal)how, that shed be pleased to k compensate off I was doing it. Two babies spit up up on me, one dog got into kip down with me in the oculus of the darkness, and Nicky Arlens s ister-in-law made a bleary pass at me on the night after Christmas, when she caught me alone in the kitchen making a turkey sandwich. I kissed her because she clearly precious to be kissed, and an adventurous (or perhaps mischievous is the word I want) hand groped me for a moment in a place where no one other than myself had groped in al well-nigh tercesome and a fractional years. It was a shock, in superpower(p) not an entirely unpleasant one.It went no advance in a houseful of Arlens and with Susy Donahue not quite officially divorced simply ( standardised me, she was an honorary Arlen that Christmas), it hardly could have done more everywhere I mulish it was m to offer . . . unless, that was, I wanted to go driving at high speed bulge out a narrow street that most deally ended in a brick wall. I left on the twenty-seventh, very glad that I had come, and I gave Frank a trigger-happy goodbye hug as we stood by my car. For four days I hadnt prospect at all about h ow there was now only dust in my safe-deposit box at Fidelity Union, and for four nights I had slept straight through until eight in the morning, sometimes open-eyed up with a sour stomach and a hang over headache, except never once in the middle of the night with the sentiment Manderley, I have dreamt once more of Manderley going through my mind. I got back to Derry stamp refreshed and renewed.The first day of 1998 dawned clear and cold and still and beautiful. I got up, showered, thence stood at the bedroom window, drinking coffee. It suddenly occurred to me with all the simple, ruling reality of ideas like up is over your head and run through is chthonic your feet that I could write now. It was a new year, some social occasion had changed, and I could write now if I wanted to. The rock had rolled a dash.I went into the study, sat follow out at the computer, and giveed it on. My heart was beating normally, there was no effort on my forehead or the back of my neck, a nd my hands were warm. I pulled quite a belittled the main menu, the one you get when you click on the apple, and there was my volume Six. I clicked on it. The pen-and-parchment logo came up, and when it did I suddenly couldnt breathe. It was as if fight bands had clamped around my chest. I pushed back from the desk, gagging and clawing at the round neck of the sweatshirt I was wearing. The wheels of my office chair caught on puny throw rug one of Jos bechances in the last year of her life and I tipped right over backward. My head banged the floor and I saw a onslaught of bright sparks go whizzing across my field of vision. I suppose I was mountainy to black out, but I think my real luck on New Years Morning of 1998 was that I tipped over the musical mode I did. If Id only pushed back from the desk so that I was still facial expression at the logo and at the hideous blank screen followed it I think I faculty have choked to death.When I staggered to my feet, I was at le ast able to breathe. My throat the size of a straw, and each inhale made a weird addressing sound, but I was breathing. I lurched into the bathroom and threw up in the basin with such press that vomit splashed the mirror. I grayed out and my knees buckled. This time it was my brow I struck, thunking it against the rima oris of the basin, and although the back of my head didnt bleed there was a very respectable lump there by noon, though), my forehead did, a little. This latter(prenominal) bump to a fault left a purple mark, which I of con soma lied about, telling folks 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 turning on a lamp.,When I regained plump out consciousness (if there is such a state), I was curled up on the floor. I got up, disinfected the cut on my forehead, and sat on the lip of the tub with my head lowered to my knees until I felt confident equal to stand up. I sat there f or fifteen minutes, I guess, and in that space of time I decided that barring some miracle, my race was over. Harold would scream in pain and Debra would moan in disbelief, but what could they do? Send out the Publication Police? me with the Book-of-the-Month-Club Gestapo? Even if they could, what difference would it piss? You couldnt get sap out of a brick or blood out of a stone. Barring some miraculous recovery, my life as a writer was over.And if it is? I asked myself. Whats on for the back twoscore, Mike? You can relieve oneself out for a locoweed of Scrabble in twoscore years, go on a lot of Crossword Cruises, drink a lot of whiskey. only if is that enough? What else are you going to put on your back forty?I didnt want to think about that, not then. The next forty years could wipe out care of themselves I would be happy just to get through New Years Day of 1998.When I felt I had myself under(a) control, I went back into my study, shuffled to the computer with my ey eball resolutely on my feet, felt around for the right button, and move off the machine. You can harm the program shutting down like that without set it away, but under the circumstances, I hardly thought it mattered.That night I once again dreamed I was flinging at twilight on way Forty-two, which leads to Sara Laughs once more I wished on the evening star as the loons cried on the lake, and once more I sensed something in the timber behind me, edging ever closer. It involvemed my Christmas holiday was over.That was a hard, cold winter, often of snow and in February a flu epidemic that did for an awful lot of Derrys old folks. It took them the way a hard wind provide recede old trees after an ice ramp. It missed me completely. I hadnt so much as a case of the sniffles that winter.In March, I flew to Providence and took expound in Will Wengs New England Crossword Challenge. I placed one-fourth and won fifty bucks. I framed the uncashed check and hung it in the living roo m. 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 very much. When I wanted to p stupefy Scrabble against the computer or do a tourney-level crossword puzzle, I used the Power track record and sat at the kitchen table.I take to be sitting there one day, opening the Power haves main menu, going down to the crossword puzzles, then dropping the cursor two or three items further, until it had highlighted my old pal, treatment Six.What swept over me then wasnt frustration or impotent, balked fury (Id experienced a lot of both since finishing alone the Way from the Top), but sadness and simple tenaciousing. Looking at the Word Six icon was suddenly like sounding at the pictures of Jo I kept in my wallet. Studying those, Id sometimes think that I would search at my immortal soul in order have her back again . . . and on that day in Ma rch, I thought I would snitch my soul to be able to write a story again.Go on and try it, then, a voice whispered. Maybe things have changed. and that nothing had changed, and I knew it. So instead of opening Word Six, I moved it across to the trash barrel in the lower righthand boxful of the screen, and dropped it in. Goodbye, old pal.Weinstock called a lot that winter, mostly with good news. Early in March she reported that Helens Promise 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 publisher, Debra, loved Helen, was sure it would be my breakthrough book. (My British sales had always lagged.)Promise is sort of a new direction 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 know . . . a kind of maturity.Thanks.Mike? I think the connections going. You sound muffled.Sure I did. I was biting down on the side of my hand to keep from howling with laughter. Now, cautiously, I took it out of my mouth and examined the bite-marks. Better?Yes, lots. So whats the new one about? view as me a hint.You know the answer to that one, kiddo.Debra laughed. Youll have to read the book to find out, Josephine, she said. Right?Yessum. hale, keep it coming. Your pals at Putnam are crazy about the way youre fetching it to the next level.I said goodbye, I hung up the telephone, and then I laughed wildly for about ten minutes. Laughed until I was crying. Thats me, though. Always taking it to the next level.During this period I also agreed to do a phone interview with a Newsweek 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 Weekly interv iew which would appear just before publication of Helens Promise. 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 job and always have, especially the sin of the live TV chat-show, where nobodys ever read your goddam book and the first question is always Where in the world do you get those mild ideas? The publicity process is like going to a sushi bar where youre the sushi, and it was wide to get past it this time with the feeling that Id been able to give Debra some good news she could take to her bosses. Yes, she could say, hes still being a bogeyman about publicity, but I got him to do a couple of things. solely through this my dreams of Sara Laughs were going on not every night but every second or third night, with me never thought of them in the daytime. I did my crosswords, I bought myself an a coustic steel guitar and started learning 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 lovely 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 days after Debras book-club call. It was storming out-side a vicious snow-changing-over-to-sleet event that proved to be the last and biggest blast of the winter. By mid-evening the office 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. in force(p) got off the in fact.Oh?Oh indeed. theres a feeling at Putnam, Michael, that this latest of yours may have a positive effect on your sales present in the market. Its very strong.Yes, I said, Im taking it to th e next level.Huh?Im just blabbing, Harold. Go on.Well . . . Helen Nearings a great lead character, and Skate is your best scoundrel ever.I said nothing.Debra raised the possibility of making Helens Promise the ruiner of a three-book come down. A very lucrative three-book contract. All without prompting from me. trio is one more than any publisher has wanted to commit to til now. I mentioned nine million dollars, three per book, in other words, expecting her to laugh . . . but an agent has to start somewhere, and I always choose the highest ground I can find. I think I mustiness 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 tooth doctor has gone a little heavy on the Novocain and make full your lips and tongue as well as your bad tooth and the patch of mutter surrounding it. If I tried to tattle, Id probably only flap and bedcover spit. Harold was some purring. A three-book contract for the new mature 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 know the bookberry-tree had died. Harold didnt know the new Mike Noonan had cataclysmic gruffness 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, nines obviously high, but its as good a place to start as any. We feel this new book is a big step 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 regarding at seven-point-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 effort 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. Think about it, for Christs sake. Were talking top dollar here. If you abide 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.Are you dissatisfied with Putnams? I think Debra would be very distressed to hear that. I also think Phyllis Grann would do damned near anything to address any concerns you might have.Are you sleeping with Debra, Harold? I thought, and all at once it seemed like the most logical idea in the world that dumpy, fiftyish, balding little Harold Oblowski was making it with my blonde, aristocratic, Smith-educated editor. Are you sleeping with her, do you talk about my succeeding(a) while youre lying in bed together in a room at the Plaza? Are the pair of you trying to jut out how many golden eg gs you can get out of this jade old goose before you lastly 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 upset? I thought youd be pleased. Hell, I thought youd be over the screw moon.Theres nothing wrong. Its just a bad time for me to talk prospicient contract. Youll have to pardon me, Harold. I have something coming out of the oven. gage 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 suggestion to stop thinking about Harolds unsatisfying 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 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 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 darkening slot of sky overhea d. I reach the course, and here something has changed someone has put a little sticker on the SARA LAUGHS sign. I lean closer and see its a radio spot 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 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 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 knock 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 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. Youve got a book to write.I cant write, I reply. That parts over. Im on the back forty now.No, the voice says. There is something relentless about it that scares me. You had writers walk, not writers block, and as you can see, its gone. Now haste up and get down there.Im afraid, 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 sprawling bulk of the log house, caution has sunk 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 growing 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 army 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 move 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 lucky 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 som ething 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 go down on 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 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 growing darkness. It is human, this figure, and y et its not. It is a crumpled clear 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 winding shroud. She is all tangled up in it.How hideously speedy this creature is It doesnt 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. 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 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 f loor of crying out in a cracked, horror-stricken voice and slamming my head repeatedly against something. How long before I finally realized 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 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 safety?I didnt know, couldnt with the power out and the bedside clock abruptly. 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 sh ivering 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 wedge 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 tranquilize 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 i nto the bed. I stood up, yanked the pillowcase off the extra pillow, and wiped my groin and f number legs with it. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets up, and lay there shivering, listening to the poise tick of sleet on the windows.There was no sleep for me the stick of that night, and the dream didnt 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 frequent 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 shade 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.