Bag of Bones Read online

  “They want me to give them the next book in November?

  Next month?” I injected what I hoped was the right note of incredulity into my voice, just as if I hadn’t had Helen’s Promise in a safe-deposit box for almost eleven years. It had been the first nut I had stored; it was now the only nut I had left. “No, no, you could have until January fifteenth, at least,” he said, trying to sound magnanimous. I found myself wondering where he and Debra had gotten their lunch. Some fly place, I would have bet my life on that. Maybe Four Seasons. Johanna always used to call that place Valli and the Four Seasons. “It means they’d have to crash proseriously crash it, but they’re willing to do that. The real ques-is whether or not you could crash production.”

  “I think I could, but it’ll cost em,” I said. “Tell them to think of it as: being like same-day service on your dry-cleaning.”

  “Oh what a rotten shame for them!” Harold sounded as if he were maybe jacking off and had reached the point where Old Faithful splurts and everybody snaps their Instamatics. “How much do you think—”

  “A surcharge tacked on to the advance is probably the way to go,” he said. “They’ll get pouty of course, claim that the move is in your interest, too. Primarily in your interest, even. But based on the extra-work ’” argument… the midnight oil you’ll have to burn…”

  “The mental agony of creation… the pangs of premature birth…”

  “Right… right… I think a ten percent surcharge sounds about right.” lie spoke judiciously, like a man trying to be just as damned fair as he possibly could. Myself, I was wondering how many women would induce birth a month or so early if they got paid two or three hundred grand extra for doing so. Probably some questions are best left unanswered. And in my case, what difference did it make? The goddam thing was written, wasn’t it?

  “Well, see if you can make the deal,” I said. “Yes, but I don’t think we want to be talking about just a single book here, okay? I think—”

  “Harold, what I want right now is to eat some lunch.”

  “You sound a little tense, Michael. Is everything—”

  “Everything is fine. Talk to them about just one book, with a sweetener for speeding up production at my end. Okay?”,"Okay,” he said after one of his most significant pauses. “But I hope this doesn’t mean that you won’t entertain a three- or four-book contract later on. Make hay while the sun shines, remember. It’s the motto Of champions.”, Cross each bridge when you come to it is the motto of champions,” I. laid, and that night I dreamt I went to Sara Laughs again.

  In that dream—in all the dreams I had that fall and winter—I am walking up the lane to the lodge. The lane is a two-mile loop through the woods with ends opening onto Route 68. It has a number at either end (Lane Forty-two, if it matters) in case you have to call in a fire, but no name. Nor did Jo and I ever give it one, not even between ourselves.

  It is narrow, really just a double rut with timothy and witchgrass growing on the crown. When you drive in, you can hear that grass whispering like low voices against the undercarriage of your car or truck.

  I don’t drive in the dream, though. I never drive. In these dreams I walk. The trees huddle in close on either side of the lane. The darkening sky overhead is little more than a slot. Soon I will be able to see the first peeping stars. Sunset is past. Crickets chirr. Loons cry on the lake. Small things-chipmunks, probably, or the occasional squirrel—rustle in the woods.

  Now I come to a dirt driveway sloping down the hill on my right. It is our driveway, marked with a little wooden sign which reads s^, UGHS. I stand at the head of it, but I don’t go down. Below is the lodge. It’s all logs and added-on wings, with a deck jutting out behind. Fourteen rooms in all, a ridiculous number of rooms. It should look ugly and awkward, but somehow it does not. There is a brave-dowager quality to Sara, the look of a lady pressing resolutely on toward her hundredth year, still taking pretty good strides in spite of her arthritic hips and gimpy old knees.

  The central section is the oldest, dating back to 1900 or so. Other sections were added in the thirties, forties, and sixties. Once it was a hunting lodge; for a brief period in the early seventies it was home to a small commune of transcendental hippies. These were lease or rental deals; the owners from the late forties until 1984 were the Hingermans, Darren and Marie… then Marie alone when Darren died in 1971. The only visible addition from our period of ownership is the tiny DSS dish mounted on the central roofpeak. That was Johanna’s idea, and she never really got a chance to enjoy it.

  Beyond the house, the lake glimmers in the afterglow of sunset. The driveway, I see, is carpeted with brown pine needles and littered with fallen branches. The bushes which grow on either side of it have run wild, reaching out to one another like lovers across the narrowed gap which separates If you brought a car down here, the branches would scrape and unpleasantly against its sides. Below, I see, there’s moss growing logs of the main house, and three large sunflowers with faces like have grown up through the boards of the little driveway-side. The overall feeling is not neglect, exactly, butjrgottenness.

  There is a breath of breeze, and its coldness on my skin makes me that I have been sweating. I can smell pine—a smell which is sour and clean at the same time—and the faint but somehow smell of the lake. Dark Score is one of the cleanest, deepest in Maine.

  It was bigger until the late thirties, Marie Hingerman us; that was when Western Maine Electric, working hand in hand the mills and paper operations around Rumford, had gotten state to dam the Gessa River.

  Marie also showed us some charming;raphs of white-frocked ladies and vested gentlemen in canoes—snaps were from the time of the First World War, she said, and to one of the young women, frozen forever on the rim of the with a dripping paddle upraised. “That’s my mother,” she said, the man she’s threatening with the paddle is my father.”

  Their voices like loss. Now I can see Venus in the dark-sky. Star light, star bright, wish I may, wish I might… in these I always wish for Johanna.

  My wish made, I try to walk down the driveway. Of course I do. house, isn’t it? Where else would I go but my house, now that dark and now that the stealthy rustling in the woods seems closer and somehow more purposeful? Where else can I go? It’s. and it will be frightening to go into that dark place alone (suppose been left so long alone? suppose she’s angry?), but I electricity’s off, I’ll light one of the hurricane lamps we keep ’ kitchen cabinet.

  I can’t go down. My legs won’t move. It’s as if my body knows about the house down there that my brain does not. The rises again, chilling gooseflesh out onto my skin, and I wonder I have done to get myself all sweaty like this. Have I been run-And if so, what have I been running toward? Or from?

  Hair is sweaty, too; it lies on my brow in an unpleasantly heavy clump. I raise my hand to brush it away and see there is a shallow cut, fairly recent, running across the back, just beyond the knuckles.

  Sometimes this cut is on my right hand, sometimes it’s on the left. I think, If this is a dream, the details are good. Always that same thought: If this is a dream, the details are good. It’s the absolute truth. They are a novelist’s details… but in dreams, perhaps everyone is a novelist. How is one to know? Now Sara Laughs is only a dark hulk down below, and I realize I don’t want to go down there, anyway. I am a man who has trained his mind to misbehave, and I can imagine too many things waiting for me inside. A rabid raccoon crouched in a corner of the kitchen. Bats in the bath-room—if disturbed they’ll crowd the air around my cringing face, squeaking and fluttering against my cheeks with their dusty wings. Even one of William Denbrough’s famous Creatures from Beyond the Universe, now hiding under the porch and watching me approach with glittering, pus-rimmed eyes. “Well, I can’t stay up here,” I say, but my legs won’t move, and it seems I will be staying up here, where the driveway meets the lane; that I will be staying up here, like it or not. Now the rustling in the woods behind me sounds not like small animals (most of
them would by then be nested or burrowed for the night, anyway) but approaching footsteps. I try to turn and see, but I can’t even do that… and that was where I usually woke up. The first thing I always did was to turn over, establishing my return to reality by demonstrating to myself that my body would once more obey my mind. Sometimes—most times, actually—I would find myself thinking Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley. There was something creepy about this (there’s something creepy about any repeating dream, I think, about knowing your subconscious is digging obsessively at some object that won’t be dislodged), but I would be lying if I didn’t add that some part of me enjoyed the breathless summer calm in which the dream always wrapped me, and that part also enjoyed the sadness and foreboding I felt when I awoke. There was an exotic strangeness to the dream that was missing from my waking life, now that the road leading out of my imagination was so effectively blocked.

  The only time I remember being really frightened (and I must tell I don’t completely trust any of these memories, because for so long didn’t seem to exist at all) was when I awoke one night speaking clearly into the dark of my bedroom: “Something’s behind me, let it get me, something in the woods, please don’t let it get me.” wasn’t the words themselves that frightened me so much as the tone I which they were spoken. It was the voice of a man on the raw edge of and hardly seemed like my own voice at all.

  Days before Christmas of 1997, I once more drove down to Fidelity where once more the bank manager escorted me to my safe-box in the fluorescent-lit catacombs. As we walked down the he assured me (for the dozenth time, at least) that his wife was a fan of my work, she’d read all my books, couldn’t get enough. For the dozenth time (at least) I replied that now I must get him in my home. He responded with his usual chuckle. I thought of this oft-exchange as Banker’s Communion… i Mr. Quinlan inserted his key in Slot A and turned it. Then, as discreetly as a pimp who has conveyed a customer to a whore’s crib, he left. I inserted my own key in Slot B, turned it, and opened the drawer. It very vast now. The one remaining manuscript box seemed to quail in the far corner, like an abandoned puppy who some-knows his sibs have been taken off and gassed. Promise was scrawled across the top in fat black letters I could barely remember what the story was about.

  Snatched that time-traveller from the eighties and slammed the box shut Nothing left in there now but dust Give me that, i had hissed in my dream—it was the first time I’d thought of that one for years. Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher. Mr Quinlan, I’m finished,” I called. My voice sounded rough and was steady to my own ears, but Quinlan seemed to sense nothing wrong or perhaps he was just being discreet. I can’t have been the only cusafter all, who found his or her visits to this financial version of emotionally distressful. “I’m really going to read one of your books,” he said, dropping an involuntary little glance at the box I was holding (I suppose I could have brought a briefcase to put it in, but on those expeditions I never did). “In fact, I think I’ll put it on my list of New Year’s resolutions.”

  “You do that,” I said. “You just do that, Mr. Quinlan.”

  “Mark,” he said.

  “Please.” He’d said this before, too.

  I had composed two letters, which I slipped into the manuscript box before setting out for Federal Express. Both had been written on my computer, which my body would let me use as long as I chose the Note Pad function. It was only opening Word Six that caused the storms to start.

  I never tried to compose a novel using the Note Pad function, understanding that if I did, I’d likely lose that option, too. . not to mention my ability to play Scrabble and do crosswords on the machine.

  I had tried a couple of times to compose longhand, with spectacular lack of success. The problem wasn’t what I had once heard described as “screen shyness”; I had proved that to myself.

  One of the notes was to Harold, the other to Debra Weinstock, and both said pretty much the same thing: here’s the new book, Helen’s Promise, hope you like it as much as I do, if it seems a little rough it’s because I had to work a lot of extra hours to finish it this soon, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Erin Go Bragh, trick or treat, hope someone gives you a fucking pony.

  I stood for almost an hour in a line of shuffling, bitter-eyed late mailers (Christmas is such a carefree, low-pressure time—that’s one of the things I love about it), with Helen’s Promise under my left arm and a paperback copy of Nelson Demille’s The Charm School in my right hand.

  I read almost fifty pages before entrusting my final unpublished novel to a harried-looking clerk. When I wished her a Merry Christmas she shuddered and said nothing.

  CHAPTER 2

  He phone was ringing when I walked in my front door. It was asking me if I’d like to join him for Christmas. Join them, as matter of fact; all of his brothers and their families were coming.

  I opened my mouth to say no—the last thing on earth I needed was a Irish Christmas with everybody drinking whiskey and waxing ntimental about Jo while perhaps two dozen snotcaked rugrats around the floor—and heard myself saying I’d come.

  Frank sounded as surprised as I felt, but honestly delighted. “Fantastic”—he cried. “When can you get here?” was in the hall, my galoshes dripping on the tile, and from where I standing I could look through the arch and into the living room. was no Christmas tree; I hadn’t bothered with one since Jo died. Looked both ghastly and much too big to me… a roller rink in Early American.

  “I’ve been out running errands,” I said. “How about I throw some in a bag, get back into the car, and come south while the still blowing warm air?”

  “Tremendous,” Frank said without a moment’s hesitation. “We can have us a sane bachelor evening before the Sons and Daughters of East Malden start arriving. I’m pouring you a drink as soon as I get off the telephone.”

  “Then I guess I better get rolling,” I said.

  That was hands down the best holiday since Johanna died. The only good holiday, I guess. For four days I was an honorary Arlen. I drank too much, toasted Johanna’s memory too many times… and knew, somehow, that she’d be pleased to know I was doing it. Two babies spit up on me, one dog got into bed with me in the middle of the night, and Nicky Arlen’s sister-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 wanted 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 almost three and a half years. It was a shock, but not an entirely unpleasant one. It went no further—in a houseful of Arlens and with Susy Donahue not quite officially divorced yet (like me, she was an honorary Arlen that Christmas), it hardly could have done—but I decided it was time to leave… unless, that was, I wanted to go driving at high speed down a narrow street that most likely ended in a brick wall. I left on the twenty-seventh, very glad that I had come, and I gave Frank a fierce goodbye hug as we stood by my car. For four days I hadn’t thought at all about how 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 waking up with a sour stomach and a hangover headache, but never once in the middle of the night with the thought Manderley, I have dreamt again of Manderley going through my mind. I got back to Derry feeling refreshed and renewed. The first day of 1998 dawned clear and cold and still and beautiful. I got up, showered, then stood at the bedroom window, drinking coffee. It suddenly occurred to me—with all the simple, powerful reality of ideas like up is over your head and down is under your feet—that I could write now. It was a new year, something had changed, and I could write now if I wanted to. The rock had rolled away.

  I went into the study, sat down at the computer, and turned it on. My was beating normally, there was no sweat on my forehead or the of my neck, and my hands were warm. I pulled down the main the one you get when you click on the apple, and t
here was my Word Six. I clicked on it.

  The pen-and-parchment logo came up, when it did I suddenly couldn’t breathe. It was as if iron bands had clamped around my chest. I pushed back from the desk, gagging and clawing at the round neck the sweatshirt I was wearing. The wheels of my office chair caught on little throw rug—one of Jo’s finds in the last year of her life and I tipped over backward. My head banged the floor and I saw a fountain of,arks go whizzing across my field of vision. I suppose I was lucky to black out, but I think my real luck on New Year’s Morning of 1998 that I tipped over the way I did. If I’d only pushed back from the desk that I was still looking at the logo—and at the hideous blank screen followed it—I think I might 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 each inhale made a weird screaming sound, I was breathing. I lurched into the bathroom and threw up in the with such force that vomit splashed the mirror. I grayed out and knees buckled. This time it was my brow I struck, thunking it the lip of the basin, and although the back of my head didn’t there was a very respectable lump there by noon, though), my did, a little. This latter bump also left a purple mark, which I lied about, telling folks who asked that I’d run into the bath-door in the middle of the night, silly me, that’ll teach a fella to get at two A.M. without turning on a lamp.