Bag of Bones by Stephen King Page A

hazy fragments or completely forgotten.
    There were a great many clear details to the Sara dreams—the loons, the crickets, the evening star and my wish upon it, just to name a few—but I thought most of those things were just verisimilitude. Scene-setting, if you will. As such, they could be dismissed from my considerations. That left three major elements, three large pieces of furniture to be unwrapped.
    As I sat on the beach, watching the sun go down between my sandy toes, I didn’t think you had to bea shrink to see how those three things went together.
    In the Sara dreams, the major elements were the woods behind me, the house below me, and Michael Noonan himself, frozen in the middle. It’s getting dark and there’s danger in the woods. It will be frightening to go to the house below, perhaps because it’s been empty so long, but I never doubt I must go there; scary or not, it’s the only shelter I have. Except I can’t do it. I can’t move. I’ve got writer’s walk.
    In the nightmare I am finally able to go toward shelter, only the shelter proves false. Proves more dangerous than I had ever expected in my . . . well, yes, in my wildest dreams. My dead wife rushes out, screaming and still tangled in her shroud, to attack me. Even five weeks later and almost three thousand miles from Derry, remembering that speedy white thing with its baggy arms would make me shiver and look back over my shoulder.
    But was it Johanna? I didn’t really know, did I? The thing was all wrapped up. The coffin looked like the one in which she had been buried, true, but that might just be misdirection.
    Writer’s walk, writer’s block.
    I can’t write, I told the voice in the dream. The voice says I can. The voice says the writer’s block is gone, and I believe it because the writer’s walk is gone, I’m finally headed down the driveway, going to shelter. I’m afraid, though. Even before the shapeless white thing makes its appearance, I’m terrified. I say it’s Mrs. Danvers I’m afraid of, but that’s just my dreaming mind getting Sara Laughs and Manderley all mixed up. I’m afraid of—
    â€œI’m afraid of writing,” I heard myself saying out loud. “I’m afraid to even try.”
    This was the night before I finally flew back to Maine, and I was half-past sober, going on drunk. By the end of my vacation, I was drinking a lot of evenings. “It’s not the block that scares me, it’s undoing the block. I’m really fucked, boys and girls. I’m fucked big-time.”
    Fucked or not, I had an idea I’d finally reached the heart of the matter. I was afraid of undoing the block, maybe afraid of picking up the strands of my life and going on without Jo. Yet some deep part of my mind believed I must do it; that’s what the menacing noises behind me in the woods were about. And belief counts for a lot. Too much, maybe, especially if you’re imaginative. When an imaginative person gets into mental trouble, the line between seeming and being has a way of disappearing.
    Things in the woods, yes, sir. I had one of them right there in my hand as I was thinking these things. I lifted my drink, holding it toward the western sky so that the setting sun seemed to be burning in the glass. I was drinking a lot, and maybe that was okay on Key Largo—hell, people were supposed to drink a lot on vacation, it was almost the law—but I’d been drinking too much even before I left. The kind of drinking that could get out of hand in no time at all. The kind that could get a man in trouble.
    Things in the woods, and the potentially safe place guarded by a scary bugbear that was not my wife, but perhaps my wife’s memory. It made sense, because Sara Laughs had always been Jo’s favorite place onearth. That thought led to another, one that made me swing my legs over the side of the chaise I’d