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Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 104 из 425Then, if the noise I’dheard at least twice now repeated itself, I would have it on tape. I could play it for Bill Dean and ask him what he thought it was. What if I hear the sobbing child tonight and the machine never kicks on? “Well then, I’ll know something else,” I told the empty, sunlit office. I was standing there in the doorway with the Memo-Scriber under my arm, looking at the empty desk and sweating like a pig. “Or at least suspect it.” Jo’s nook across the hall made my office seem crowded and homey by comparison. Never overfull, it was now nothing but a square room-shaped space. The rug was gone, her photos were gone, even the desk was gone. This looked like a do-it-yourself project which had been abandoned after ninety percent of the work had been done. Jo had been scrubbed/ out of it—scraped out of it—and I felt a moment’s unreasonable anger a Brenda Meserve. I thought of what my mother usually said when I’d done something on my own initiative of which she disapproved: “You took a little too much on y’self, didn’t you?” That was my feeling about Jo’s little bit of office: that in emptying it to the walls this way, Mrs. Meserve had taken a little too much on herself.
Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the UFO voice said. Maybe Jo did it herselfi Ever think of that, sport? “That’s stupid,” I said.
“Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death.
Considering she’d just bought—”
But I didn’t want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.
I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face.
It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears… except that’s not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.
I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room’s window in motion… but they hung perfectly straight.
“Jo?” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you?”
Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains… which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room… but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn’t alone in Sara Laughs.
Maybe it wasn’t Mrs. M. who cleaned it out, the UFO voice said. Maybe Jo did it herselfi Ever think of that, sport? “That’s stupid,” I said.
“Why would she? I hardly think she had a premonition of her own death.
Considering she’d just bought—”
But I didn’t want to say it. Not out loud. It seemed like a bad idea somehow.
I turned to leave the room, and a sudden sigh of cool air, amazing in that heat, rushed past the sides of my face. Not my body; just my face.
It was the most extraordinary sensation, like hands patting briefly but gently at my cheeks and forehead. At the same time there was a sighing in my ears… except that’s not quite right. It was a susurrus that went past my ears, like a whispered message spoken in a hurry.
I turned, expecting to see the curtains over the room’s window in motion… but they hung perfectly straight.
“Jo?” I said, and hearing her name made me shiver so violently that I almost dropped the Memo-Scriber. “Jo, was that you?”
Nothing. No phantom hands patting my skin, no motion from the curtains… which there certainly would have been if there had been an actual draft. All was quiet. There was only a tall man with a sweaty face and a tape-recorder under his arm standing in the doorway of a bare room… but that was when I first began to really believe that I wasn’t alone in Sara Laughs.