JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 129 из 425While you’re right here by the phone, it said, why not call Bonnie Amudson?
Say hi, see how she’s doing? Jo had been on four differentboards during the nineties, all of them doing charitable work. Her friend Bonnie had persuaded her onto the Soup Kitchens board when a seat fell vacant. They had gone to a lot of the meetings together. Not the one in November of 1993, presumably, and Bonnie could hardly be expected to remember that one particular meeting almost five years later… but if she’d saved her old minutes-of-the-meeting sheets… Exactly what the fuck was I thinking of?. Calling Bonnie, making nice, then asking her to check her December 1993 minutes? Was I going to ask her if the attendance report had my wife absent from the November meeting? Was I going to ask if maybe Jo had seemed different that last year of her life? And when Bonnie asked me why I wanted to know, what would I say? Give me that, Jo had snarled in my dream of her.
In the dream she hadn’t looked like Jo at all, she’d looked like some other woman, maybe like the one in the Book of Proverbs, the strange woman whose lips were as honey but whose heart was full of gall and wormwood. A strange woman with fingers as cold as twigs after a frost.
Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher. I went to the cellar door and touched the knob. I turned it… then let it go. I didn’t want to look down there into the dark, didn’t want to risk the chance that something might start thumping again. It was better to leave that door shut. What I wanted was something cold to drink. I went into the kitchen, reached for the fridge door, then stopped. The magnets were back in a circle again, but this time four letters and one number had been pulled into the center and lined up there. They spelled a single lower-case word: hello There was something here. Even back in broad daylight I had no doubt of that. I’d asked if it was safe for me to be here and had received a mixed message… but that didn’t matter. if I left Sara now, there was nowhere to go. I had a key to the house in Derry, but matters had to be resolved here. I knew that, too. “Hello,” I said, and opened the fridge to get a soda. “Whoever or whatever you are, hello.”
C H P T E.:. R I woke in the early hours of the following morning convinced that there was someone in the north bedroom with me. I sat up against the pillows, rubbed my eyes, and saw a dark, shouldery shape standing between me and the window. “Who are you?” I asked, thinking that it wouldn’t reply in words; it would, instead, thump on the wall. Once for yes, twice for no—what’s on your mind, Houdini? But the figure standing by the window made no reply at all. I groped up, found the string hanging from the light over the bed, and yanked it.
Say hi, see how she’s doing? Jo had been on four differentboards during the nineties, all of them doing charitable work. Her friend Bonnie had persuaded her onto the Soup Kitchens board when a seat fell vacant. They had gone to a lot of the meetings together. Not the one in November of 1993, presumably, and Bonnie could hardly be expected to remember that one particular meeting almost five years later… but if she’d saved her old minutes-of-the-meeting sheets… Exactly what the fuck was I thinking of?. Calling Bonnie, making nice, then asking her to check her December 1993 minutes? Was I going to ask her if the attendance report had my wife absent from the November meeting? Was I going to ask if maybe Jo had seemed different that last year of her life? And when Bonnie asked me why I wanted to know, what would I say? Give me that, Jo had snarled in my dream of her.
In the dream she hadn’t looked like Jo at all, she’d looked like some other woman, maybe like the one in the Book of Proverbs, the strange woman whose lips were as honey but whose heart was full of gall and wormwood. A strange woman with fingers as cold as twigs after a frost.
Give me that, it’s my dust-catcher. I went to the cellar door and touched the knob. I turned it… then let it go. I didn’t want to look down there into the dark, didn’t want to risk the chance that something might start thumping again. It was better to leave that door shut. What I wanted was something cold to drink. I went into the kitchen, reached for the fridge door, then stopped. The magnets were back in a circle again, but this time four letters and one number had been pulled into the center and lined up there. They spelled a single lower-case word: hello There was something here. Even back in broad daylight I had no doubt of that. I’d asked if it was safe for me to be here and had received a mixed message… but that didn’t matter. if I left Sara now, there was nowhere to go. I had a key to the house in Derry, but matters had to be resolved here. I knew that, too. “Hello,” I said, and opened the fridge to get a soda. “Whoever or whatever you are, hello.”
C H P T E.:. R I woke in the early hours of the following morning convinced that there was someone in the north bedroom with me. I sat up against the pillows, rubbed my eyes, and saw a dark, shouldery shape standing between me and the window. “Who are you?” I asked, thinking that it wouldn’t reply in words; it would, instead, thump on the wall. Once for yes, twice for no—what’s on your mind, Houdini? But the figure standing by the window made no reply at all. I groped up, found the string hanging from the light over the bed, and yanked it.