Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

On the float I bent my head and put my mouth on one of Jo’s breastsand sucked the cloth-covered nipple into my mouth. I tasted damp fabric and dank lake. She reached for me where I stuck out and I slapped her hand away. If she touched me I would come at once. I sucked, drinking back trickles of cotton-water, groping with my own hands, first caressing her ass and then yanking down the bottom half of her suit. I got it off her and she dropped to her knees. I did too, finally getting rid of my wet, clinging underpants and tossing them on top of her bikini panty. We faced each other that way, me naked, her almost.

“Who was the guy at the game?” I panted. “Who was he, Jo?”

“No one in particular, Irish. Just another bag of bones.”

She laughed, then leaned back on her haunches and stared at me. Her navel was a tiny black cup. There was something queerly, attractively snakelike in her posture. “Everything down there is death,” she said, and pressed her cold palms and white, pruney fingers to my cheeks. She turned my head and then bent it so I was looking into the lake. Under the water I saw decomposing bodies slipping by, pulled by some deep current. Their wet eyes stared. Their fish-nibbled noses gaped. Their tongues lolled between white lips like tendrils of waterweed. Some of the dead trailed pallid balloons of jellyfish guts; some were little more than bone. Yet not even the sight of this floating charnel parade could divert me from what I wanted. I shrugged my head free of her hands, pushed her down on the boards, and finally cooled what was so hard and contentious, sinking it deep. Her moon-silvered eyes stared up at me, through me, and I saw that one pupil was larger than the other.

That was how her eyes had looked on the TV monitor when I had identified her in the Derry County Morgue. She was dead. My wife was dead and I was fucking her corpse. Nor could even that realization stop me. “Who was he?” I cried at her, covering her cold flesh as it lay on the wet boards. “Who was he, Jo, for Christ’s sake tell me who he was!” In the north bedroom I pulled Mattie on top of me, relishing the feel of those small breasts against my chest and the length of her entwining legs.

Then I rolled her over on the far side of the bed. I felt her hand reaching for me, and slapped it away—if she touched me where she meant to touch me, I would come in an instant. “Spread your legs, hurry,” I said, and she did. I closed my eyes, shutting out all other sensory input in favor of this. I pressed forward, then stopped.