JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 176 из 425I made one little adjustment, pushing at my engorged penis with the side of my hand, then rolled my hips and slipped into her like a finger ina silk-lined glove. She looked up at me, wide-eyed, then put a hand on my cheek and turned my head. “Everything out there is death,” she said, as if only explaining the obvious. In the window I saw Fifth Avenue between Fiftieth and Sixtieth—all those trendy shops, Bijan and Bally, Tiffany and Bergdortts and Steuben Glass. And here came Harold Oblowski, northbound and swinging his pigskin briefcase (the one Jo and I had given him for Christmas the year before she died). Beside him, carrying a Barnes and Noble bag by the handles, was the bountiful, beauteous Nola, his secretary. Except her bounty was gone. This was a grinning, yellow-jawed skeleton in a Donna Karan suit and alligator pumps; scrawny, beringed bones instead of fingers gripped the bag-handles.
Harold’s teeth jutted in his usual agent’s grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead—mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harold’s grin—Hey, how are ya, how’s the wij, how’s the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire.
I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. “Tell me who he was!” I shouted at her. “You know, I know you do!” My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. “Tell me, you bitch!” On the path between Jo’s studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk—all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman.
Harold’s teeth jutted in his usual agent’s grin, now extended to the point of obscenity. His favorite suit, the doublebreasted charcoal-gray from Paul Stuart, flapped on him like a sail in a fresh breeze. All around them, on both sides of the street, walked the living dead—mommy mummies leading baby corpses by the hands or wheeling them in expensive prams, zombie doormen, reanimated skateboarders. Here a tall black man with a last few strips of flesh hanging from his face like cured deer-hide walked his skeletal Alsatian. The cab-drivers were rotting to raga music. The faces looking down from the passing buses were skulls, each wearing its own version of Harold’s grin—Hey, how are ya, how’s the wij, how’s the kids, writing any good books lately? The peanut vendors were putrefying. Yet none of it could quench me. I was on fire.
I slipped my hands under her buttocks, lifting her, biting at the sheet (the pattern, I saw with no surprise, was blue roses) until I pulled it free of the mattress to keep from biting her on the neck, the shoulder, the breasts, anywhere my teeth could reach. “Tell me who he was!” I shouted at her. “You know, I know you do!” My voice was so muffled by my mouthful of bed-linen that I doubted if anyone but me could have understood it. “Tell me, you bitch!” On the path between Jo’s studio and the house I stood in the dark with the typewriter in my arms and that dream-spanning erection quivering below its metal bulk—all that ready and nothing willing. Except maybe for the night breeze. Then I became aware I was no longer alone. The shroud-thing was behind me, called like the moths to the party lights. It laughed-a brazen, smoke-broken laugh that could belong to only one woman.