Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

I staggered to the stairs and limped down them, holding tight to the bannister in case my tingling leg should buckle. At the foot I looked dazedly around the living room, as if seeing it for the first time, and then limped down the north-wing corridor. The bedroom door was ajar and for a moment I couldn’t bring myself to push it all the way open and go in. I was very badly scared, and my mind kept trying to replay an old episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, the one about the man who strangles his wife during an alcoholic blackout. He spends the whole half hour looking for her, and finally finds her in the pantry, bloated and open-eyed. Kyra Devore was the only kid of stuffed-animal age I’d met recently, but she had been sleeping peacefully under her cabbage-rose coverlet when I left her mother and headed home. It was stupid to think I had driven all the way back to Wasp Hill Road, probably wearing nothing but my Jockeys, that I had-Il/hat? Raped the woman? Brought the child here? In my sleep? I got the typewriter, in my sleep, didn’t I? It’s sitting right upstairs in the god-dam hallway. Big difference between going thirty yards through the woods and five miles down the road to-I wasn’t going to stand out here listening to those quarrelling voices in my head. If I wasn’t crazy—and I didn’t think I was—listening to those contentious assholes would probably send me there, and by the express. I reached out and pushed the bedroom door open. For a moment I actually saw a spreading octopus-pattern of blood soaking into the sheet, that’s how real and focused my terror was. Then I closed my eyes tight, opened them, and looked again. The sheets were rumpled, the bottom one mostly pulled free. I could see the quilted satin hide of the mattress. One pillow lay on the far edge of the bed.

The other was scrunched down at the foot. The throw rug—a piece of Jo’s work—was askew, and my water-glass lay overturned on the nighttable.

The bedroom looked as if it might have been the site of a brawl or an orgy, but not a murder. There was no blood and no little stuffed animal with black fur. I dropped to my knees and looked under the bed. Nothing there—not even dust-kitties, thanks to Brenda Meserve. I looked at the ground-sheet again, first passing a hand over its rumpled topography, then pulling it back down and resecuring the elasticized corners. Great invention, those sheets; if women gave out the Medal of Freedom instead of a bunch of white politicians who never made a bed or washed a load of clothes in their lives, the guy who thought up fitted sheets would undoubtedly have gotten a piece of that tin by now. In a Rose Garden ceremony. With the sheet pulled taut, I looked again. No blood, not a single drop.