Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

There wasno stiffening patch of semen, either. The former I hadn’t really expected (or so I was already telling myself), but what about the latter? At the very least, I’d had the world’s most creative wet-dream—a triptych in which I had screwed two women and gotten a handjob from a third, all at the same time. I thought I had that morning-after feeling, too, the one you get when the previous night’s sex has been of the headbusting variety. But if there had been fireworks, where was the burnt gunpowder? “In Jo’s studio, most likely,” I told the empty, sunny room. “Or on the path between here and there. Just be glad you didn’t leave it in Mattie Devore, bucko. An affair with a post-adolescent widow you don’t need.” A part of me disagreed; a part of me thought Mattie Devore was exactly what I did need. But I hadn’t had sex with her last night, any more than I had had sex with my dead wife out on the swimming float or gotten a handjob from Sara Tidwell. Now that I saw I hadn’t killed a nice little kid either, my thoughts turned back to the typewriter. Why had I gotten it? Why bother? Oh man. What a silly question. My wife might have been keeping secrets from me, maybe even having an affair; there might be ghosts in the house; there might be a rich old man halfa mile south who wanted to put a sharp stick into me and then break it off; there might be a few toys in my own humble attic, for that matter. But as I stood there in a bright shaft of sunlight, looking at my shadow on the far wall, only one thought seemed to matter: I had gone out to my wife’s studio and gotten my old typewriter, and there was only one reason to do something like that. I went into the bathroom, wanting to get rid of the sweat on my body and the dirt on my feet before doing anything else. I reached for the shower-handle, then stopped. The tub was full of water. Either I had for some reason filled it during my sleepwalk… or something else had. I reached for the drain-lever, then stopped again, remembering that moment on the shoulder of Route 68 when my mouth had filled up with the taste of cold water. I realized I was waiting for it to happen again. When it didn’t, I opened the bathtub drain to let out the standing water and started the shower.

I could have brought the Selectric downstairs, perhaps even lugged it out onto the deck where there was a little breeze coming over the surface of the lake, but I didn’t. I had brought it all the way to the door of my office, and my office was where I’d work… if I could work.