Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

I drank the champagne by myself that time, and entered the last line by myself as well (by then I was using a Macintosh which did a billion different things and which I used for only one) and never lost a minute’s sleep over it. But I called her at the inn where she and her friend Bryn were staying; I told her I had finished, and listened as she said the words I’d called to hear—words that slipped into an Irish telephone line, travelled to a microwave transmitter, rose like a prayer to some satellite, and then came back down to my ear: “Well, then that’s all right, isn’t it?” This custom began, as I say, after the second book. When we’d each had a glass of champagne and a refill, I took her into the office, where a single sheet of paper still stuck out of my forest-green Selectric. On the lake, one last loon cried down dark, that call that always sounds to me like something rusty turning slowly in the wind. “I thought you said you were done,” she said. “Everything but the last line,” I said. “The book, such as it is, is dedicated to you, and I want you to put down the last bit.” She didn’t laugh or protest or get gushy, just looked at me to see if I really meant it. I nodded that I did, and she sat in my chair. She had been swimming earlier, and her hair was pulled back and threaded through a white elastic thing. It was wet, and two shades darker red than usual. I touched it. It was like touching damp silk. “Paragraph indent?” she asked, as seriously as a girl from the steno pool about to take dictation from the big boss.

“No,” I said, “this continues.” And then I spoke the line I’d been holding in my head ever since I got up to pour the champagne.”

“He slipped the chain over her head, and then the two of them walked down the steps to where the car was parked.’” She typed it, then looked around and up at me expectantly. “That’s it,” I said. “You can write The End, I guess.”

Jo hit the Tt3m-4 button twice, centered the carriage, and typed The End under the last line of prose, the IBM’s Courier type ball (my favorite) spinning out the letters in their obedient dance. “What’s the chain he slips over her head?” she asked me. “You’ll have to read the book to find out.” With her sitting in my desk chair and me standing beside her, she was in perfect position to put her face where she did.

When she spoke, her lips moved against the most sensitive part of me.

There were a pair of cotton shorts between us and that was all. “Ve haffvays off making you talk,” she said. “I’ll just bet you do,” I said.