Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

According to gloomy old Dennison Carville, the aspiring novelist should understand from the outset that fiction’s goals were foreverbeyond his reach, that the job was an exercise in futility. “Compared to the dullest human being actually walking about on the face of the earth and casting his shadow there,” Hardy supposedly said, “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” I understood because that was what I felt like in those interminable, dissembling days: a bag of bones.

Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again. If there is any more beautiful and haunting first line in English fiction, I’ve never read it. And it was a line I had cause to think of a lot during the fall of 1997 and the winter of 1998. I didn’t dream of Manderley, of course, but of Sara Laughs, which Jo sometimes called “the hideout.” A fair enough description, I guess, for a place so far up in the western Maine woods that it’s not really even in a town at all, but in an unincorporated area designated on state maps as RR-90. The last of these dreams was a nightmare, but until that one they had a kind of surreal simplicity. They were dreams I’d awake from wanting to turn on the bedroom light so I could reconfirm my place in reality before going back to sleep. You know how the air feels before a thunderstorm, how everything gets still and colors seem to stand out with the brilliance of things seen during a high fever? My winter dreams of Sara Laughs were like that, each leaving me with a feeling that was not quite sickness.

I’ve dreamt again ofmanderley, I would think sometimes, and sometimes I would lie in bed with the light on, listening to the wind outside, looking into the bedroom’s shadowy corners, and thinking that Rebecca de Winter hadn’t drowned in a bay but in Dark Score Lake. That she had gone down, gurgling and flailing, her strange black eyes full of water, while the loons cried out indifferently in the twilight. Sometimes I would get up and drink a glass of water. Sometimes I just turned off the light after I was once more sure of where I was, rolled over on my side again, and went back to sleep. In the daytime I rarely thought of Sara Laughs at all, and it was only much later that I realized something is badly out of whack when there is such a dichotomy between a person’s waking and sleeping lives. I think that Harold Oblowski’s call in October of 1997 was what kicked off the dreams. Harold’s ostensible reason for calling was to congratulate me on the impending release of Darcy’s Admirer, which was entertaining as hell and which also contained some extremely thought-provoking shit. I suspected he had at least one other item on his agenda—Harold usually does—and I was right.