Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

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It has wating down here during all the dreams when I had been frozen, that I have finally been able to walk down, it means to have scream when it wraps me in its silk arms, and I will scream when its rotting, bug-raddled flesh and see its dark staring eyes fine weave of the cloth. I will scream as the sanity leaves my forever. I will scream… but there is no one out here to hear me. The loons will hear me. I have come again to Manderley, and this I will never leave.

White thing reached for me and I woke up on the floor of crying out in a cracked, horrified voice and slamming my head repeatedly against something. How long before I finally realized I was no longer asleep, that I wasn’t at Sara Laughs? How long before I realized that I had fallen out of bed at some point and had crawled across the room in my sleep, that I was on my hands and knees in a corner, butting my head against the place where the walls came together, doing it over and over again like a lunatic in an asylum? I didn’t know, couldn’t with the power out and the bedside clock dead. I know that at first I couldn’t move out of the corner because it felt safer than the wider room would have done, and I know that for a long time the dream’s force held me even after I woke up (mostly, I imagine, because I couldn’t turn on a light and dispel its power). I was afraid that if I crawled out of my corner, the white thing would burst out of my bathroom, shrieking its dead shriek, eager to finish what it had started. I know I was shivering all over, and that I was cold and wet from the waist down, because my bladder had let go. I stayed there in the corner, gasping and wet, staring into the darkness, wondering if you could have a nightmare powerful enough in its imagery to drive you insane. I thought then (and think now) that I almost found out on that night in March. Finally I felt able to leave the corner. Halfway across the floor I pulled off my wet pajama pants, and when I did that, I got disoriented. What followed was a miserable and surreal five minutes in which I crawled aimlessly back and forth in my familiar bedroom, bumping into stuff and moaning each time I hit something with a blind, flailing hand. Each thing I touched at first seemed like that awful white thing.

Nothing I touched felt like anything I knew. With the reassuring green numerals of the bedside clock gone and my sense of direction temporarily lost, I could have been crawling around a mosque in Addis Ababa. At last I ran shoulder-first into the bed. I stood up, yanked the pillowcase off the extra pillow, and wiped my groin and upper legs with it. Then I crawled back into bed, pulled the blankets up, and lay there shivering, listening to the steady tick of sleet on the windows. There was no sleep for me the rest of that night, and the dream didn’t fade as dreams usually do upon waking.

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