JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 72 из 425It wouldn’t do to say, “Well, Bill, I got down there and heard a kid bawling in mylocked house, and it scared me so bad I turned into the gingerbread man and ran back to Derry. I’ll send you the flashlight I took; put it back on the shelf next to the paperbacks, would you?” That wasn’t ’any good because the story would get around and people would say, “Not surprised.
Wrote too many books, probably. Work like that has got to soften a man’s head. Now he’s scared of his own shadow. Occupational hazard.” Even if I never came down here again in my life, I didn’t want to leave people on the TR with that opinion of me, that half-contemptuous, see-what-you-get-for-thinking-too-much attitude. It’s one a lot of folks seem to have about people who live by their imaginations. I’d tell Bill I got sick. In a way it was true. Or no… better to tell him someone else got sick… a friend… someone in Derry I’d been seeing… a lady-friend, perhaps. “Bill, this friend of mine, this lady-friend of mine got sick, you see, and so…” I stopped suddenly, the light shining on the front of my car. I had walked the mile in the dark without noticing many of the sounds in the woods, and dismissing even the bigger of them as deer settling down for the night. I hadn’t turned around to see if the shroud-thing (or maybe some spectral crying child) was following me. I had gotten involved in making up a story and then embellishing it, doing it in my head instead of on paper this time but going down all the same well-known paths. I had gotten so involved that I had neglected to be afraid. My heartbeat was back to normal, the sweat was drying on my skin, and the mosquitoes had stopped whining in my ears. And as I stood there, a thought occurred to me. It was as if my mind had been waiting patiently for me to calm down enough so it could remind me of some essential fact. The pipes. Bill had gotten my go-ahead to replace most of the old stuff, and the plumber had done so. Very recently he’d done so.
“Air in the pipes,” I said, running the beam of the eight-cell flashlight over the grille of my Chevrolet. “That’s what I heard.” I waited to see if the deeper part of my mind would call this a stupid, rationalizing lie. It didn’t… because, I suppose, it realized it could be true. Airy pipes can sound like people talking, dogs barking, or children crying. Perhaps the plumber had bled them and the sound had been something else… but perhaps he hadn’t. The question was whether or not I was going to jump in my car, back two tenths of a mile to the highway, and then return to Derry, all on the basis of a sound I had heard for ten seconds (maybe only five), and while in an excited, stressful state of mind.
Wrote too many books, probably. Work like that has got to soften a man’s head. Now he’s scared of his own shadow. Occupational hazard.” Even if I never came down here again in my life, I didn’t want to leave people on the TR with that opinion of me, that half-contemptuous, see-what-you-get-for-thinking-too-much attitude. It’s one a lot of folks seem to have about people who live by their imaginations. I’d tell Bill I got sick. In a way it was true. Or no… better to tell him someone else got sick… a friend… someone in Derry I’d been seeing… a lady-friend, perhaps. “Bill, this friend of mine, this lady-friend of mine got sick, you see, and so…” I stopped suddenly, the light shining on the front of my car. I had walked the mile in the dark without noticing many of the sounds in the woods, and dismissing even the bigger of them as deer settling down for the night. I hadn’t turned around to see if the shroud-thing (or maybe some spectral crying child) was following me. I had gotten involved in making up a story and then embellishing it, doing it in my head instead of on paper this time but going down all the same well-known paths. I had gotten so involved that I had neglected to be afraid. My heartbeat was back to normal, the sweat was drying on my skin, and the mosquitoes had stopped whining in my ears. And as I stood there, a thought occurred to me. It was as if my mind had been waiting patiently for me to calm down enough so it could remind me of some essential fact. The pipes. Bill had gotten my go-ahead to replace most of the old stuff, and the plumber had done so. Very recently he’d done so.
“Air in the pipes,” I said, running the beam of the eight-cell flashlight over the grille of my Chevrolet. “That’s what I heard.” I waited to see if the deeper part of my mind would call this a stupid, rationalizing lie. It didn’t… because, I suppose, it realized it could be true. Airy pipes can sound like people talking, dogs barking, or children crying. Perhaps the plumber had bled them and the sound had been something else… but perhaps he hadn’t. The question was whether or not I was going to jump in my car, back two tenths of a mile to the highway, and then return to Derry, all on the basis of a sound I had heard for ten seconds (maybe only five), and while in an excited, stressful state of mind.