JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 73 из 425I decided the answer was no. It might take only one more peculiar thing to turn me around—probably gibbering like a character on Tales from the Crypt—but the sound I’d heard in the foyer wasn’t enough. Not when making a go of it at Sara Laughs might mean so much. I hear voices in my head, and have for as long as I can remember.
I don’t know if that’s part of the necessary equipment for being a writer or not; I’ve never asked another one. I never felt the need to, because I know all the voices I hear are versions of me. Still, they often seem like very real versions of other people, and none is more real to me-or more familiar—than Jo’s voice. Now that voice came, sounding interested, amused in an ironic but gentle way… and approving. Going to fight, Mike? “Yeah,” I said, standing there in the dark and picking out gleams of chrome with my flashlight. “Think so, babe.” Well, then—that’s all right, isn’t it? Yes. It was. I got into my car, started it up, and drove slowly down the lane. And when I got to the driveway, I turned in.
There was no crying the second time I entered the house. I walked slowly through the downstairs, keeping the flashlight in my hand until I had turned on every light I could find; if there were people still boating on the north end of the lake, old Sara probably looked like some weird Spielbergian flying saucer hovering above them. I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer. In my life Johanna had been dead nearly four years, but to Sara, she was much nearer than that.
It wasn’t until I was actually inside, with all the lights on and the flash returned to its spot on the bookshelf, that I realized how much I had been dreading my arrival. Of having my grief reawakened by signs of Johanna’s interrupted life. A book with a corner turned down on the table at one end of the sofa, where Jo had liked to recline in her nightgown, reading and eating plums; the cardboard cannister of Quaker Oats, which was all she ever wanted for breakfast, on a shelf in the pantry; her old green robe hung on the back of the bathroom door in the south wing, which Bill Dean still called “the new wing,” although it had been built before we ever saw Sara Laughs. Brenda Meserve had done a good job—a humane job-of removing these signs and signals, but she couldn’t get them all. Jo’s hardcover set of Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels still held pride of place at the center of the living-room bookcase.
I don’t know if that’s part of the necessary equipment for being a writer or not; I’ve never asked another one. I never felt the need to, because I know all the voices I hear are versions of me. Still, they often seem like very real versions of other people, and none is more real to me-or more familiar—than Jo’s voice. Now that voice came, sounding interested, amused in an ironic but gentle way… and approving. Going to fight, Mike? “Yeah,” I said, standing there in the dark and picking out gleams of chrome with my flashlight. “Think so, babe.” Well, then—that’s all right, isn’t it? Yes. It was. I got into my car, started it up, and drove slowly down the lane. And when I got to the driveway, I turned in.
There was no crying the second time I entered the house. I walked slowly through the downstairs, keeping the flashlight in my hand until I had turned on every light I could find; if there were people still boating on the north end of the lake, old Sara probably looked like some weird Spielbergian flying saucer hovering above them. I think houses live their own lives along a time-stream that’s different from the ones upon which their owners float, one that’s slower. In a house, especially an old one, the past is closer. In my life Johanna had been dead nearly four years, but to Sara, she was much nearer than that.
It wasn’t until I was actually inside, with all the lights on and the flash returned to its spot on the bookshelf, that I realized how much I had been dreading my arrival. Of having my grief reawakened by signs of Johanna’s interrupted life. A book with a corner turned down on the table at one end of the sofa, where Jo had liked to recline in her nightgown, reading and eating plums; the cardboard cannister of Quaker Oats, which was all she ever wanted for breakfast, on a shelf in the pantry; her old green robe hung on the back of the bathroom door in the south wing, which Bill Dean still called “the new wing,” although it had been built before we ever saw Sara Laughs. Brenda Meserve had done a good job—a humane job-of removing these signs and signals, but she couldn’t get them all. Jo’s hardcover set of Sayers’s Peter Wimsey novels still held pride of place at the center of the living-room bookcase.