Bag of Bones   ::   Кинг Стивен

Then my feet landed in the stones and slimy weedstuffgrowing along the bottom, my heart kick-started, and I shoved upward like a guy planning to slam-dunk home the last score of a close basketball game. As I returned to the air, I gasped. Water went in my mouth and I coughed it back out, patting one hand against my chest in an effort to encourage my heart—come on, baby, keep going, you can do it. I came back down standing waist-deep in the lake and with my mouth full of that cold taste—lakewater with an undertinge of miner als, the kind you’d have to correct for when you washed your clothes. It was exactly what I had tasted while standing on the shoulder of Route 68. It was what I had tasted when Mattie Devore told me her daughter’s name. I made a psychological connection, that’s all. From the similarity of the names to my dead wi) to this lake. Which-“Which I have tasted a time or two before,” I said out loud. As if to underline the fact, I scooped up a palmful of water—some of the cleanest and clearest in the state, according to the analysis reports I and all the other members of the so-called Western Lakes Association get each year—and drank it down.

There was no revelation, no sudden weird flashes in my head. It was just Dark Score, first in my mouth and then in my stomach. I swam out to the float, climbed the three-rung ladder on the side, and flopped on the hot boards, feeling suddenly very glad I had come. In spite of everything.

Tomorrow I would start putting together some sort of life down here… trying to, anyway. For now it was enough to be lying with my head in the crook of one arm, on the verge of a doze, confident that the day’s adventures were over. As it happened, that was not quite true.

During our first summer on the TR, Jo and I discovered it was possible to see the Castle Rock fireworks show from the deck overlooking the lake. I remembered this just as it was drawing down toward dark, and thought that this year I would spend that time in the living room, watching a movie on the video player. Reliving all the Fourth of July twilights we had spent out there, drinking beer and laughing as the big ones went off, would be a bad idea. I was lonely enough without that, lonely in a way of which I had not been conscious in Derry. Then I wondered what I had come down here for, if not to finally face Johanna’s memory—all of it—and put it to loving rest. Certainly the possibility of writing again had never seemed more distant than it did that night.

There was no beer—I’d forgotten to get a sixpack either at the General Store or at the Village Cafe—but there was soda, courtesy of Brenda Meserve. I got a can of Pepsi and settled in to watch the lightshow, hoping it wouldn’t hurt too much. Hoping, I supposed, that I wouldn’t cry.