JК
Bag of Bones :: Кинг Стивен
Страница: 386 из 425Fred Dean, of course, only nineteen years old in ’01, the drowning of his daughter still over thirty years away. And the one who had reminded me of myself was Harry Auster, the firstborn of my great-grandfather’s sister. He would have been sixteen, barely old enough to raise a fuzz but old enough to work in the woods with Jared.
Old enough to shit in the same pit as Jared. To mistake Jared’s poison for wisdom. One of the others twisted his head and squinted at the same time—I’d seen that tic before. Where? Then it came to me: in the Lake-view General. This young man was the late Royce Merrill’s father.
The others I didn’t know. Nor did I care to.
“You ain’t a-passing by us,” Devore said. He held up both hands. “Don’t even think about trying. Am I right, boys?”
They murmured growling agreement—the sort you could hear coming from any present-day gang of headbangers or taggers, I imagine but their voices were distant; actually more sad than menacing. There was some substance to the man in Jared Devore’s clothes, perhaps because in life he had been a man of enormous vitality, perhaps because he was so recently dead, but the others were little more than projected images.
I started forward, moving into that baking cold, moving into the smell of him—the same invalid odors which had surrounded him when I’d met him here before.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he cried.
“For a constitutional,” I said. “And no law against it. The Street’s the place where good pups and vile dogs can walk side-by-side. You said so yourself.”
“You don’t understand,” Max-Jared said. “You never will. You’re not of that world. That was our world.”
I stopped, looking at him curiously. Time was short, I wanted to be done with this… but I had to know, and I thought Devore was ready to tell me.
“Make me understand,” I said. “Convince me that any world was your world.” I looked at him, then at the flickering, translucent figures behind him, gauze flesh heaped on shining bones. “Tell me what you did.”
“It was all different then,” Devore said. “When you come down here, Noonan, you might walk all three miles north to Halo Bay and see only a dozen people on The Street. After Labor Day you might not see any one at all. This side of the lake you have to walk through the bushes that are growing up wild and around the fallen trees—there’ll be even more of em after this storm—and even a deadfall or two because nowadays the townfolk don’t club together to keep it neat the way they used to.
Old enough to shit in the same pit as Jared. To mistake Jared’s poison for wisdom. One of the others twisted his head and squinted at the same time—I’d seen that tic before. Where? Then it came to me: in the Lake-view General. This young man was the late Royce Merrill’s father.
The others I didn’t know. Nor did I care to.
“You ain’t a-passing by us,” Devore said. He held up both hands. “Don’t even think about trying. Am I right, boys?”
They murmured growling agreement—the sort you could hear coming from any present-day gang of headbangers or taggers, I imagine but their voices were distant; actually more sad than menacing. There was some substance to the man in Jared Devore’s clothes, perhaps because in life he had been a man of enormous vitality, perhaps because he was so recently dead, but the others were little more than projected images.
I started forward, moving into that baking cold, moving into the smell of him—the same invalid odors which had surrounded him when I’d met him here before.
“Where do you think you’re going?” he cried.
“For a constitutional,” I said. “And no law against it. The Street’s the place where good pups and vile dogs can walk side-by-side. You said so yourself.”
“You don’t understand,” Max-Jared said. “You never will. You’re not of that world. That was our world.”
I stopped, looking at him curiously. Time was short, I wanted to be done with this… but I had to know, and I thought Devore was ready to tell me.
“Make me understand,” I said. “Convince me that any world was your world.” I looked at him, then at the flickering, translucent figures behind him, gauze flesh heaped on shining bones. “Tell me what you did.”
“It was all different then,” Devore said. “When you come down here, Noonan, you might walk all three miles north to Halo Bay and see only a dozen people on The Street. After Labor Day you might not see any one at all. This side of the lake you have to walk through the bushes that are growing up wild and around the fallen trees—there’ll be even more of em after this storm—and even a deadfall or two because nowadays the townfolk don’t club together to keep it neat the way they used to.