Bag of Bones (70 page)

FRIEND, by Noonan/Pg. 92

only thing I got to say. Anything else, fuck, what good would it do? Life's a game, and I lost. You want me to tell you that I yanked some little kid out of the water, pulled her up, got her motor going again? I did, but not because I'm a hero or a saint . . . ”

There was more but no need to read it. The message,
owls under studio,
ran down the margin just as it had on page nineteen. As it probably did on any number of other pages as well. I remembered how deliriously happy I had been to discover that the block had been dissolved and I could write again. It had been dissolved all right, but not because I'd finally beaten it or found a way around
it. Jo
had dissolved it.
Jo
had beaten it, and my continued career as a writer of second-rate thrillers had been the least of her concerns when she did it. As I stood there in the flicker-flash of lightning, feeling my unseen guests swirl around me in the unsteady air, I remembered Mrs. Moran, my first-grade teacher. When your efforts to replicate the smooth curves of the Palmer Method alphabet on the blackboard began to flag and waver, she would put her large competent hand over yours and help you.

So had Jo helped me.

I riffled through the manuscript and saw the key words everywhere, sometimes placed so you could
actually read them stacked on different lines, one above the other. How hard she had tried to tell me this . . . and I had no intention of doing anything else until I found out why.

I dropped the manuscript back on the table, but before I could re-anchor it, a furious gust of freezing air blew past me, lifting the pages and scattering them everywhere in a cyclone. If that force could have ripped them to shreds, I'm sure that it would have.

No!
it cried as I grabbed the lantern's handle.
No, finish the job!

Wind blew around my face in chill gusts—it was as if someone I couldn't quite see was standing right in front of me and breathing in my face, retreating as I moved forward, huffing and puffing like the big bad wolf outside the houses of the three little pigs.

I hung the lantern over my arm, held my hands out in front of me, and clapped them together sharply. The cold puffs in my face ceased. There was now only the random swirling air coming in through the partially plugged kitchen window. “She's sleeping,” I said to what I knew was still there, silently watching. “There's time.”

I went out the back door and the wind took me at once, making me stagger sideways, almost knocking me over. And in the wavering trees I saw green faces, the faces of the dead. Devore's was there, and Royce's, and Son Tidwell's. Most of all I saw Sara's.

Everywhere Sara.

No! Go back! You don't need no truck with no owls, sugar! Go back! Finish the job! Do what you came for!

“I don't
know
what I came for,” I said. “And until I find out, I'm not doing
anything.
”

The wind screamed as if in offense, and a huge branch split off the pine standing to the right of the house. It fell on top of my Chevrolet in a spray of water, denting the roof before rolling off on my side.

Clapping my hands out here would be every bit as useful as King Canute commanding the tide to turn. This was her world, not mine . . . and only the edge of it, at that. Every step closer to The Street and the lake would bring me closer to that world's heart, where time was thin and spirits ruled. Oh dear God, what had happened to cause this?

The path to Jo's studio had turned into a creek. I got a dozen steps down it before a rock turned under my foot and I fell heavily on my side. Lightning zigged across the sky, there was the crack of another breaking branch, and then something was falling toward me. I put my hands up to shield my face and rolled to the right, off the path. The branch splashed to the ground just behind me, and I tumbled halfway down a slope that was slick with soaked needles. At last I was able to pull myself to my feet. The branch on the path was even bigger than the one which had landed on the roof of the car. If it had struck me, it likely would have bashed in my skull.

Go back!
A hissing, spiteful wind through the trees.

Finish it!
The slobbering, guttural voice of the lake slamming into the rocks and the bank below The Street.

Mind your business!
That was the very house itself, groaning on its foundations.
Mind your business and let me mind mine!

But Kyra
was
my business. Kyra was my daughter.

I picked up the lantern. The housing was cracked but the bulb glowed bright and steady—that was one for the home team. Bent over against the howling wind, hand raised to ward off more falling branches, I slipped and stumbled my way down the hill to my dead wife's studio.

A
t first the door wouldn't open. The knob turned under my hand so I knew it wasn't locked, but the rain seemed to have swelled the wood . . . or had something been shoved up against it? I drew back, crouched a little, and hit the door with my shoulder. This time there was some slight give.

It was her. Sara. Standing on the other side of the door and trying to hold it shut against me. How could she do that? How, in God's name? She was a fucking ghost!

I thought of the
BAMM CONSTRUCTION
pickup . . . and as if thought were conjuration I could almost see it out there at the end of Lane Forty-two, parked by the highway. The old ladies' sedan was behind it, and three or four other cars were now behind them. All of them with their windshield wipers flopping back and forth, their headlights cutting feeble cones through the downpour. They were lined up on the shoulder like cars at a yard sale. There was no yard sale here,
only the old-timers sitting silently in their cars. Old-timers who were in the zone just like I was. Old-timers sending in the vibe.

She was drawing on them.
Stealing
from them. She'd done the same with Devore—and me too, of course. Many of the manifestations I'd experienced since coming back had likely been created from my own psychic energy. It was amusing when you thought of it.

Or maybe “terrifying” was the word I was actually looking for.

“Jo, help me,” I said in the pouring rain. Lightning flashed, turning the torrents a bright brief silver. “If you ever loved me, help me now.”

I drew back and hit the door again. This time there was no resistance at all and I went hurtling in, catching my shin on the jamb and falling to my knees. I held onto the lantern, though.

There was a moment of silence. In it I felt forces and presences gathering themselves. In that moment nothing seemed to move, although behind me, in the woods Jo had loved to ramble—with me or without me—the rain continued to fall and the wind continued to howl, a merciless gardener pruning its way through the trees that were dead and almost dead, doing the work of ten gentler years in one turbulent hour. Then the door slammed shut and it began. I saw everything in the glow of the flashlight, which I had turned on without even realizing it, but at first I didn't know exactly what I was seeing, other than the destruction by poltergeist of my wife's beloved crafts and treasures.

The framed afghan square tore itself off the wall and
flew from one side of the studio to the other, the black oak frame breaking apart. The heads popped off the dolls poking out of the baby collages like champagne corks at a party. The hanging light-globe shattered, showering me with fragments of glass. A wind began to blow—a cold one—and was quickly joined and whirled into a cyclone by one which was warmer, almost hot. They rolled past me as if in imitation of the larger storm outside.

The Sara Laughs head on the bookcase, the one which appeared to be constructed of toothpicks and lollipop sticks, exploded in a cloud of wood-splinters. The kayak paddle leaning against the wall rose into the air, rowed furiously at nothing, then launched itself at me like a spear. I threw myself flat on the green rag rug to avoid it, and felt bits of broken glass from the shattered light-globe cut into the palm of my hand as I came down. I felt something else, as well—a ridge of something beneath the rug. The paddle hit the far wall hard enough to split into two pieces.

Now the banjo my wife had never been able to master rose in the air, revolved twice, and played a bright rattle of notes that were out of tune but nonetheless unmistakable—wish I was in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten. The phrase ended with a vicious
BLUNK!
that broke all five strings. The banjo whirled itself a third time, its bright steel fittings reflecting fishscale runs of light on the study walls, and then beat itself to death against the floor, the drum shattering and the tuning pegs snapping off like teeth.

The sound of moving air began to—how do I
express this?—to
focus
somehow, until it wasn't the sound of air but the sound of voices—panting, unearthly voices full of fury. They would have screamed if they'd had vocal cords to scream with. Dusty air swirled up in the beam of my flashlight, making helix shapes that danced together, then reeled apart again. For just a moment I heard Sara's snarling, smoke-broken voice:
“Git out, bitch! You git on out! This ain't none of yours—”
And then a curious insubstantial thud, as if air had collided with air. This was followed by a rushing wind-tunnel shriek that I recognized: I'd heard it in the middle of the night. Jo was screaming. Sara was hurting her, Sara was punishing her for presuming to interfere, and Jo was screaming.

“No!” I shouted, getting to my feet. “Leave her alone! Leave her be!” I advanced into the room, swinging the lantern in front of my face as if I could beat her away with it. Stoppered bottles stormed past me—some contained dried flowers, some carefully sectioned mushrooms, some woods-herbs. They shattered against the far wall with a brittle xylophone sound. None of them struck me; it was as if an unseen hand guided them away.

Then Jo's rolltop desk rose into the air. It must have weighed at least four hundred pounds with its drawers loaded as they were, but it floated like a feather, nodding first one way and then dipping the other in the opposing currents of air.

Jo screamed again, this time in anger rather than pain, and I staggered backward against the closed door with a feeling that I had been scooped hollow. Sara wasn't the only one who could steal the energy of
the living, it appeared. White semeny stuff—ectoplasm, I guess—spilled from the desk's pigeonholes in a dozen little streams, and the desk suddenly launched itself across the room. It flew almost too fast to follow with the eye. Anyone standing in front of it would have been smashed flat. There was a head-splitting shriek of protest and agony—Sara this time, I knew it was—and then the desk struck the wall, breaking through it and letting in the rain and the wind. The rolltop snapped loose of its slot and hung like a jointed tongue. All the drawers shot out. Spools of thread, skeins of yarn, little flora/fauna identification books and woods guides, thimbles, notebooks, knitting needles, dried-up Magic Markers—Jo's early remains, Ki might have called them. They flew everywhere like bones and bits of hair cruelly scattered from a disinterred coffin.

“Stop it,” I croaked. “Stop it, both of you. That's enough.”

But there was no need to tell them. Except for the furious beat of the storm, I was alone in the ruins of my wife's studio. The battle was over. At least for the time being.

*   *   *

I knelt and doubled up the green rag rug, carefully folding into it as much of the shattered glass from the light as I could. Beneath it was a trapdoor giving on a triangular storage area created by the slope of the land as it dropped toward the lake. The ridge I'd felt was one of the trap's hinges. I had known about this area and had meant to check it for the owls. Then things began to happen and I'd forgotten.

There was a recessed ring in the trapdoor. I
grabbed it, ready for more resistance, but it swung up easily. The smell that wafted up froze me in my tracks. Not damp decay, at least not at first, but Red—Jo's favorite perfume. It hung around me for a moment and then it was gone. What replaced it was the smell of rain, roots, and wet earth. Not pleasant, but I had smelled far worse down by the lake near that damned birch tree.

I shone my light down three steep steps. I could see a squat shape that turned out to be an old toilet—I could vaguely remember Bill and Kenny Auster putting it under here back in 1990 or '91. There were steel boxes—filing cabinet drawers, actually—wrapped in plastic and stacked up on pallets. Old records and papers. An eight-track tape player wrapped in a plastic bag. An old VCR next to it, in another one. And over in the corner—

I sat down, hung my legs over, and felt something touch the ankle I had turned in the lake. I shone my light between my knees and for one moment saw a young black kid. Not the one drowned in the lake, though—this one was older and quite a lot bigger. Twelve, maybe fourteen. The drowned boy had been no more than eight.

This one bared his teeth at me and hissed like a cat. There were no pupils in his eyes; like those of the boy in the lake, his eyes were entirely white, like the eyes of a statue. And he was shaking his head.
Don't come down here, white man. Let the dead rest in peace.

“But you're not at peace,” I said, and shone the light full on him. I had a momentary glimpse of a truly hideous thing. I could see through him, but I could also see
into
him: the rotting remains of his
tongue in his mouth, his eyes in their sockets, his brain simmering like a spoiled egg in its case of skull. Then he was gone, and there was nothing but one of those swirling dust-helixes.

I went down, holding the lantern raised. Below it, nests of shadows rocked and seemed to reach upward.

*   *   *