Free A Bedroom in the Wee Hours of t by Stephen King Page A

Lottie refused. Riding meant slacks, and her posterior was just a trifle too wide for slacks. The idiot had also suggested that she go hiking with him and some of the others — the caretaker’s son doubled as a guide, Bill enthused, and he knew a hundred trails.
    The amount of game you saw, Bill said, would make you think it was 1829 instead of a hundred years later. Lottie had dumped cold water on this idea, too.
    “I believe, darling, that all hikes should be one—way, you see.”
    “One way?” His wide anglo—saxon brow criggled and croggled into its usual expression of befuddlement. “How can you have a one—way hike, Lottie?”
    “By hailing a taxi to take you home when your feet begin to hurt,”
    she replied coldly. The barb was wasted. He went without her, and came back glowing. The stupid bastard was getting a tan.
    She had not even enjoyed their evenings of bridge in the downstairs recreation room, and that was most unlike her. She was something of a barracuda at bridge, and if it had been ladylike to play for stakes in mixed company, she could have brought a cash dowry to her marriage (not that she would have, of course). Bill was a good bridge partner, too, he had both qualifications. He understood the basic rules and he allowed Lottie to dominate him.
    She thought it was poetic justice that her new husband spent most of their bridge evenings as the dummy.
    Their partners at the Overlook were the Compsons occasionally, the Vereckers more frequently. Verecker was in his early seventies, a surgeon who had retired following a near—fatal heart attack. His wife smiled a lot, spoke softly, and had eyes like shiny nickles. They played only adequate bridge, but they kept beating Lottie and Bill.
    On the occasions when the men played against the women, the men ended up trouncing Lottie and Malvina Verecker. When Lottie and Dr. Verecker played Bill and Malvina, she and the doctor usually won but there was no pleasure in it because Bill was a dullard and Malvina could not see the game of bridge as anything but a social tool.
    Two nights ago, after the doctor and his wife had made a bid of four clubs that they had absolutely no right to make, Lottie had mussed the cards in a sudden flash of pique that was very unlike her. She usually kept her feelings under much better control.
    “You could have led into my spades on that third trick!” She rattled at Bill. “That would have put a stop to it right there!”
    “But dear,” Bill said, flustered, “I thought you were thin in spades—”
    “If I had been thin in spades, I shouldn’t have bid two of them, should I? Why I continue to play this game with you I don’t know!”
    The Vereckers blinked at them in mild surprise. Later that evening Mrs. Verecker, she of the nickle—bright eyes, would tell her husband that she had thought them such a nice couple, so loving, but when she rumpled the cards like that she had looked just like a female shrew
    or was that a shrewess?
    Bill was staring at her with his jaw agape.
    “I’m very sorry,” she said, gathering up the reins of her control and giving them an inward shake. “I’m off my feed a little, I suppose. I haven’t been sleeping well.”
    “That’s a pity,” the doctor said. “Usually this mountain air
    we’re almost twelve thousand feet above sea level, you know
    is very conducive to good rest. Less oxygen, you know. The body doesn’t—”
    “I’ve had bad dreams,” Lottie told him shortly.
    And so she had. Not just bad dreams but nightmares. She had never been much of a one to dream (which said something disgusting and Freudian about her psyche, no doubt), even as a child. Oh yes, there had been some, pretty humdrum affairs, mostly. The only one she could remember that came even close to being a nightmare was one in which she had been delivering a Good Citizenship speech at the school assembly and had looked down to discover she had forgotten to put on her dress. Later someone had told her