Free Bag of Bones by Stephen King Page A

teach a fella to get up at two A.M. without turning on a lamp.
    When I regained complete consciousness (if there is such a state), I was curled on the floor. I got up, disinfected the cut on my forehead, and sat on the lip of the tub with my head lowered to my knees until I felt confident enough to stand up. I sat there for fifteen minutes, I guess, and in that space of time I decided that barring some miracle, my career was over. Harold would scream in pain and Debra would moanin disbelief, but what could they do? Send out the Publication Police? Threaten me with the Book-of-the-Month-Club Gestapo? Even if they could, what difference would it make? You couldn’t get sap out of a brick or blood out of a stone. Barring some miraculous recovery, my life as a writer was over.
    And if it is? I asked myself. What’s on for the back forty, Mike? You can play a lot of Scrabble in forty years, go on a lot of Crossword Cruises, drink a lot of whiskey. But is that enough? What else are you going to put on your back forty?
    I didn’t want to think about that, not then. The next forty years could take care of themselves; I would be happy just to get through New Year’s Day of 1998.
    When I felt I had myself under control, I went back into my study, shuffled to the computer with my eyes resolutely on my feet, felt around for the right button, and turned off the machine. You can damage the program shutting down like that without putting it away, but under the circumstances, I hardly thought it mattered.
    That night I once again dreamed I was walking at twilight on Lane Forty-two, which leads to Sara Laughs; once more I wished on the evening star as the loons cried on the lake, and once more I sensed something in the woods behind me, edging ever closer. It seemed my Christmas holiday was over.
    *   *   *
    That was a hard, cold winter, lots of snow and in February a flu epidemic that did for an awful lot of Derry’s old folks. It took them the way a hard wind will take old trees after an ice storm. It missed mecompletely. I hadn’t so much as a case of the sniffles that winter.
    In March, I flew to Providence and took part in Will Weng’s New England Crossword Challenge. I placed fourth and won fifty bucks. I framed the uncashed check and hung it in the living room. Once upon a time, most of my framed Certificates of Triumph (Jo’s phrase; all the good phrases are Jo’s phrases, it seems to me) went up on my office walls, but by March of 1998, I wasn’t going in there very much. When I wanted to play Scrabble against the computer or do a tourney-level crossword puzzle, I used the PowerBook and sat at the kitchen table.
    I remember sitting there one day, opening the PowerBook’s main menu, going down to the crossword puzzles . . . then dropping the cursor two or three items further, until it had highlighted my old pal, Word Six.
    What swept over me then wasn’t frustration or impotent, balked fury (I’d experienced a lot of both since finishing All the Way from the Top ), but sadness and simple longing. Looking at the Word Six icon was suddenly like looking at the pictures of Jo I kept in my wallet. Studying those, I’d sometimes think that I would sell my immortal soul in order to have her back again . . . and on that day in March, I thought I would sell my soul to be able to write a story again.
    Go on and try it, then, a voice whispered. Maybe things have changed.
    Except that nothing had changed, and I knew it. So instead of opening Word Six, I moved it across tothe trash barrel in the lower righthand corner of the screen, and dropped it in. Goodbye, old pal.
    Debra Weinstock called a lot that winter, mostly with good news. Early in March she reported that Helen’s Promise had been picked as one half of the Literary Guild’s main selection for August, the other half being a legal thriller by Steve Martini, another veteran of the