Bag of Bones by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

in four of those ten years, publishing one and ratholing the other.
    I don’t remember ever talking about this with Jo, and since she never asked, I always assumed she understood what I was doing: saving up nuts. It wasn’t writer’s block I was thinking of, though. Shit, I was just having fun.
    By February of 1995, after crashing and burning with at least two good ideas (that particular function—the Eureka! thing—has never stopped, which creates its own special version of hell), I could no longer deny the obvious: I was in the worst sort of trouble a writer can get into, barring Alzheimer’s or a cataclysmic stroke. Still, I had four cardboard manuscript boxes in the big safe-deposit box I keep up at Fidelity Union. They were marked Promise, Threat, Darcy, and Top. Around Valentine’s Day, my agent called, moderately nervous—I usually delivered my latest masterpiece to him by January, and here it was already half-past February. They would have to crash production to get this year’s Mike Noonan out in time for the annual Christmas buying orgy. Was everything all right?
    This was my first chance to say things were a countrymile from all right, but Mr. Harold Oblowski of 225 Park Avenue wasn’t the sort of man you said such things to. He was a fine agent, both liked and loathed in publishing circles (sometimes by the same people at the same time), but he didn’t adapt well to bad news from the dark and oil-streaked levels where the goods were actually produced. He would have freaked and been on the next plane to Derry, ready to give me creative mouth-to-mouth, adamant in his resolve not to leave until he had yanked me out of my fugue. No, I liked Harold right where he was, in his thirty-eighth-floor office with its kickass view of the East Side.
    I told him what a coincidence, Harold, you calling on the very day I finished the new one, gosharooty, how ’bout that, I’ll send it out FedEx, you’ll have it tomorrow. Harold assured me solemnly that there was no coincidence about it, that where his writers were concerned, he was telepathic. Then he congratulated me and hung up. Two hours later I received his bouquet—every bit as fulsome and silky as one of his Jimmy Hollywood ascots.
    After putting the flowers in the dining room, where I rarely went since Jo died, I went down to Fidelity Union. I used my key, the bank manager used his, and soon enough I was on my way to FedEx with the manuscript of All the Way from the Top. I took the most recent book because it was the one closest to the front of the box, that’s all. In November it was published just in time for the Christmas rush. I dedicated it to the memory of my late, beloved wife, Johanna. It went to number eleven on the Times bestseller list, and everyone went home happy. Even me. Because things would get better, wouldn’t they? No one had terminal writer’s block, did they (well, with the possible exception of Harper Lee)? All I had to do was relax, as the chorus girl said to the archbishop. And thank God I’d been a good squirrel and saved up my nuts.
    I was still optimistic the following year when I drove down to the Federal Express office with Threatening Behavior. That one was written in the fall of 1991, and had been one of Jo’s favorites. Optimism had faded quite a little bit by March of 1997, when I drove through a wet snowstorm with Darcy’s Admirer, although when people asked me how it was going (“Writing any good books lately?” is the existential way most seem to phrase the question), I still answered good, fine, yeah, writing lots of good books lately, they’re pouring out of me like shit out of a cow’s ass.
    After Harold had read Darcy and pronounced it my best ever, a bestseller which was also serious, I hesitantly broached the idea of taking a year off. He responded immediately with the question I detest above all others: was I all right? Sure, I told