Duma Key by Stephen King Read Free Book Online

itself—the cottage by Lake Phalen, not the house in Mendota Heights, no croaking voice downstairs—the urge passed.
    Reba the Anger-Management Doll in the Boston rocker, and grown to the size of an actual child. Well, why not? I had been angry, although at Mrs. Fevereau rather than at poor Gandalf, and I had no idea what toothy frogs had to do with the price of beans in Boston. The real question, it seemed to me, was about Monica’s dog. Had I killed Gandalf, or had he just expired?
    Or maybe the question was why I’d been so hungry afterward. Maybe that was the question.
    So hungry for meat.
    â€œI took him in my arms,” I whispered.
    Your arm, you mean, because now one is all you’ve got. Your good left.
    But my memory was taking him in my arms, plural. Channeling my anger
    ( it was RED )
    away from that foolish woman with her cigarette and cell phone and somehow back into myself, in some kind of crazy closed loop . . . taking him in myarms . . . surely a hallucination, but yes, that was my memory.
    Taking him in my arms .
    Cradling his neck with my left elbow so I could strangle him with my right hand.
    Strangle him and put him out of his misery.
    I slept shirtless, so it was easy to look at my stump. I only had to turn my head. I could wiggle it, but not much more. I did that a couple of times, and then I looked up at the ceiling. My heartbeat was slowing a little.
    â€œThe dog died of his injuries,” I said. “And shock. An autopsy would confirm that.”
    Except no one did autopsies on dogs that died after being crushed to bones and jelly by Hummers driven by careless, distracted women.
    I looked at the ceiling and I wished this life was over. This unhappy life that had started out so confidently. I thought I would sleep no more that night, but eventually I did. In the end we always wear out our worries.
    That’s what Wireman says.

How to Draw a Picture (II)
    Remember that the truth is in the details. No matter how you see the world or what style it imposes on your work as an artist, the truth is in the details. Of course the devil’s there, too—everyone says so—but maybe truth and the devil are words for the same thing. It could be, you know.
    Imagine that baby girl again, the one who fell from the carriage. She struck the right side of her head, but it was the left side of her brain that suffered the worst insult—contracoup, remember? The left side is where Broca’s area is—not that anyone knew that in the 1920s. Broca’s area processes language. Smack it hard enough and you lose your language, sometimes for a little while, sometimes forever. But—although they are closely related—saying is not seeing.
    The little girl still sees.
    She sees her five sisters. Their dresses. How their hair is crazy-combed by the wind when they come in from outside. She sees her father’s mustache, now threaded with gray. She sees Nan Melda—not just the housekeeper but the closest thing to a mother this little girl knows. She sees the scarf Nanny wraps around her head when she cleans; she sees the knot in the front, at the very top of Nan Melda’s high brown forehead; she sees Nan Melda’s silver bracelets, and how they flash starpoints in the sunshine that falls through the windows.
    Details, details, the truth is in the details.
    And does seeing cry out to saying, even in a damaged mind? A wounded brain? Oh, it must, it must.
    She thinks My head hurts.
    She thinks Something bad happened, and I don’t know who I am. Or where I am. Or what all these bright surrounding images are.
    She thinks Libbit? Is my name Libbit? I used to know. I could talk in the used-to-know, but now my words are like fish in the water. I want the man with the hair on his lip.
    She thinks That’s my Daddy, but when I try to say his name I call “Ird! Ird!” instead, because one flies past my window. I see every feather. I