Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

He powered up his laptop and created a blank document. What followed was also part of the ritual, he supposed: naming the doc (BITTER RIVER #1), formatting the doc, and picking a font for the doc. He had used Book Antiqua while writing Village , but had no intention of using it on Bitter River ; that would be bad mojo indeed. Aware that there might be power outages, causing him to resort to the Olympia portable, he picked the American Typewriter font.

Was that everything? No, one more thing. He clicked on Autosave. Even if there was an outage, he’d be unlikely to lose his copy, the laptop had a full battery, but it was better to be safe than sorry.

The coffee was ready. He poured himself a cup and sat down.

Do you really want to do this? Do you really intend to do this?

The answer to both was yes, so he centered the blinking cursor and typed

He hit return and sat very still for a moment. Hundreds of miles south of here he supposed Lucy was sitting with her own cup of coffee in front of her own open laptop, where she kept the records of her current accounting clients. Soon she would fall into her own hypnotic trance—numbers instead of words—but right now she was thinking of him. He was quite sure of that. Thinking of him and hoping, maybe even praying, that he didn’t… how had Al Stamper put it?… lose the wheels off his little red wagon.

“Not going to happen,” he said. “It’s going to be like taking dictation.”

He looked at the blinking cursor a moment longer, then typed:

When the girl screamed, a sound shrill enough to shatter glass, Herk stopped playing the piano and turned around.

After that, Drew was lost.

He had arranged his teaching schedule to start late in the day from the very start, because when he was working on his fiction, he liked to begin at eight. He always made himself go until eleven even though on many days he found himself struggling by ten-thirty. He often thought of a story—probably apocryphal—he had read about James Joyce. A friend had come into Joyce’s house and found the famous writer at his desk with his head in his arms, a picture of abject despair. When the friend asked what was wrong, Joyce told him he’d only managed seven words all morning. “Ah, but James, that’s good for you,” the friend said. To which Joyce replied, “Perhaps, but I don’t know what order they go in!”

Drew could relate to that story, apocryphal or not. It was the way he usually felt during that torturous last half hour. That was when the fear of losing his words set in. Of course during the last month or so of The Village on the Hill , he had felt that way every rotten second.

There was none of that nonsense this morning. A door in his head opened directly into the smoky, kerosene-smelling saloon known as the Buffalo Head Tavern, and he stepped through it. He saw every detail, heard every word. He was there, looking through the eyes of Herkimer Belasco, the piano player, when the Prescott kid put the muzzle of his .45 (the one with the fancy pearl-handle grips) under the chin of the young dancehall girl and began to harangue her. The accordion player covered his eyes when Andy Prescott pulled the trigger, but Herkimer kept his wide open and Drew saw it all: the sudden eruption of hair and blood, the bottle of Old Dandy shattered by the bullet, the crack in the mirror behind which the whiskey bottle had stood.

It was like no writing experience Drew had ever had in his life, and when hunger pangs finally pulled him from his trance (his breakfast had consisted of a bowl of Quaker Oats), he looked at the info strip on his laptop and saw it was almost two in the afternoon. His back ached, his eyes burned, and he felt exalted. Almost drunk. He printed his work (eighteen pages, fucking incredible) but left them in the output tray. He would go over them tonight with a pen—that was also part of his routine—but he already knew he would find precious little to correct. A dropped word or two, the occasional unintended repetition, maybe a simile that was working too hard or not hard enough. Otherwise it would be clean. He knew it.

“Like taking dictation,” he murmured, then got up to make himself a sandwich.

Over the next three days he fell into a clockwork routine. It was as if he had been working at the cabin all his life—the creative part of it, anyway. He wrote from seven-thirty or so until almost two. He ate. He napped or walked along the road, counting power poles as he went. In the evening, he lit a fire in the woodstove, heated up something from a can on the Hotpoint, then called home to talk to Lucy and the kids. When the call was done, he would edit his pages, then read, choosing from the paperbacks in the upstairs bookcase. Before bed, he damped the fire in the woodstove and went out to look at the stars.

The story rolled. The pile of pages sitting next to the printer grew. There was no dread as he made his coffee, took his vitamins, and brushed his teeth, only anticipation. Once he sat down, the words were there. He felt that each of those days was Christmas, with new presents to unwrap. He barely noticed that he was sneezing quite a lot on the third day, or the slight roughness in his throat.

“What have you been eating?” Lucy asked him when he called that night. “Be honest, Mister.”

“Mostly the stuff I brought, but—”

“Drew!” Dragging it out so it was Drooo .

“But I’m going to buy some fresh stuff tomorrow, after I finish working.”

“Good. Go to the market in St. Christopher. It’s not much, but it’s better than that nasty little store down the road.”

“Okay,” he said, although he had no intention of going all the way to St. Christopher; that was a ninety-mile roundtrip, and he wouldn’t be back until almost dark. It didn’t occur to him until after he’d hung up that he had lied to her. Something he hadn’t done since the last few weeks of working on Village , when everything started to go wrong. When he had sometimes sat for twenty minutes in front of the same laptop he was using now, debating between a grove of willows and a copse of trees . Both seemed right, neither seemed right. Sitting hunched over the laptop, sweating, resisting the urge to pound his forehead until he jarred the right descriptive phrase loose. And when Lucy asked him how it was going—with that I’m worried furrow in her brow—he had replied with that same single word, that same simple lie: Okay .

Undressing for bed, he told himself it didn’t matter. If it was a lie it was a white one, just a device to short-circuit an argument before it could be born. Husbands and wives did it all the time. It was the way marriages survived.

He lay down, turned off the lamp, sneezed twice, and went to sleep.

On his fourth day of work, Drew woke up to plugged sinuses and a moderately sore throat, but no fever he could detect. He could work through a cold, had done so many times in his teaching career; prided himself, in fact, on his ability to bull through while Lucy had a tendency to take to her bed with tissues and NyQuil and magazines at the first sniffle. Drew never scolded her about this, although his mother’s word for such behavior—“spleeny”—often came to mind. Lucy was allowed to pamper herself through her twice- or thrice-yearly colds, because she was a freelance accountant, and thus her own boss. In his sabbatical year that was technically true of him, as well… except it wasn’t. In The Paris Review some writer—he couldn’t remember who—had said, “When you’re writing, the book is the boss,” and it was true. If you slowed down the story began to fade, as dreams did on waking.