Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

This time he managed to turn aside before the sneezing started. Not just one this time but half a dozen. He seemed to feel his sinuses bulging with each one. Like overinflated tires. His throat was throbbing, and so was his ear.

Let’s just get these

It came to him then. A bench! There might be a bench in the sheriff’s office where people could sit while they waited to do their little bits of business. He grinned and gave himself a thumbs up. Sick or not, the pieces were still falling into place, and was that really surprising? Creativity often seemed to run on its own clean circuit, regardless of the body’s ills. Flannery O’Connor had lupus. Stanley Elkin had multiple sclerosis. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, and Octavia Butler suffered from dyslexia. What was a lousy cold, maybe even the flu, compared to things like that? He could work through this. The bench proved it, the bench was genius.

“Let’s just get this bench outside and have a few drinks.”

“But we’re not really gonna drink, are we, Sheriff?” Jep Leonard asked. The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the brightest bulb in the

Brightest bulb in the chandelier? God no, that was an anachronism. Or was it? The bulb part for sure, no lightbulbs in the 1880s, but there were chandeliers back then, of course there were. There was one in the saloon! If he’d had an Internet connection he could have looked at any number of old-time examples of them, but he didn’t. Just two hundred channels of TV, most of it total junk.

Better to use a different metaphor. If it even was a metaphor; Drew wasn’t completely sure. Maybe it was just a comparative… comparative something . No, it was a metaphor. He was sure of it. Almost.

Never mind, that wasn’t the point and this wasn’t a classroom exercise, it was a book, it was his book, so stick to the writing. Eyes on the prize.

Not the ripest melon in the patch? Not the fastest horse in the race? No, those were awful, but—

Then he got it. Magic! He bent and typed rapidly.

The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the smartest kid in the classroom.

Satisfied (well, relatively satisfied), Drew got up, had a knock of Dr. King’s, then chased it with a glass of water to wash the taste out of his mouth: a slimy mixture of snot and cold medicine.

This is like before. This is like what happened with Village.

He could tell himself that wasn’t true, that this time was entirely different, that the clean circuit wasn’t so clean after all because he was running a fever, a pretty high one from the way it felt, and it was all because he’d handled that bandanna.

No you didn’t, you handled his hand. You handled the hand that handled the bandanna.

“Handled the hand that handled the bandanna, right.”

He turned on the cold tap and splashed his face. That made him feel a little better. He mixed Goody’s Headache Powder with more water, drank it off, then went to the door and threw it open. He felt quite sure that Moose Mom would be there, so sure that for a moment (thank you, fever) he actually thought he did see her over there by the equipment shed, but it was only shadows moving in a slight breeze.

He took a number of deep breaths. In goes the good air, out goes the bad, when I shook his hand I must have been mad.

Drew went back inside and sat down at the laptop. Pushing on seemed like a bad idea, but not pushing on seemed even worse. So he began to write, trying to recapture the wind that had filled his sails and brought him this far. At first it seemed to be working, but by lunchtime (not that he had any interest in eating) his interior sails had gone slack. Probably it was being sick, but it was still too much like before.

I seem to be losing my words .

That was what he’d told Lucy, what he’d told Al Stamper, but that wasn’t the truth; it was just what he could give them so they could dismiss it as writer’s block, something he would eventually find his way through. Or it might dissolve on its own. In truth, it was the opposite. It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed ?

He shut down at one o’clock. He had written two pages, and the feeling that he was reverting to the nervous and neurotic man who’d almost burned down his house three years ago was getting harder to dismiss. He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.

Was it possible that he was coming down with Alzheimer’s? Could that be it?

“Don’t be dumb,” he said, and was dismayed at how nasal he sounded. Also hoarse. Pretty soon he’d lose his voice entirely. Not that there was anyone out here to talk to except himself.

Get your ass home. You’ve got a wife and two fine kids to talk to .

But if he did that, he would lose the book. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. After four or five days, when he was back in Falmouth and feeling better, he would open the Bitter River documents and the prose there would look like something someone else had written, an alien story he would have no idea how to finish. Leaving now would be like throwing away a precious gift, one that might never be given again.

Had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia , Roy DeWitt’s daughter had said, the subtext being just another damn fool . And was he going to do the same?

The lady or the tiger. The book or your life. Was the choice really that stark and melodramatic? Surely not, but he surely felt like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, there was no doubt about that.

Nap. I need a nap When I wake up, I’ll be able to decide.

So he took another knock of Dr. King’s Magic Elixir—or whatever it was called—and climbed the stairs to the bedroom he and Lucy had shared on other trips out here. He went to sleep, and when he woke up, the rain and wind had arrived and the choice was made for him. He had a call to make. While he still could.

“Hey, honey, it’s me. I’m sorry I pissed you off. Really.”

She ignored this completely. “It doesn’t sound like allergies to me, Mister. It sounds like you’re sick.”

“It’s just a cold.” He cleared his throat, or tried to. “A pretty bad one, I guess.”

The throat-clearing provoked coughing. He covered the mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone, but he supposed she heard it anyway. The wind gusted, rain slapped against the windows, and the lights flickered.

“So now what? You just hole up?”

“I think I have to,” he said, then rushed on. “It’s not the book, not now. I’d come back if I thought it was safe, but that storm is here already. The lights just flickered. I’m going to lose the power and the phone before dark, practically guaranteed. Here I’ll pause so you can say I told you so.”

“I told you so,” she said. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, how bad are you?”

“Not that bad,” he said, which was a far bigger lie than telling her the satellite dish didn’t work. He thought he was quite bad indeed, but if he said that, it was hard to gauge how she might react. Would she call the Presque Isle cops and request a rescue? Even in his current condition, that seemed like an overreaction. Not to mention embarrassing.

“I hate this, Drew. I hate you being up there and cut off. Are you sure you can’t drive out?”