Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Voilà .

Holly has a good day at the office. Rattner, that master criminal, has been spotted by Jerome in a bar with the amazing (to Holly, at least) name of the Edmund Fitzgerald Taproom, and escorted to county lockup by Pete Huntley. Pete is currently at the Toomey dealership where he will confront Richard Ellis.

Barbara Robinson, Jerome’s sister, drops by, telling Holly (rather smugly) that she has been excused from afternoon classes because she’s doing a report called Private Investigation: Fact vs. Fiction . She asks Holly a few questions (recording the answers on her own phone), then helps Holly with the files. At three o’clock, they settle down to watch John Law .

“I love this guy, he’s so jive,” Barbara says as Judge Law boogies his way to the bench.

“Pete doesn’t agree,” Holly says.

“Yes, but Pete is white,” Barbara says.

Holly looks at Barbara, wide-eyed. “ I’m white.”

Barbara giggles. “Well, there’s white and there’s really white. Which is what Mr. Huntley is.”

They laugh together, then watch as Judge Law deals with a burglar who claims he didn’t do anything, he’s just a victim of racial profiling. Holly and Barbara give each other one of those telepathic looks— as if . Then they burst out laughing again.

A very good day, and Chet Ondowsky hardly crosses Holly’s mind until her phone rings at six o’clock that evening, just as she’s settling in to watch Animal House . That call, from Dr. Carl Morton, changes everything. When it finishes, Holly makes one of her own. An hour later, she receives another call. She takes notes on all three.

The next morning she’s on her way to Portland, Maine.

Holly gets up at three o’clock in the morning. She’s packed, she’s printed out her Delta ticket, she doesn’t have to be at the airport until seven and it’s a short ride, but she can’t sleep anymore. She would not, in fact, think she had slept at all except for her Fitbit, which registers two hours and thirty minutes. Shallow sleep and precious little of it, but she’s made do on less.

She has coffee and a cup of yogurt. Her bag (overhead bin–sized, of course) is waiting by the door. She calls the office and leaves a message for Pete, telling him she won’t be in the office today and maybe not for the rest of the week. It’s a personal matter. She’s about to end the call when something else occurs to her.

“Please have Jerome tell Barbara that she should watch The Maltese Falcon , The Big Sleep , and Harper for the ‘fiction’ part of her private investigation report. All three movies are in my collection. Jerome knows where I keep the spare key to my apartment.”

With that done, she opens the recording app on her phone and begins to add to the report she is making for Ralph Anderson. She’s starting to believe she may have to send it to him, after all.

Although Allie Winters is Holly’s regular therapist, and has been for years, Holly did some research and sought out Carl Morton after she returned from her dark adventures in Oklahoma and Texas. Dr. Morton has written two books of case histories, similar to those of Oliver Sacks but too clinical for bestsellerdom. Still, she thought he was the right man, he was relatively close, and so she sought him out.

She had two fifty-minute sessions with Morton, enough to recount the complete and unvarnished story of her dealings with the outsider. She didn’t care if Dr. Morton believed all, some, or none. The important thing, as far as Holly was concerned, was getting it out before it could grow inside her like a malignant tumor. She didn’t go to Allie because she thought it would poison the work the two of them were doing on Holly’s other issues, and that was the last thing Holly wanted.

There was another reason for going to a secular confessor like Carl Morton. Have you seen another one like me somewhere? the outsider had asked. Holly hadn’t; Ralph hadn’t; but the legends of such creatures, known to Latinos on both sides of the Atlantic as El Cuco , had been around for centuries. So… maybe there were others.

Maybe there were.

Toward the end of their second and last session, Holly said, “May I tell you what I think you think? I know that’s very impertinent, but may I?”

Morton gave her a smile probably meant to be encouraging but which Holly read as indulgent—he wasn’t as hard to read as he perhaps liked to believe. “Go right ahead, Holly. This is your time.”

“Thank you.” She had folded her hands. “You must know that at least some of my story is true, because the events were well publicized, from the rape-murder of the Peterson boy in Oklahoma to the events—some of them, at least—that occurred at the Marysville Hole in Texas. The death of Detective Jack Hoskins, from Flint City, Oklahoma, for instance. Am I right?”

Morton had nodded.

“As for the rest of my story—the shape-changing outsider and what happened to him in that cave—you believe those are stress-induced delusions. Am I right about that?”

“Holly, I wouldn’t characterize—”

Oh, spare me the jargon, Holly thought, and then had interrupted him—a thing of which she would have been incapable not so long ago.

“It doesn’t matter how you characterize it. You’re welcome to whatever you believe. But I want something from you, Dr. Morton. You attend lots of conferences and symposiums. I know this, because I researched you online.”

“Holly, aren’t we wandering a bit from the subject of your story? And your perceptions of that story?”

No, she thought, because that story is told. What matters is what comes next. I’m hoping it will be nothing, and it probably will be, but it never hurts to be sure. Being sure helps a person sleep better at night.

“When you go to those conferences and symposiums, I want you to talk about my case. I want you to describe it. Write it up if you like, that would be fine, too. I want you to be specific about my belief, which you’re welcome to characterize as delusional, that I encountered a creature that renews itself by eating the pain of the dying. Will you do that? And if you ever— ever —meet or get an email from a fellow therapist who says he has or had a patient suffering from that exact same delusion, will you give that therapist my name and telephone number?” And then, to be gender neutral (which she always strives to be): “Or her.”

Morton had frowned. “That would hardly be ethical.”

“You’re wrong,” Holly said. “I’ve checked the law. Talking to another therapist’s patient would be unethical, but you can give the therapist my name and number if I give you permission to do so. And I do.”

Holly waited for his response.

She pauses her recording long enough to check the time and get a second cup of coffee. It will give her the jitters and acid indigestion, but she needs it.

“I saw him thinking it over,” Holly says into her phone. “I think what tipped the scales was knowing what a good story my story would make in his next book or article or compensated appearance. It did, too. I read one of the articles and looked at one of the conference videos. He changes the locations, and he calls me Carolyn H., but otherwise it’s the whole megillah . He’s especially good when talking about what happened to our perp when I hit him with the Happy Slapper—that brought gasps from the audience in the video. And I’ll give him this, he always ends my part of his lectures by saying he would like to hear from anyone with patients suffering similar delusional fantasies.”