Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Thus armored (or so she hopes), Holly calls her mother. Charlotte does most of the talking. That Holly won’t tell her where she is, what she’s doing, or when she’ll be back makes Charlotte very angry. Beneath the anger Holly senses fear, because Holly has escaped. Holly has a life of her own. That was not supposed to happen.

“Whatever you’re doing, you have to be back this weekend,” Charlotte says. “We need to go see Henry together. We’re his family . All he’s got.”

“I may not be able to do that, Mom.”

“Why? I want to know why!”

“Because…” Because I’m chasing the case . That’s what Bill would have said. “Because I’m working.”

Charlotte begins to cry. For the last five years or so it has always been her last resort when it comes to bringing Holly to heel. It no longer works, but it’s still her default position and it still hurts.

“I love you, Mom,” Holly says, and ends the call.

Is that true? Yes. It’s liking that got lost, and love without liking is like a chain with a manacle at each end. Could she break the chain? Strike off the manacle? Perhaps. She’s discussed that possibility with Allie Winters many times, especially after her mother told her—proudly—that she voted for Donald Trump (oough). Will she do it? Not now, maybe never. When Holly was growing up, Charlotte Gibney taught her—patiently, perhaps even with good intentions—that she was thoughtless, helpless, hapless, careless. That she was less . Holly believed that until she met Bill Hodges, who thought she was more. Now she has a life, and it is more often than not a happy one. If she broke with her mother, it would lessen her.

I don’t want to be less, Holly thinks as she sits on the bed in her Embassy Suites room. Been there, done that. “And got the tee-shirt,” she adds.

She takes a Coke from the bar refrigerator (damn the caffeine). Then she opens her phone’s recording app and continues her report to Ralph. Like praying to a God she can’t quite believe in, it clears her head, and by the time she finishes, she knows how she’ll go forward.

From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

From here on, Ralph, I’ll try to give you my conversation with Dan and Brad Bell verbatim, while it’s still fresh in my mind. It won’t be completely accurate, but it will be close. I should have recorded our talk, but never thought of it. I still have a lot to learn about this job. I only hope I get the chance.

I could see that Mr. Bell—the old Mr. Bell—wanted to go on, but once that little bit of whiskey wore off, he couldn’t. He said he needed to lie down and rest. The last thing he said to Brad was something about the sound recordings. I didn’t understand that. Now I do.

His grandson wheeled him away to his bedroom, but first he gave me his iPad and opened a photo stream for me. I looked at the pictures while he was gone, then I looked at them again, and I was still looking at them when Brad came back. Seventeen photos, all taken from videos on the Internet, all of Chet Ondowsky in his various

[ Pause ]

His various incarnations, I guess you’d say. And an eighteenth. The one of Philip Hannigan outside the Pulse nightclub four years ago. No mustache, blond hair instead of dark, younger than in the security camera photo of George in his fake delivery uniform, but it was him, all right. Same face underneath. Same fox face. But not the same as Ondowsky. No way was he.

Brad came back with a bottle and two more jelly glasses. “Grampa’s whiskey,” he said. “Maker’s Mark. Do you want a little?” When I said no, he poured quite a bit into one of the glasses. “Well, I need some,” he said. “Did Grampa tell you I was gay? Terribly gay?”

I said he had, and Brad smiled.

“That’s how he starts every conversation about me,” he said. “He wants to get it right out front, on the record, to show he doesn’t mind. But of course he does. He loves me, but he does.”

When I said I felt sort of the same way about my mother, he smiled and said that we had something in common. I guess we do.

He said his grandfather had always been interested in what he called “the second world.” Stories about telepathy, ghosts, strange disappearances, lights in the sky. He said, “Some people collect stamps. My grampa collects stories about the second world. I had my doubts about all that stuff until this.”

He pointed at the iPad, where the picture of George was still on the screen. George with his package full of explosives, waiting to be buzzed into the Macready School office.

Brad said, “Now I think I could believe in anything from flying saucers to killer clowns. Because there really is a second world. It exists because people refuse to believe it’s there.”

I know that’s true, Ralph. And so do you. It’s how the thing we killed in Texas survived as long as it did.

I asked Brad to explain why his grandfather waited so long, although by then I had a pretty good idea.

He said his grandfather thought it was basically harmless. A kind of exotic chameleon, and if not the last of its species, then one of the last. It lives off grief and pain, maybe not a nice thing, but not so different from maggots living off decaying flesh or buzzards and vultures living off roadkill.

“Coyotes and hyenas live that way, too,” Brad said. “They’re the janitors of the animal kingdom. And are we really any better? Don’t people slow down for a good long look at an accident on the turnpike? That’s roadkill, too.”

I said that I always looked away. And said a prayer that the people involved in the accident would be all right.

He said if that was true, I was an exception. He said that most people like pain, as long as it’s not theirs. Then he said, “I suppose you don’t watch horror movies, either?”

Well, I do, Ralph, but those movies are make-believe. When the director calls cut, the girl who had her throat slashed by Jason or Freddy gets up and grabs a cup of coffee. But still, after this I may not…

[ Pause ]

Never mind, I don’t have time to ramble off the subject. Brad said, “For every clip of killings or disasters that Grampa and I have collected, there are hundreds more. Maybe thousands. News people have a saying: If it bleeds, it leads. That’s because the stories people are most interested in are bad news stories. Murders. Explosions. Car crashes. Earthquakes. Tidal waves. People like that stuff, and they like it even more now that there’s cell phone video. The security footage recorded inside Pulse, when Omar Mateen was still rampaging? That has millions of hits. Millions .”

He said Mr. Bell thought this rare creature was only doing what all the people who watch the news do: feeding on tragedy. The monster—he didn’t call it an outsider—was just fortunate enough to live longer by doing it. Mr. Bell was content to watch and marvel until he saw the security camera still of the Macready School bomber. He has that memory for faces, and he knew he’d seen a version of that face at some act of violence, not that long ago. It took Brad less than an hour to isolate Philip Hannigan.

“I’ve found the Macready School bomber three more times so far,” Brad said, and showed me pictures of the fox-faced man—always different but always George underneath—doing three different stand-ups. Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Illinois tornadoes in 2004. And the World Trade Center in 2001. “I’m sure there are more, but I haven’t had time enough to hunt them out.”

“Maybe it’s a different man,” I said. “Or creature.” I was thinking that if there were two—Ondowsky, and the one we killed in Texas—there might be three. Or four. Or a dozen. I remembered a show I saw on PBS about endangered species. Only sixty black rhinos left in the world, only seventy Amur leopards, but that’s a lot more than three.