Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Bill Hodges, my friend and sometime partner, remembered me in his will. There was the death benefit from his insurance policy, but there were other keepsakes that mean even more to me. One was his service weapon, a .38 Smith & Wesson Military and Police revolver. Bill told me that most city police now carry the Glock 22, which holds fifteen rounds instead of six, but that he himself was old-school, and proud of it.

I don’t like guns—hate them, in fact—but I will use Bill’s tomorrow, and I won’t hesitate. There will be no discussion. I had one conversation with Ondowsky, and that was enough. I will shoot him in the chest, and not just because the best shot is always the center mass shot, a thing I learned in the shooting class I took two years ago.

The real reason is

[ Pause ]

You remember what happened in the cave, when I hit the thing we found there in the head? Of course you do. We dream about it, and we’ll never forget it. I believe the force—the physical force—that animates these things is a kind of alien brain that has replaced the human brain which might have existed before being taken over. I don’t know where it originated, and I don’t care. Shooting this thing in the chest may not kill it. In fact, Ralph, I’m sort of counting on that. I believe there is another way to get rid of it for good. You see there’s been a glitch.

My mother just drove in. I’ll try to finish this later today or tomorrow.

Charlotte won’t let Holly help with the cooking; every time her daughter comes into the kitchen, Charlotte shoos her out. It makes for a long day, but the dinner hour finally arrives. Charlotte has put on the green dress she wears every Christmas (proud of the fact that she can still get into it). Her Christmas pin—holly and holly berries—is in its accustomed place over her left breast.

“An authentic Christmas dinner, just like in the old days!” she exclaims as she leads Holly into the dining room by the elbow. Like a prisoner being led into an interrogation room, Holly thinks. “I’ve made all your favorites!”

They sit across from each other. Charlotte has lit her aromatherapy candles, which give off a lemongrass scent that makes Holly want to sneeze. They toast each other with thimble glasses of Mogen David wine (an authentic oough if ever there was one) and wish each other a merry Christmas. Then comes a salad already dressed with the snotlike ranch dressing Holly hates (Charlotte thinks she loves it), and the dry-as-papyrus turkey, which can only be swallowed with lots of gravy to grease its passage. The mashed potatoes are lumpy. The overcooked asparagus is as limp and hateful as ever. Only the carrot cake (store-bought) is tasty.

Holly eats everything on her plate and compliments her mother. Who beams.

After the dishes are done (Holly dries, as always; her mother claims she never gets all the “smutch” off the pots), they repair to the living room, where Charlotte hunts out the DVD of It’s a Wonderful Life . How many Christmas seasons have they watched it? A dozen at least, and probably more. Uncle Henry used to be able to quote every line. Maybe, Holly thinks, he still can. She’s googled Alzheimer’s and found out there’s no way of telling what areas of the mind remain bright as the circuits shut down, one by one.

Before the film begins, Charlotte hands Holly a Santa hat… and with great ceremony. “You always wear it when we watch this,” she says. “Ever since you were a little girl. It’s a tradition .”

Holly has been a movie buff all her life and has found things to enjoy even in films the critics have roasted (she believes, for example, that Stallone’s Cobra is woefully underestimated), but It’s a Wonderful Life has always made her uneasy. She can relate to George Bailey at the beginning of the film, but by the end he strikes her as someone with a serious bipolar condition who’s arrived at the manic part of his cycle. She has even wondered if, after the movie ends, he creeps out of bed and murders his whole family.

They watch the movie, Charlotte in her Christmas dress and Holly in her Santa hat. Holly thinks, I am moving somewhere else now. I feel myself going. It’s a sad place, full of shadows. This is the place where you know death is very close.

On the screen, Janie Bailey says, “Please, God, something’s the matter with Daddy.”

That night when she sleeps, Holly dreams that Chet Ondowsky comes out of the Frederick Building elevator with his jacket torn at the sleeve and the pocket. His hands are smeared with brick dust and blood. His eyes are shimmering, and when his lips spread in a wide grin, squirming red bugs spill from his mouth and stream down his chin.

Holly sits in four lanes of unmoving southbound traffic, still fifty miles from the city, thinking if this miles-long jam-up doesn’t let go, she might be late to her own funeral instead of early.

Like many people who struggle with insecurity, she’s a compulsive planner-aheader, and consequently almost always early. She expected to be at the Finders Keepers office by one o’clock on this Saturday at the latest, but now even three is starting to look optimistic. The cars around her (and a big old dumptruck ahead of her, its dirty butt looming like a steel cliff) make her feel claustrophobic, buried alive ( my own funeral ). If she had cigarettes in the car, she would be smoking them one after the other. She resorts to cough drops instead, what she calls her anti-smoking devices, but she only stashed half a dozen in her coat pocket and soon they will be gone. That would leave her fingernails, had they not been clipped too short to get a good grip.

I’m late for a very important date.

It wasn’t because of the gift-giving, which came after her mother’s traditional Christmas breakfast of waffles and bacon (it’s not Christmas for almost a week, but Holly was willing to pretend along with Charlotte). Charlotte gave Holly a frilly silk blouse she’ll never wear (even if she lives), a pair of medium heels (ditto), and two books: The Power of Now and Anxious for Nothing: Finding Calm in a Chaotic World . Holly hadn’t had the opportunity to wrap her presents, but she did buy a Christmassy gift bag to put them in. Charlotte oohed over the fur-lined slippers and shook her head indulgently over the bathrobe, a $79.50 purchase.

“This is at least two sizes too big. I don’t suppose you saved the sales slip, honey.”

Holly, who knew damn well she did, said, “I think it’s in my coat pocket.”

So far so good. But then, out of the blue, Charlotte suggested that they go and see Henry and wish him a merry-merry, since Holly wasn’t going to be there on the actual big day. Holly glanced at the clock. Quarter of nine. She’d hoped to be on the road and headed south by nine, but there was such a thing as carrying obsessional behavior too far—why, exactly, did she want to arrive five hours early? Plus, if things went badly with Ondowsky this would be her last chance to see Henry, and she was curious about what he’d said: Why are you afraid?

How did he know that? He had certainly never seemed particularly sensitive to the feelings of others before. More the opposite, actually.

So Holly agreed, and they went, and Charlotte insisted on driving, and there was a fender-bender at a four-way stop sign. No airbags deployed, no one was hurt, no police were summoned, but it did involve certain predictable justifications on Charlotte’s part. She invoked a mythical patch of ice, ignoring the fact that she only slowed rather than stopped at the four-way, as she always did; all of her driving life, Charlotte Gibney had assumed she had the right-of-way.