Стивен Кинг - If It Bleeds

Better.

All foam and no beer .

Better still, because of the story’s western milieu.

Dumber than a bag of hammers. About as smart as a rock. Sharp as a marb —

“Stop it,” he almost begged. That was the problem. That secret door was the problem, because…

“I have no control over it,” he said in his croaky voice, and thought, Dumb as a frog with brain damage .

Drew struck the side of his head with the heel of his hand. His headache flared. He did it again. And again. When he’d had enough of that, he stuffed crumpled sheets of magazine under some kindling, scratched a match on the stovetop, and watched the flames lick up.

Still holding the lit match, he looked at the pages of Bitter River stacked beside the printer, and thought about what would happen if he touched them alight. He hadn’t quite managed to burn down the house when he’d lit up The Village on the Hill , the fire trucks had arrived before the flames could do much more than scorch the walls of his study, but there would be no fire trucks out here on Shithouse Road, and the storm wouldn’t stop the fire once it took hold, because the cabin was old and dry. Old as dirt, dry as your grandmother’s—

The flame guttering along the matchstick reached his fingers. Drew shook it out, tossed it into the blazing stove, and slammed the grate shut.

“It’s not a bad book and I’m not going to die out here,” he said. “Not going to happen.”

He turned off the Coleman to conserve the fuel, then sat down in the wing chair he spent his evenings in, reading paperbacks by John D. MacDonald and Elmore Leonard. There wasn’t enough light to read by now, not with the Coleman off. Night had almost come, and the only light in the cabin was the shifting red eye of the fire seen through the woodstove’s isinglass window. Drew pulled his chair a bit closer to the stove and wrapped his arms around himself to quell the shivers. He should change out of his damp shirt and pants, and do it right away if he didn’t want to get even sicker. He was still thinking this when he fell asleep.

What woke him was a splintering crack from outside. It was followed by a second, even louder crack, and a thud that shook the floor. A tree had fallen, and it must have been a big one.

The fire in the woodstove had burned down to a bed of bright red embers that waxed and waned. Along with the wind, he could now hear a sandy rattling against the windows. The cabin’s big downstairs room was stuperously hot, at least for the time being, but the temperature outside must have fallen ( off the table ) as predicted, because the rain had turned to sleet.

Drew tried to check the time, but his wrist was bare. He supposed he’d left his watch on the nighttable beside the bed, although he couldn’t remember for sure. He could always check the time and date strip on his laptop, he supposed, but what would be the point? It was nighttime in the north woods. Did he need any other information?

He decided he did. He needed to find out if the tree had fallen on his trusty Suburban and smashed the shit out of it. Of course need was the wrong word, need was for something you had to have, subtext being that if you could get it you might be able to change the overall situation for the better, and nothing in this situation would change either way, and was situation the right word, or was it too general? It was more of a fix than a situation, fix in this context meaning not to repair but—

“Stop it,” he said. “Do you want to drive yourself crazy?”

He was pretty sure a part of him wanted exactly that. Somewhere inside his head, control panels were smoking and circuit breakers were fusing and some mad scientist was shaking his fists in exultation. He could tell himself it was the fever, but he had been in fine fettle when Village had gone bad. Same with the other two. Physically, at least.

He got up, wincing at the aches that now seemed to be afflicting all of his joints, and went to the door, trying not to hobble. The wind tore it from his grasp and bounced it off the wall. He grabbed it and held on, his clothes plastered against his body and his hair streaming back from his forehead. The night was black—black as the devil’s riding boots, black as a black cat in a coalmine, black as a woodchuck’s asshole—but he could make out the bulk of his Suburban and (maybe) tree branches waving above it on the far side. Although he couldn’t be sure, he thought the tree had spared his Suburban and landed on the equipment shed, no doubt bashing in the roof.

He shouldered the door shut and turned the deadbolt. He didn’t expect intruders on such a dirty night, but he didn’t want it blowing open after he went to bed. And he was going to bed. He made his way to the kitchen counter by the shifting, chancy light of the embers and lit the Coleman lantern. In its glare the cabin looked surreal, caught by a flashbulb that didn’t go out but just went on and on. Holding it in front of him, he crossed to the stairs. That was when he heard a scratching at the door.

A branch , he told himself. Blown there by the wind and caught somehow, maybe on the welcome mat. It’s nothing. Go to bed .

The scratching came again, so soft he never would have heard it if the wind hadn’t chosen those few moments to lull. It didn’t sound like a branch; it sounded like a person. Like some orphan of the storm too weak or badly hurt to even knock and could only scratch. Only no one had been out there… or had there been? Could he be absolutely sure? It had been so dark. Black as the devil’s riding boots.

Drew went to the door, freed the deadbolt, and opened it. He held up the Coleman lamp. No one there. Then, as he was about to shut the door again, he looked down and saw a rat. Probably a Norway, not huge but pretty big. It was lying on the threadbare welcome mat, one of its paws—pink, strangely human, like a baby’s hand—outstretched and still scratching at the air. Its brown-black fur was littered with tiny bits of leaf, twig, and beads of blood. Its bulging black eyes were looking up at him. Its side heaved. That pink paw continued to scratch at the air, just as it had scratched at the door. A miniscule sound.

Lucy hated rodents, screeched her head off if she saw so much as a fieldmouse scuttering along the baseboard, and it did no good to tell her the wee sleekit cowerin beastie was undoubtedly a lot more terrified of her than she was of it. Drew didn’t care much for rodents himself, and understood they carried diseases—hantavirus, rat bite fever, and those were only the two most common—but he’d never had Lucy’s almost instinctive loathing of them. What he mostly felt for this one was pity. Probably it was that tiny pink paw, which continued scratching at nothing. Or maybe the pinpricks of white light from the Coleman lantern he saw in its dark eyes. It lay there panting and looking up at him with blood on its fur and in its whiskers. Broken up inside and probably dying.

Drew bent, one hand on his upper thigh, the other holding down the lantern for a better look. “You were in the equipment shed, weren’t you?”

Almost surely. Then the tree had come down, smashing through the roof, destroying Mr. Rat’s happy home. Had he been hit by a tree branch or a piece of the roof as he scuttled for safety? Maybe by a bucket of congealed paint? Had Pop’s useless old McCulloch chainsaw tumbled off the table and fallen on him? It didn’t matter. Whatever it was had squashed him and maybe broken his back. He’d had just enough gas left in his ratty little tank to crawl here.

The wind picked up again, throwing sleet into Drew’s hot face. Spicules of ice struck the globe of the lantern, hissed, melted, and ran down the glass. The rat panted. The rat on the mat needs help stat , Drew thought. Except the rat on the mat was beyond help. You didn’t need to be a rocket scientist.