If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  9

  Certainly Holly won’t be facing it with Dan Bell, who’s all of eighty pounds and sitting in a wheelchair with an oxygen tank clipped to the side. He’s a shadow-man, with a mostly bald skull and dark purple patches under his bright but exhausted eyes. He and his grandson live in a fine old brownstone full of fine old furniture. The living room is airy; the drapes are pulled back to allow in floods of cold December sunlight. Yet the smells under the air freshener (Glade Clean Linen, if she’s not mistaken) remind her inevitably of the smells, stubborn and not to be denied, that she detected wafting into the lobby of the Rolling Hills Elder Care Center: Musterole, Bengay, talcum powder, pee, the approaching end of life.

  She’s shown into Bell’s presence by the grandson, a man of about forty whose dress and mannerisms seem curiously old-fashioned, almost courtly. The hall is lined with half a dozen framed pencil drawings, full-face portraits of four men and two women, all good and all surely done by the same hand. They strike her as an odd introduction to the house; most of the subjects look rather skeevy. There’s a much larger picture over the fireplace in the living room, where a small and cozy fire has been kindled. This one, an oil painting, shows a beautiful young woman with black, merry eyes.

  “My wife,” Bell says in his cracked voice. “Dead these many years, and how I miss her. Welcome to our home, Ms. Gibney.”

  He rolls his chair toward her, wheezing with the effort it takes, but when the grandson moves forward to help, Bell waves him off. He holds out a hand which arthritis has turned into a driftwood sculpture. She shakes it with care.

  “Have you had lunch?” Brad Bell asks.

  “Yes,” Holly says. A hastily gobbled chicken salad sandwich on the short ride from her hotel to this fashionable neighborhood.

  “Would you like tea or coffee? Oh, and we have pastries from Two Fat Cats. They are excellent.”

  “Tea would be wonderful,” Holly says. “Decaf, if you have it. And I’d love a pastry.”

  “I want tea and a turnover,” the old man says. “Apple or blueberry, doesn’t matter which. And I want real tea.”

  “Coming right up,” Brad says, and leaves them.

  Dan Bell immediately leans forward, eyes fixed on Holly’s, and says in a low conspiratorial voice, “Brad’s terribly gay, you know.”

  “Oh,” Holly says. She can think of nothing else to say except I was pretty sure he was, and that seems rude.

  “Terribly gay. But he’s a genius. He’s helped me with my researches. I can be sure—I have been sure—but Brad’s the one who provided the proof.” He wags a finger at her, marking off each syllable. “In… contro… vertible!”

  Holly nods and sits in a wing chair, knees together and purse on her lap. She’s starting to think that Bell actually is in the grip of a neurotic fantasy and she’s running up a blind alley. This doesn’t irritate or exasperate her; on the contrary, it fills her with relief. Because if he is, she probably is, too.

  “Tell me about your creature,” Dan says, leaning even further forward. “In his article, Dr. Morton says you call it an outsider.” Those bright, exhausted eyes are still fixed on hers. Holly thinks of a cartoon vulture sitting on a tree branch.

  Although it once would have been difficult for Holly not to do what people asked her to do—almost impossible—she shakes her head.

  He sits back in his wheelchair, disappointed. “No?”

  “You already have most of my story from the article Dr. Morton published in Psychiatric Quarterly, and from videos you may have seen on the Internet. I came to hear your story. You called Ondowsky a thing, an it. I want to know how you can be so sure he’s an outsider.”

  “Outsider is a good name for him. Very good.” Bell straightens his cannula, which has come askew. “A very good name. I’ll tell you over our tea and pastries. We’ll have them upstairs, in Brad’s workroom. I’ll tell you everything. You’ll be convinced. Oh yes.”

  “Brad—”

  “Brad knows everything,” Dan says, waving that driftwood hand dismissively. “A good boy, gay or not.” Holly has time to muse that when you’re in your nineties, even men twenty years older than Brad Bell must seem like boys. “A smart boy, too. And you don’t have to tell me your story if you don’t want to—although I would love for you to fill in certain details I’m curious about—but before I tell you what I know, I must insist that you tell me what caused you to suspect Ondowsky in the first place.”

  This is a reasonable request, and she runs down her reasoning… such as it is. “Mostly it was that little spot of hair beside his mouth that kept bugging me,” she finishes. “It was as if he put on a false mustache and was in such a hurry when he peeled it off that he didn’t get all of it. Only if he could change his whole physical appearance, why would he even need a false mustache?”

  Bell waves his hand dismissively. “Did your outsider have facial hair?”

  Holly thinks, frowning. The first person the outsider impersonated (that she knew of), an orderly named Heath Holmes, didn’t. The second one didn’t have face hair, either. His third target had a goatee, but when Holly and Ralph confronted the outsider in the Texas cave, his transformation hadn’t been complete.

  “I don’t think so. What are you saying?”

  “I don’t think they can grow facial hair,” Dan Bell says. “I think if you saw your outsider naked—I assume you never did?”

  “No,” Holly says, and because she can’t help it: “Oough.”

  That makes Dan smile. “If you had, I think you would have seen no pubic hair. And clean armpits.”

  “The thing we met in that cave had hair on his head. So does Ondowsky. So did George.”

  “George?”

  “What I call the man who delivered the package with the bomb in it to the Macready School.”

  “George. Ah, I see.” Dan appears to meditate on this for a moment. A little smile touches the corners of his mouth. Then it fades. “Head hair is different, though, isn’t it? Children have hair on their heads before puberty. Some are born with hair on their heads.”

  Holly sees his point, and hopes it really is a point and not just another facet of this old man’s delusion.

  “There are other things the bomber—George, if you like—can’t change the way he changes his physical appearance,” Dan says. “He needed to put on a fake uniform and wear fake glasses. He needed a fake truck and a fake package reader. And he needed a fake mustache.”

  “Ondowsky may also have fake eyebrows,” Brad says, coming in with a tray. On it are two mugs of tea and a pile of turnovers. “But probably not. I’ve studied pictures of him until my eyes are practically rolling down my cheeks. I think he may have had implants to normalize what would otherwise have just been fuzz. The way baby eyebrows are just fuzz.” He bends to put the tray on the coffee table.

  “No, no, your workroom,” Dan says. “Time to get this show on the road. Ms. Gibney—Holly—will you push me? I’m rather tired.”

  “Of course.”

  They pass a formal dining room and a cavernous kitchen. At the end of the hall is a stair-chair, which runs up to the second floor on a steel rail. Holly hopes it’s more reliable than the elevator in the Frederick Building.

  “Brad had this put in when I lost the use of my legs,” Dan says. Brad hands Holly the tray and transfers the old man to the stair-chair with the ease of long practice. Dan pushes a button and begins to rise. Brad takes the tray back and he and Holly walk along beside the chair, which is slow but sure.

  “This is a very nice house,” Holly says. Must have been expensive is the unspoken corollary.

  Dan, nevertheless, reads her mind. “Grandfather. Pulp and paper mills.”

  The penny drops for Holly. The supply closet at Finders Keepers is stacked with Bell copier paper. Dan sees her face and smiles.

  “Yes, that’s right, Bell Paper Products, now part of an overseas conglomerate that kept the name. Until the nineteen-twenties, my grandfather owned mills all over west
ern Maine—Lewiston, Lisbon Falls, Jay, Mechanic Falls. All shuttered now, or turned into shopping malls. He lost most of his fortune in the Crash of ’29 and the Depression. That was the year I was born. No life of Riley for my father or me, we had to work for our beer and skittles. But we managed to keep the house.”

  On the second floor, Brad transfers Dan to another wheelchair and hooks him up to another bottle of oxygen. This floor seems to consist of one large room where the December sunlight has been forbidden to enter. The windows have been covered with blackout curtains. There are four computers on two work desks, several gaming consoles that look state-of-the-art to Holly, a ton of audio equipment, and a gigantic flatscreen TV. Several speakers have been mounted on the walls. Two more flank the TV on either side.

  “Put the tray down, Brad, before you spill everything.”

  The table Dan indicates with one of his arthritic hands is covered with computing magazines (several of them copies of SoundPhile, which Holly has never heard of), flash drives, external hard drives, and cables. Holly starts trying to clear a place.

  “Oh, just put all that rickrack on the floor,” Dan says.

  She looks at Brad, who nods apologetically. “I’m a little messy,” he says.

  When the tray is safely in place, Brad puts pastries on three plates. They look delicious, but Holly no longer knows if she’s hungry or not. She’s starting to feel like Alice at the Mad Hatter’s teaparty. Dan Bell takes a sip from his cup, smacks his lips, then grimaces and places a hand on the left side of his shirt. Brad is at his side immediately.

  “Do you have your pills, Grampa?”

  “Yes, yes,” Dan says, and pats the side pocket of his wheelchair. “I’m all right, you can stop hovering. It’s just the excitement of having someone in the house. Someone who knows. It’s probably good for me.”

  “Not so sure about that, Grampa,” Brad says. “Maybe you better take a pill.”

  “I’m fine, I said.”

  “Mr. Bell—” Holly begins.

  “Dan,” the old man says, once more wagging his finger, which is grotesquely bent with arthritis but still admonitory. “I’m Dan, he’s Brad, you’re Holly. We’re all friends here.” He laughs again. This time it sounds out of breath.

  “You have to slow down,” Brad says. “Unless you want another trip to the hospital, that is.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Dan says. He cups a hand over his beak of a nose and takes several deep breaths of oxygen. “Now give me one of those turnovers. And we need napkins.”

  But there are no napkins. “I’ll get some paper towels from the bathroom,” Brad says, and off he goes.

  Dan turns to Holly. “Terribly forgetful. Terribly. Where was I? Does it even matter?”

  Does any of this? Holly wonders.

  “I was telling you that my father and I had to work for a living. Did you see the pictures downstairs?”

  “Yes,” Holly says. “Yours, I assume.”

  “Yes, yes, all mine.” He holds up his twisted hands. “Before this happened to me.”

  “They’re very good,” Holly says.

  “Not so bad,” he says, “although the ones in the hall aren’t the best. Those were for work. Brad put them up. Insisted. I also did some paperback covers back in the fifties and sixties, for publishers like Gold Medal and Monarch. They were much better. Crime, mostly—half-dressed babes with smoking automatics. They brought in a little extra. Ironic, when you think about my full-time job. I was with the Portland PD. Retired at sixty-eight. Did my forty and four more.”

  Not just an artist but another cop, Holly thinks. First Bill, then Pete, then Ralph, and now him. She once more thinks of how some force, invisible but strong, seems to be pulling her into this, quietly insisting on parallels and continuations.

  “My grandfather was a mill-owning capitalist, but since then we’ve all been blue. Dad was police, and I followed in his footsteps. As my son followed in mine. Brad’s father, I’m speaking of. He died in a crash while chasing a man, probably drunk, driving a stolen car. That man lived. May be living today, for all I know.”

  “I’m very sorry,” Holly says.

  Dan ignores her effort at condolence. “Even Brad’s mother was in the family trade. Well, in a way. She was a court stenographer. When she died, I took the boy in. I don’t care if he’s gay or not, nor does the police department. Although he doesn’t work for them full-time. With him it’s more of a hobby. Mostly he does… this.” He waves his deformed hand at the computer equipment.

  “I design audio for games,” Brad says quietly. “The music, the effects, the mix.” He has returned with a whole roll of paper towels. Holly takes two and spreads them on her lap.

  Dan goes on, seemingly lost in the past. “After my radio car days were over—I never rose to detective, never wanted to—I worked mostly in dispatch. Some cops don’t like riding a desk, but I never minded, because I had another job as well, one that kept me busy long after retirement. You could say that’s one side of the coin. What Brad does, when they call him in, is the other side. Between the two of us, Holly, we nailed this, pardon my French, this shitbag. He’s been in our sights for years.”

  Holly has finally taken a bite of her turnover, but now opens her mouth, allowing an unsightly shower of crumbs to fall to the plate and paper towels in her lap. “Years?”

  “Yes,” Dan says. “Brad’s known since he was in his twenties. He’s worked on this with me since 2005 or so. Isn’t that right, Brad?”

  “A little later,” Brad says, after swallowing a bite of his own turnover.

  Dan shrugs. It looks painful. “It all starts to melt together when you’re my age,” he says, then turns what’s almost a glare on Holly. His bushy eyebrows (no faking there) draw together. “But not with Ondowsky, as he’s now calling himself. On him I’m crystal clear. Right back to the beginning… or at least to where I came in. We’ve arranged quite a show for you, Holly. Brad, is that first video cued up?”

  “All ready, Grampa.” Brad grabs his iPad and uses a remote to turn on the big TV. It’s currently showing nothing but a bluescreen and the word READY.

  Holly hopes she is.

  10

  “I was thirty-one when I first saw him,” Dan says. “I know that because my wife and boy had a little birthday party for me just a week before. It seems like a long time ago and it seems like no time at all. I was still on radio cars then. Marcel Duchamp and I were parked just off Marginal Way, behind a snowbank and waiting for speeders, not very likely on a weekday morning. Eating crullers, drinking coffee. I remember Marcel was ribbing me about some paperback cover I’d done, asking how my wife liked me painting pictures of hot women in their undies. I think I was just telling him that his wife had posed for that one when the guy ran up to the car and knocked on the driver’s side window.” He pauses. Shakes his head. “You always remember where you were when you get bad news, don’t you?”

  Holly thinks of the day she found out that Bill Hodges was gone. Jerome made that call, and she was pretty sure he’d been choking back tears.

  “Marcel rolled his window down and asked the guy if he needed help. He said no. He had a transistor radio—that was what we had instead of iPods and cell phones back in those days—and asked if we’d heard about what just happened in New York.”

  Dan pauses to straighten his cannula and adjust the flow of oxygen from the tank on the side of his chair.

  “We hadn’t heard anything except for what was on the police radio, so Marcel turned that off and turned on the regular one. Found the news. This is what the jogger was talking about. Go ahead and run the first one, Brad.”

  Dan’s grandson has his electronic tablet on his lap. He pokes at it and says to Holly, “I’m going to mirror this to the big screen. One second… okay, here we go.”

  On the screen, to somber music, comes the title card of an old-time newsreel. WORST AIR CRASH IN HISTORY, it reads. What follows is crisp black-and-white footage of a city street that looks like a b
omb hit it.

  “The terrible aftermath of the worst air disaster in history!” the announcer intones. “In a Brooklyn street lies the shattered remnant of a jet transport that collided with another airliner in murky New York skies.” On the tail of the plane—or what remains of it—Holly can read UNIT. “The United Airlines aircraft plummeted into a brownstone residential section, killing six on the ground as well as eighty-four passengers and the crew.”

  Now Holly sees firemen in old-fashioned helmets rushing through the wreckage. Some are carrying stretchers to which are strapped blanket-covered bodies.

  “Normally,” the announcer continues, “this United flight and the Trans World Airlines flight it collided with would have been separated by miles, but the TWA plane—Flight 266, carrying forty-four passengers and crew—was far off course. It crashed on Staten Island.”

  More covered bodies on more stretchers. A huge airplane wheel, the rubber shredded and still smoking. The camera pans the wreckage of 266, and Holly sees Christmas presents wrapped in gay paper scattered everywhere. The camera zooms in on one, to show a little Santa Claus attached to the bow. Santa is smoldering and blackened with soot.

  “You can stop it there,” Dan says. Brad pokes his tablet and the big TV returns to bluescreen.

  Dan turns to Holly.

  “A hundred and thirty-four dead in all. And when did it happen? December sixteenth, 1960. Sixty years ago to this very day.”

  Only a coincidence, Holly thinks, but a chill shivers through her just the same, and once again she thinks of how there may be forces in this world moving people as they will, like men (and women) on a chessboard. The confluence of dates could be a coincidence, but can she say that about all that’s brought her here to this house in Portland, Maine? No. There’s a chain going all the way back to another monster named Brady Hartsfield. Brady, who allowed her to believe in the first place.