If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  “Barbara is digging the movies,” Jerome tells her, “but she says they’re totally vanilla. She says that watching them, you’d think there was no such thing as black people.”

  “Tell her to put it in her report,” Holly says. “I’ll give her Shaft when I get a chance. Now I have to get back on the road. The traffic is very heavy, although I don’t know where they’re all going. I went to a mall and it was half-empty.”

  “They’re visiting relatives, just like you,” Jerome says. “Relatives are the one thing Amazon can’t deliver.”

  As she merges back onto I-76, it occurs to Holly that her mother will undoubtedly have Christmas presents for her, and she has nothing for Charlotte. She can already see her mother’s martyred look when she turns up emptyhanded.

  So she stops at the next shopping center, even though it means she won’t be at casa Gibney until after dark (she hates driving at night), and buys her mother some slippers and a nice bathrobe. She makes sure to keep the sales slip for when Charlotte tells her that Holly has bought the wrong sizes.

  Once she’s on the road again, and safe inside her rental car, Holly draws in a deep breath and lets it out in a scream.

  It helps.

  5

  Charlotte embraces her daughter on the doorstep, then draws her inside. Holly knows what comes next.

  “You’ve lost weight.”

  “Actually I’m just the same,” Holly says, and her mother gives her The Look, the one that says once an anorexic, always an anorexic.

  Dinner is take-out from the Italian place down the road, and as they eat Charlotte talks about how hard things have been without Henry. It’s as if her brother has been gone five years instead of five days, and not to a nearby elder care facility but to spend his old age doing stupid stuff far away—running a bicycle shop in Australia or painting sunsets in the tropic isles. She does not ask Holly about her life, her work, or what she was doing in Pittsburgh. By nine o’clock, when Holly can reasonably plead tiredness and go to bed, she’s started to feel as if she’s growing younger and smaller, diminishing to the sad, lonely, and anorexic girl—yes, it was true, at least during her nightmare freshman year of high school, when she was known as Jibba-Jibba Gibba-Gibba—who lived in this house.

  Her bedroom is just the same, with the dark pink walls that always made her think of half-cooked flesh. Her stuffed animals are still on the shelf above her narrow bed, with Mr. Rabbit Trick holding pride of place. Mr. Rabbit Trick’s ears are ragged, because she used to nibble on them when she couldn’t sleep. The Sylvia Plath poster still hangs on the wall above the desk where Holly wrote her bad poetry and sometimes imagined committing suicide in the manner of her idol. As she undresses, she thinks she might have done it, or at least tried it, if their oven had been gas instead of electric.

  It would be easy—much too easy—to think this childhood room has been waiting for her, like a monster in a horror story. She’s slept here several times in the sane (relatively sane) years of her adulthood, and it has never eaten her. Her mother has never eaten her, either. There is a monster, but it’s not in this room or in this house. Holly knows she would do well to remember that, and to remember who she is. Not the child who nibbled Mr. Rabbit Trick’s ears. Not the adolescent who threw up her breakfast most days before school. She is the woman who, along with Bill and Jerome, saved those children at the Midwest Culture and Arts Complex. She is the woman who survived Brady Hartsfield. The one who faced another monster in a Texas cave. The girl who hid in this room and never wanted to come out is gone.

  She kneels, says her nightly prayer, and gets into bed.

  December 18, 2020

  1

  Charlotte, Holly, and Uncle Henry sit in one corner of the Rolling Hills common room, which has been decorated for the season. There are ribbons of tinsel and sweet-smelling swags of fir that almost overcome the more permanent aroma of pee and bleach. There’s a tree hung with lights and candy canes. Christmas music spills down from the speakers, tired tunes Holly could live happily without for the rest of her life.

  The residents don’t seem exactly bursting with holiday spirit; most of them are watching an infomercial for something called the Ab Lounge, featuring a hot chick in an orange leotard. A few others are turned away from the tube, some silent, some holding conversations with each other, some talking to themselves. A wisp of an old lady in a green housecoat is bent over a huge jigsaw puzzle.

  “That’s Mrs. Hatfield,” Uncle Henry says. “I don’t recall her first name.”

  “Mrs. Braddock says you saved her from a bad fall,” Holly says.

  “No, that was Julia,” Uncle Henry says. “Back at the ohhhh-ld swimmin hole.” He laughs as people do when they are remembering days of yore. Charlotte rolls her eyes. “I was sixteen, and I believe Julia was . . .” He trails off.

  “Let me see your arm,” Charlotte commands.

  Uncle Henry cocks his head. “My arm? Why?”

  “Just let me see it.” She seizes it and pushes up his shirtsleeve. There’s a good-sized but not especially remarkable bruise there. To Holly it looks like a tattoo gone bad.

  “If this is how they take care of people, we should sue them instead of paying them,” Charlotte says.

  “Sue who?” Uncle Henry says. Then, with a laugh: “Horton Hears a Who! The kids loved that one!”

  Charlotte stands. “I’m going to get a coffee. Maybe one of those little tart things, as well. Holly?”

  Holly shakes her head.

  “You’re not eating again,” Charlotte says, and leaves before Holly can reply.

  Henry watches her go. “She never lets up, does she?”

  This time it’s Holly who laughs. She can’t help it. “No. She doesn’t.”

  “No, never does. You’re not Janey.”

  “No.” And waits.

  “You’re . . .” She can almost hear rusty gears turning. “Holly.”

  “That’s right.” She pats his hand.

  “I’d like to go back to my room, but I don’t remember where it is.”

  “I know the way,” Holly says. “I’ll take you.”

  They walk slowly down the hall together.

  “Who was Julia?” Holly asks.

  “Pretty as the dawn,” Uncle Henry says. Holly decides that’s answer enough. Certainly a better line of poetry than she ever wrote.

  In his room, she tries to guide him to the chair by the window, but he disengages his hand from hers and goes to the bed, where he sits with his hands clasped between his thighs. He looks like an elderly child. “I think I’ll lie down, sweetie. I’m tired. Charlotte makes me tired.”

  “Sometimes she makes me tired, too,” Holly says. In the old days she never would have admitted this to Uncle Henry, who was all too often her mother’s co-conspirator, but this is a different man. In some ways a much gentler man. Besides, in five minutes he’ll forget she said it. In ten, he’ll forget she was here.

  She bends to kiss his cheek, then stops with her lips just above his skin when he says, “What’s wrong? Why are you afraid?”

  “I’m not—”

  “Oh, you are. You are.”

  “All right,” she says. “I am. I’m afraid.” Such a relief to admit it. To say it out loud.

  “Your mother . . . my sister . . . it’s on the tip of my tongue . . .”

  “Charlotte.”

  “Yes. Charlie’s a coward. Always was, even when we were children. Wouldn’t go in the water at . . . the place . . . I can’t remember. You were a coward, but you grew out of it.”

  She looks at him, amazed. Speechless.

  “Grew out of it,” he repeats, then pushes off his slippers and swings his feet onto the bed. “I’m going to have a nap, Janey. This isn’t such a bad place, but I wish I had that thing . . . that thing you twist . . .” He closes his eyes.

  Holly goes to the door with her head down. There are tears on her face. She takes a tissue from her pocket and wipes them away. She doesn’t want Charl
otte to see them. “I wish you could remember saving that woman from falling down,” she says. “The nurses’ aide said you moved like lightning.”

  But Uncle Henry doesn’t hear. Uncle Henry has gone to sleep.

  2

  From Holly Gibney’s report to Detective Ralph Anderson:

  I expected to finish this last night in a Pennsylvania motel, but a family matter came up and I drove to my mother’s house instead. Being here is difficult. There are memories, many of them not so good. I will stay tonight, though. It’s better that I do. Mom is out now, buying things for an early Christmas dinner that will probably not be tasty. Cooking has never been one of her talents.

  I hope to finish my business with Chet Ondowsky—the thing that calls itself that, anyway—tomorrow evening. I’m scared, no sense lying about that. He promised to never do anything again like the Macready School, promised it right away, without even thinking it over, and I don’t believe it. Bill wouldn’t, and I am sure you wouldn’t, either. He has a taste for it now. He may also have a taste for being the heroic rescuer, although he must know that calling attention to himself is a bad idea.

  I phoned Dan Bell and told him I intended to put an end to Ondowsky. I felt that as ex-police himself he would understand and approve. He did, but told me to be careful. I will try to do that, but I’d be lying if I didn’t say that I have a very bad feeling about this. I also called my friend Barbara Robinson and told her I will be staying over at my mother’s on Saturday night. I need to make sure that she and her brother Jerome think I won’t be in the city tomorrow. No matter what happens to me, I need to know they will not be at risk.

  Ondowsky is worried about what I may do with the information I’ve gotten, but he’s also confident. He’ll kill me if he can. I know this. What he doesn’t know is that I have been in these situations before, and won’t underestimate him.

  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.

  3

  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.

  December 19, 2020

  1

  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 bi
g. 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.

  The man in the other vehicle was nice enough about it, nodding and agreeing with everything Charlotte said, but it involved an exchange of insurance cards, and by the time they were on their way again (Holly was quite sure the man whose fender they’d bumped dropped her a wink before getting back into his own vehicle), it was ten o’clock, and the visit turned out to be a total bust, anyway. Henry had no idea who either of them were. He said he had to get dressed for work and told them to stop bothering him. When Holly kissed him goodbye, he looked at her suspiciously and asked if that was a Jehovah’s Witnesses thing.

  “You drive back,” Charlotte said when they were outside. “I’m far too upset.”