If It Bleeds Read online

  He had been scheduled for tests at Maine Medical that day (tests every three weeks for the first year, Drew remembered him saying). “He could have put the appointment off,” Kelly said, “but you know Al, and Nadine was the same way. A little snow wasn’t going to stop them.”

  The accident happened on 295, less than a mile from Maine Med. A semi skidded on the ice, sideswiping Nadie Stamper’s little Prius and flicking it like a tiddlywink. It turned over and landed on the roof.

  “Oh my God,” Lucy said. “Both of them, gone. How horrible is that? And when he was getting better!”

  “Yes,” Drew said. He felt numb. “He was, wasn’t he?” Except, of course, he had that damn rat to contend with. He’d said so himself.

  “You need to sit down,” Lucy said. “You’re as pale as windowglass.”

  But sitting down wasn’t what Drew needed, at least not first. He rushed to the kitchen sink and vomited up the champagne. As he hung there, still heaving, barely aware of Lucy rubbing his back, he thought, Ellie says the book will be published next February. Between now and then I’ll do whatever the editor tells me, and all the publicity they want once the book comes out. I’ll play the game. I’ll do it for Lucy and the kids. But there’s never going to be another one.

  “Never,” he said.

  “What, honey?” She was still rubbing his back.

  “The pancreatic. I thought that would get him, it gets almost everybody. I never expected anything like this.” He rinsed his mouth from the faucet, spat. “Never.”

  35

  The funeral—which Drew couldn’t help thinking of as the FUNNERAL—was held four days after the accident. Al’s younger brother asked Drew if he would say a few words. Drew declined, saying he was still too shocked to be articulate. He was shocked, no doubt about it, but his real fear was that the words would turn treacherous as they had on Village and the two aborted books before it. He was afraid—really, actually afraid—that if he stood at the podium before a chapel filled with grieving relatives, friends, colleagues, and students, what might spill from his mouth was The rat! It was the fucking rat! And I turned it loose!

  Lucy cried all through the service. Stacey cried with her, not because she knew the Stampers well but in sympathy with her mother. Drew sat silent, with his arm around Brandon. He looked not at the two coffins but at the choir loft. He was sure he would see a rat running a victory lap along the polished mahogany rail up there, but he didn’t. Of course he didn’t. There was no rat. As the service wound down, he realized he’d been stupid to think there might be. He knew where the rat was, and that place was miles from here.

  36

  In August (and a mighty hot August it was), Lucy decided to take the kids down to Little Compton, Rhode Island, to spend a couple of weeks at the shore with her parents and her sister’s family, leaving Drew a quiet house where he could work through the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River. He said he would break the work in half, taking a day in the middle to drive up to Pop’s cabin. He would spend the night, he said, and come back the following day to resume work on the manuscript. They had hired Jack Colson—Young Jackie—to truck away the remains of the smashed shed; Jackie in turn had hired his ma to clean the cabin. Drew said he wanted to see what kind of job they’d done. And to retrieve his watch.

  “Sure you don’t want to start a new book there?” Lucy asked, smiling. “I wouldn’t mind. The last one turned out pretty well.”

  Drew shook his head. “Nothing like that. I was thinking we ought to sell the place, hon. I’m really going up there to say goodbye.”

  37

  The signs on the gas pump at the Big 90 were the same: CASH ONLY and REGULAR ONLY and “DASH-AWAYS” WILL BE PERSECUTED and GOD BLESS AMERICA. The scrawny young woman behind the counter was also pretty much the same; the chrome stud was gone but the nose ring was still there. And she’d gone blond. Presumably because blonds had more fun.

  “You again,” she said. “Only you changed your ride, seems like. Didn’t you have a ’Burban?”

  Drew glanced out at the Chevy Equinox—purchased outright, still less than 7,000 miles on the clock—standing at the single rusting pump. “The Suburban was never really the same after my last trip up here,” he said. Actually, neither was I.

  “Gonna be up there long?”

  “No, not this time. I was sorry to hear about Roy.”

  “Should have gone to the doctor. Let it be a lesson to you. Need anything else?”

  Drew bought some bread, some lunchmeat, and a sixpack.

  38

  All the blowdown had been trucked away from the dooryard, and the equipment shed was gone as if it had never been. Young Jackie had sodded the ground and fresh grass was growing there. Also some cheery flowers. The warped porch steps had been repaired and there were a couple of new chairs, just cheap stuff from the Presque Isle Walmart, probably, but not bad looking.

  Inside, the cabin was neat and freshened up. The woodstove’s isinglass window had been cleaned of soot and the stove itself gleamed. So did the windows, the dining table, and the pine-plank floor, which looked as if it had been oiled as well as washed. The refrigerator was once more unplugged and standing open, once more empty except for a box of Arm & Hammer. Probably a fresh one. It was clear that Old Bill’s widow had done a bang-up job.

  Only on the counter by the sink were there signs of his occupancy the previous October: the Coleman lantern, the tin of lantern fuel, a bag of Halls cough drops, several packets of Goody’s Headache Powder, half a bottle of Dr. King’s Cough & Cold Remedy, and his wristwatch.

  The fireplace was scrubbed clean of ash. It had been loaded with fresh chunks of oak, so Drew supposed Young Jackie had either had the chimney swept or done it himself. Very efficient, but there would be no need of a fire in this August heat. He went to the fireplace, knelt, and twisted his head to stare up into the black throat of the chimney.

  “Are you up there?” he called… and with no self-consciousness at all. “If you’re up there, come down. I want to talk to you.”

  Nothing, of course. He told himself again there was no rat, had never been a rat, except there was. The splinter wasn’t coming out. The rat was in his head. Only that wasn’t completely true, either. Was it?

  There were still two crates flanking the spandy-clean fireplace, fresh kindling in one, toys in the other—the ones left here by his kids and those left by the children of whomever Lucy had let the cabin to in the few years they’d rented it. He grabbed the crate and dumped it. At first he didn’t think the stuffed rat was there, and he felt a stab of panic, irrational, but real. Then he saw it had tumbled under the hearth, nothing sticking out but its cloth-covered rump and stringy tail. What an ugly toy it was!

  “Thought you’d hide, did you?” he asked it. “No good, Mister.”

  He took it over to the sink and dropped it in. “Got anything to say? Any explanations? Maybe an apology? No? What about any last words? You were chatty enough before.”

  The stuffed rat had nothing to say, so Drew doused it with lantern fluid and set it on fire. When there was nothing left but smoking, foul-smelling slag, he turned on the water and doused the remains. There were a few paper bags under the sink. Drew used a spatula to scrape what was left into one of these. He took the bag down to Godfrey Brook, tossed it in, and watched it float away. Then he sat down on the bank and looked at the day, which was windless and hot and gorgeous.

  When the sun began to sink, he went inside and made a couple of bologna sandwiches. They were sort of dry—he should have remembered to get mustard or mayo—but he had the beer to wash them down. He drank three cans, sitting in one of the old armchairs and reading an Ed McBain paperback about the 87th Precinct.

  Drew considered a fourth beer and decided against it. He had an idea that was the one with the hangover in it, and he wanted to get an early start in the morning. He was done with this place. As he was with writing novels. There was just the one, his only child waiting for him to finish w
ith it. The one that had cost his friend and his friend’s wife their lives.

  “I don’t believe that,” he said as he climbed the stairs. At the top he looked down at the big main room, where he had started his book and where—for a little while, anyway—he had believed he would die. “Except I do. I do believe that.”

  He undressed and went to bed. The beers sent him off to sleep quickly.

  39

  Drew awoke in the middle of the night. The bedroom was gilded silver with the light of a full August moon. The rat was sitting on his chest, staring at him with those little black bulging eyes.

  “Hello, Drew.” The rat’s mouth didn’t move, but the voice was coming from him, all right. Drew had been feverish and sick the last time they conversed, but he remembered that voice very well.

  “Get off me,” Drew whispered. He wanted to strike it away (he wanted to bat the rat, so to speak), but he seemed to have no strength in his arms.

  “Now, now, don’t be like that. You called me and I came. Isn’t that the way it works in stories like this? Now just how can I help you?”

  “I want to know why you did it.”

  The rat sat up, holding his little pink paws to his furry chest. “Because you wanted me to. It was a wish, remember?”

  “It was a deal.”

  “Oh, you college types with your semantics.”

  “The deal was Al,” Drew insisted. “Just him. Since he was going to die of pancreatic cancer anyway.”

  “I don’t remember pancreatic cancer ever being specified,” said the rat. “Am I wrong about that?”

  “No, but I assumed…”

  The rat did a face-washing thing with his paws, turned around twice—the feel of those paws was nauseating, even through the quilt—and then regarded Drew again. “That’s how they get you with magic wishes,” he said. “They’re tricky. Lots of fine print. All the best fairy tales make that clear. I thought we discussed that.”

  “Okay, but Nadine Stamper was never a part of it! Never a part of our… our arrangement!”

  “She was never not a part of it,” the rat replied, and rather prissily.

  It’s a dream, Drew thought. Another dream, got to be. In no version of reality could a man be lawyered at by a rodent.

  Drew thought his strength was coming back, but he made no move. Not yet. When he did it would be sudden, and it wouldn’t be to slap the rat or bat the rat. He intended to catch the rat and squeeze the rat. He would writhe, he would squeal, and he would almost certainly bite, but Drew would squeeze until the rat’s belly ruptured and his guts erupted from his mouth and his asshole.

  “All right, you might have a point. But I don’t understand. The book was all I wanted, and you spoiled it.”

  “Oh boo-hoo,” said the rat, and gave his face another dry wash. Drew almost pounced then, but no. Not quite yet. He had to know.

  “Fuck your boo-hoo. I could have killed you with that shovel, but I didn’t. I could have left you out in the storm, but I didn’t. I brought you in and put you by the stove. So why would you repay me by killing two innocent people and stealing the pleasure I felt in finishing the only book I’ll ever write?”

  The rat considered. “Well,” he said at last, “if I may slightly change an old punchline, you knew I was a rat when you took me in.”

  Drew pounced. He was very fast, but his clutching hands closed on nothing but air. The rat scurried across the floor, but before he reached the wall, he turned back to Drew, seeming to grin in the moonlight.

  “Besides, you didn’t finish it. You never could have finished it. I did.”

  There was a hole in the baseboard. The rat ran into it. For a moment Drew could see his tail. Then he was gone.

  Drew lay looking up at the ceiling. In the morning I will tell myself this was a dream, he thought, and in the morning that was what he did. Rats did not talk and rats did not grant wishes. Al had cheated cancer only to die in a car accident, dreadfully ironic but not unheard-of; it was a shame his wife had died with him, but that was not unheard-of, either.

  He drove home. He entered his preternaturally quiet house. He went upstairs to his study. He opened the folder containing the copyedited manuscript of Bitter River and prepared to go to work. Things had happened, some in the real world and some in his head, and those things could not be changed. The thing to remember was that he had survived. He would love his wife and children as best he could, he would teach the best he could, he would live the best he could, and he would gladly join the ranks of one-book writers. Really, when you thought about it, he had nothing to complain about.

  Really, when you thought about it, everything was all rat.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  When my mom or one of my four aunties happened to see a lady pushing a pram, they were apt to chant something they probably learned from their mother: “Where did you come from, baby dear? Out of the nowhere and into the here.” I sometimes think of that bit of doggerel when I’m asked where I got the idea for this or that story. I often don’t know the answer, which makes me embarrassed and a little ashamed. (Some childhood complex at work there, no doubt.) Sometimes I give the honest answer (“No idea!”), but on other occasions I just make up some bullshit, thus satisfying my questioner with a semi-rational explanation of cause and effect. Here, I will try to be honest. (Of course that’s what I would say, isn’t it?)

  As a kid, I may have seen some movie—likely one of the American-International horror flicks my friend Chris Chesley and I used to hitchhike to see at the Ritz in Lewiston—about a guy so afraid of being buried alive that he had a phone put in his crypt. Or it might have been an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Anyway, the idea resonated in my over-imaginative child’s mind: the thought of a phone ringing in a place of the dead. Years later, after a close friend died unexpectedly, I called his cell phone just to hear his voice one more time. Instead of comforting me, it gave me the creeps. I never did it again, but that call, added to the childhood memory of that movie or TV show, was the seed for “Mr. Harrigan’s Phone.”

  Stories go where they want to, and the real fun of this one—for me—was returning to a time when cell phones in general and the iPhone in particular were brand new, and all their ramifications barely glimpsed. In the course of my researches, my IT guy, Jake Lockwood, bought a first-gen iPhone on eBay and got it working. It’s nearby as I write. (I have to keep it plugged in, because somewhere along the way someone dropped it and busted the on/off switch.) I can go on the Internet with it, I can get stock reports and the weather. I just can’t make calls, because it’s 2G, and that technology is as dead as the Betamax VCR.

  I have no idea where “The Life of Chuck” came from. All I know is one day I thought of a billboard with that “Thanks, Chuck!” line on it, along with the guy’s photo and 39 GREAT YEARS. I think I wrote the story to find out what that billboard was about, but I’m not even sure of that. What I can say is that I’ve always felt that each one of us—from the kings and princes of the realm to the guys who wash dishes at Waffle House and the gals who change beds in turnpike motels—contains the whole world.

  While staying in Boston, I happened to see a guy playing the drums on Boylston Street. People were passing him with hardly a glance, and the basket in front of him (not a Magic Hat) was mighty low on contributions. I wondered what would happen if someone, a Mr. Businessman type, for instance, stopped and began to dance, sort of like Christopher Walken in that brilliant Fatboy Slim video, “Weapon of Choice.” The connection to Chuck Krantz—a Mr. Businessman type if ever there was one—was natural. I put him into the story and let him dance. I love dancing, the way it frees a person’s heart and soul, and writing the story was a joy.

  Having written two stories about Chuck, I wanted to write a third one that would knit all three into a unified narrative. “I Contain Multitudes” was written a year after the first two. Whether or not the three acts—presented in reverse order, like a film running backwards—succeed will be up to readers to
determine.

  Let me jump ahead to “Rat.” I have absolutely no clue where this story came from. All I know is that it felt like a malign fairy tale to me, and it gave me a chance to write a little bit about the mysteries of the imagination, and how that translates to the page. I should add that the Jonathan Franzen lecture Drew refers to is fictional.

  Last but hardly least: “If It Bleeds.” The basis of this story existed in my mind for at least ten years. I began to notice that certain TV news correspondents seem always to appear at the scenes of horrific tragedies: plane crashes, mass shootings, terrorist attacks, celebrity deaths. These stories almost always head local and national news; everyone in the biz knows the axiom “If it bleeds, it leads.” The story remained unwritten because someone had to catch the trail of the supernatural being masquerading as a TV news correspondent and living on the blood of innocents. I couldn’t figure out who that someone might be. Then, in November of 2018, I realized the answer had been staring me in the face all along: Holly Gibney, of course.

  I love Holly. It’s as simple as that. She was supposed to be a minor character in Mr. Mercedes, no more than a quirky walk-on. Instead, she stole my heart (and almost stole the book). I’m always curious about what she’s doing and how she’s getting along. When I go back to her, I’m relieved to find she’s still taking her Lexapro and still not smoking. I was also curious, frankly, about the circumstances that made her what she is, and thought I could explore that a little . . . as long as it added to the story, that is. This is Holly’s first solo outing, and I hope I did it justice. Particular thanks to elevator expert Alan Wilson, who walked me through the way modern computerized elevators work, and the things that can go wrong with them. Obviously I took his info and (ahem) embellished it, so if you know this stuff and think I got it wrong, blame me—and the needs of my story—rather than him.