by Stephen King
Holly ends the call, wipes sweat from her brow, and checks her Fitbit. Heart rate is 89. Not bad. There was a time when a call like that would have rammed it up over 150. She looks at the clock. Quarter of seven. She takes her book out of her travel bag and immediately puts it back. She’s too tense to read. So she paces.
At quarter to eight she’s in the bathroom with her shirt off, washing her armpits (she doesn’t use deodorant; aluminum chlorohydrate is supposed to be safe but she has her doubts), when her phone rings. She takes two deep breaths, sends up the briefest of prayers—God help me not to frack up—and answers.
18
Her phone’s screen says UNKNOWN. Holly isn’t surprised. He’s calling on his personal phone or maybe a burner.
“This is Chet Ondowsky, to whom am I speaking?” The voice is smooth, friendly, and controlled. A veteran TV reporter’s voice.
“My name is Holly. That’s all you need to know for now.” She thinks she sounds okay so far. She punches her Fitbit. Pulse is 98.
“What’s this about, Holly?” Interested. Inviting confidences. This isn’t the man who reported on the bloody horror in Pineborough Township; this is Chet on Guard, wanting to know how the guy who paved your driveway shafted you on the price or how much the power company stiffed you for kilowatts you didn’t burn.
“I think you know,” she says, “but let’s make sure. I’m going to send you some pictures. Give me your email address.”
“If you check the Chet on Guard webpage, Holly, you’ll find—”
“Your personal email address. Because you don’t want anyone seeing this. You really don’t.”
There’s a pause, long enough for Holly to think she might have lost him, but then he gives her the address. She jots it on a sheet of Embassy Suites notepaper.
“I’m sending it right away,” she says. “Pay special attention to the spectrographic analysis and the picture of Philip Hannigan. Call me back in fifteen minutes.”
“Holly, this is very unusu—”
“You’re very unusual, Mr. Ondowsky. Aren’t you? Call me back in fifteen minutes, or I’ll take what I know public. Your time starts as soon as my email goes through.”
“Holly—”
She ends the call, drops the phone on the rug, and bends over, head between her knees and face in her hands. Don’t faint, she tells herself. Don’t you fracking do it.
When she feels okay again—as okay as she can be under the circumstances, which are very stressful—she opens her laptop and sends off the material Brad Bell gave her. She doesn’t bother adding a message. The pictures are the message.
Then she waits.
Eleven minutes later her phone lights up. She grabs it at once but lets it ring four times before taking the call.
He doesn’t bother with hello. “These prove nothing.” It’s still the perfectly modulated tone of the veteran TV personality, but all the warmth has gone out of it. “You know that, right?”
Holly says, “Wait until people compare the picture of you as Philip Hannigan with the one of you standing outside the school with that package in your hands. The false mustache will fool nobody. Wait until they compare the spectrogram of Philip Hannigan’s voice to the spectrogram of Chet Ondowsky’s voice.”
“Who is this they you’re referring to, Holly? The police? They’d laugh you right out of the station.”
“Oh no, not the police,” Holly said. “I can do better than that. If TMZ isn’t interested, Gossip Glutton will be. Or DeepDive. And the Drudge Report, they always like the strange stuff. On TV there’s Inside Edition and Celeb. But do you know where I’d go first?”
Silence from the other end. But she can hear him breathing.
It breathing.
“Inside View,” she says. “They ran with the Night Flier story for over a year, Slender Man for two. They wrung those stories dry. They’ve still got a circulation of over three million, and they’ll eat this up.”
“Nobody believes that shit.”
This isn’t true, and they both know it.
“They’ll believe this. I’ve got a lot of information, Mr. Ondowsky, what I believe you reporters call deep background, and when it comes out—if it comes out—people will start digging into your past. All your pasts. Your cover won’t just come apart, it will explode.” Like the bomb you planted to kill those children, she thinks.
Nothing.
Holly chews on her knuckles and waits him out. It’s very hard, but she does it.
At last he asks, “Where did you get those pictures? Who gave them to you?”
Holly knew this was coming, and knows she has to give him something. “A man who’s been onto you for a long time. You don’t know him and you’ll never find him, but you also don’t have to worry about him. He’s very old. What you have to worry about is me.”
There’s another long pause. Now one of Holly’s knuckles is bleeding. At last the question she’s been waiting for arrives: “What do you want?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow. You’re going to meet me at noon.”
“I have an assignment—”
“Cancel it,” commands the woman who once scuttled through life with her head down and her shoulders hunched. “This is your assignment now, and I don’t think you want to blow it.”
“Where?”
Holly is ready for this. She’s done her research. “The food court of the Monroeville Mall. That’s less than fifteen miles from your TV station, so it should be convenient for you and safe for me. Go to Sbarro, look around, you’ll see me. I’ll be wearing a brown leather jacket open over a pink sweater with a turtleneck collar. I’ll have a slice of pizza and coffee in a Starbucks cup. If you’re not there by five past noon, I’ll leave and start shopping my merchandise.”
“You’re a kook and no one will believe you.” He doesn’t sound confident, but he doesn’t sound afraid, either. He sounds angry. That’s all right, Holly thinks, I can work with that.
“Who are you trying to convince, Mr. Ondowsky? Me, or yourself?”
“You’re a piece of work, lady. You know that?”
“I’ll have a friend watching,” she says. Not true, but Ondowsky won’t know that. “He doesn’t know what it’s about, don’t worry about that, but he’ll be keeping an eye on me.” She pauses. “And on you.”
“What do you want?” he asks again.
“Tomorrow,” Holly says, and ends the call.
Later, after she’s made arrangements to fly to Pittsburgh the following morning, she lies in bed, hoping for sleep but not expecting much. She wonders—as she did when she conceived this plan—if she really needs to meet him face to face. She thinks she does. She thinks she’s convinced him that she’s got the goods on him (as Bill would say). Now she has to look him in the eye and give him a way out. Has to convince him that she’s willing to make a deal. And what kind of deal? Her first wild idea was to tell him she wants to be like him, that she wants to live… maybe not forever, that seems too extreme, but for hundreds of years. Would he believe that, or would he think she was conning him? Too risky.
Money, then. Has to be.
That he will believe, because he has been watching the human parade for a long time. And looking down on it. Ondowsky believes that for lesser beings, for the herd he sometimes thins, it always comes down to money.
Sometime after midnight, Holly finally drops off. She dreams of a cave in Texas. She dreams of a thing that looked like a man until she hit it with a sock loaded with ball bearings and the head collapsed like the false front it was.
She cries in her sleep.
December 17, 2020
1
As an honor roll senior at Houghton High, Barbara Robinson is pretty much free to go as she lists during her free period, which runs from 9:00 to 9:50. When the bell rings releasing her from her Early English Writers class, she wanders down to the art room, which is deserted at this hour. She takes her phone from her hip pocket and calls Jerome. From the sound of his voice, she�
�s pretty sure she woke him up. Oh for the life of a writer, she thinks.
Barbara doesn’t waste time. “Where is she this morning, J?”
“Don’t know,” he says. “I dumped the tracker.”
“True?”
“True.”
“Well . . . okay.”
“Can I go back to sleep now?”
“No,” she says. Barbara has been up since 6:45, and misery loves company. “Time to get up and grab the world by the balls.”
“Mouth, sister,” he says, and boom, he’s gone.
Barbara stands by some kid’s really bad watercolor of the lake, staring at her phone and frowning. Jerome is probably right, Holly went off to meet some guy she met on that dating website. Not to fuck him, that’s not Holly, but to make a human connection? To reach out, as her therapist has no doubt been telling her she must do? That Barbara can believe. Portland has got to be at least five hundred miles from the site of that bombing she was so interested in, after all. Maybe more.
Put yourself in her shoes, Barbara tells herself. Wouldn’t you want your privacy? And wouldn’t you be mad if you ever found out that your friends—your so-called friends—were spying on you?
Holly wasn’t going to find out, but did that change the basic equation?
No.
Was she still worried (a little worried)?
Yes. But some worries had to be lived with.
She slips her phone back into her pocket and decides to go down to the music room and practice her guitar until 20th Century American History. She’s trying to learn the old Wilson Pickett soul shouter, “In the Midnight Hour.” The bar chords in the bridge are a bitch, but she’s getting there.
On her way out, she almost runs into Justin Freilander, a junior who’s a founding member of Houghton’s geek squad, and who has—according to rumor—a major crush on her. She smiles at him and Justin immediately turns that alarming shade of red of which only white boys are capable. Rumor confirmed. It suddenly occurs to Barbara that this might be fate.
She says, “Hey Justin. I wonder if you could help me with something?”
And takes her phone out of her pocket.
2
While Justin Freilander is examining Barbara’s phone (which is still, oh God, warm from being in her back pocket), Holly is landing at Pittsburgh International. Ten minutes later she’s in line at the Avis counter. Uber would be cheaper, but having her own ride is wiser. A year or so after Pete Huntley came onboard at Finders Keepers, the two of them took a driving course meant to teach surveillance and evasion—a refresher for him, new for her. She doesn’t expect to need the former today, but recourse to the latter isn’t out of the question. She is meeting a dangerous man.
She parks in the lot of an airport hotel to kill some time (early to my own funeral, she thinks again). She calls her mother. Charlotte doesn’t answer, which doesn’t mean she’s not there; direct-to-voicemail is one of her old punishing techniques for when she feels her daughter has stepped out of line. Holly next calls Pete, who asks again what she’s doing and when she’ll be back. Thinking of Dan Bell and his terribly gay grandson, she tells him she’s visiting friends in New England and will be in the office bright and early on Monday morning.
“You better be,” Pete says. “You have a depo on Tuesday. And the office Christmas party is on Wednesday. I plan to kiss you under the mistletoe.”
“Oough,” Holly says, but she’s smiling.
She arrives at the Monroeville Mall at quarter past eleven and makes herself sit in the car for another fifteen minutes, alternately punching her Fitbit (pulse running just over 100) and praying for strength and calm. Also to be convincing.
At eleven-thirty she enters the mall and takes a slow stroll past some of the shops—Jimmy Jazz, Clutch, Boobaloo strollers—looking in the windows not to scope out the merchandise but to catch a reflected glimpse of Chet Ondowsky, should he be watching her. And it will be Chet. His other self, the one she thinks of as George, is the most wanted man in America just now. Holly supposes he might have a third template, but she thinks it unlikely; he’s got a pig-self and a fox-self, why would he think he’d need more?
At ten minutes of twelve, she gets in line at Starbucks for a cup of coffee, then queues at Sbarro for a slice of pizza she doesn’t want. She unzips her jacket so the pink turtleneck shows, then finds an unoccupied table in the food court. Although it’s lunchtime, there are quite a few of those—more than she expected, and that makes her uneasy. The mall itself is low on foot traffic, especially for the Christmas shopping season. Seems to have fallen on hard times, everybody buys from Amazon these days.
Noon comes. A young man wearing cool sunglasses and a quilted jacket (a couple of ski-lift tags dangle jauntily from the zipper) slows, as if he means to chat her up, then moves on. Holly is relieved. She has little in the way of brush-off skills, never having had much reason to develop them.
At five past noon she starts to think Ondowsky isn’t coming. Then, at seven past, a man speaks from behind her, and in the warm, we’re-all-pals-here voice of a TV regular. “Hello, Holly.”
She jumps and almost spills her coffee. It’s the young man with the cool sunglasses. At first she thinks this is a third template after all, but when he takes them off she sees it’s Ondowsky, all right. His face is slightly more angular, the creases around his mouth are gone, and his eyes are closer together (not a good look for TV), but it’s him. And not young at all. She can’t see any lines and wrinkles on his face, but she senses them, and thinks there may be a lot. The masquerade is a good one, but up this close it’s like Botox or plastic surgery.
Because I know, she thinks. I know what he is.
“I thought it would be best if I looked just a bit different,” he says. “When I’m Chet, I tend to get recognized. TV journalists aren’t exactly Tom Cruise, but . . .” A modest shrug finishes the thought.
With his sunglasses off, she sees something else: his eyes have a shimmery quality, as if they’re underwater . . . or not there at all. And isn’t there something similar going on with his mouth? Holly thinks of how the picture looks when you’re at a 3-D movie and take off the glasses.
“You see it, don’t you?” The voice is still warm and friendly. It goes well with the small smile dimpling the corners of his mouth. “Most people don’t. It’s the transition. It will be gone in five minutes, ten at most. I had to come here directly from the station. You’ve caused me some problems, Holly.”
She realizes she can hear the small pause when he occasionally puts his tongue to the roof of his mouth to stop the lisp.
“That makes me think of an old country song by Travis Tritt.” She sounds calm enough but she can’t take her eyes from his, where the sclera shimmers into the iris and the iris shimmers into the pupil. For the time being, they’re countries with unstable borders. “It’s called ‘Here’s a Quarter, Call Someone Who Cares.’ ”
He smiles, the lips seeming to spread too far, and then, snap! The minute shivers in his eyes remain, but his mouth is solid again. He looks to her left, where an old gent in a parka and tweed cap is reading a magazine. “Is that your friend? Or is it the woman over there who’s been looking into the window of Forever 21 a suspiciously long time?”
“Maybe it’s both of them,” Holly says. Now that the confrontation is here, she feels okay. Or almost; those eyes are disturbing and disorienting. Looking into them too long will give her a headache, but he would take looking away as a sign of weakness. And it would be.
“You know me, but all I have is your given name. What’s the rest of it?”
“Gibney. Holly Gibney.”
“And what is it you want, Holly Gibney?”
“Three hundred thousand dollars.”
“Blackmail,” he says, and gives his head a small shake, as if he’s disappointed in her. “Do you know what blackmail is, Holly?”
She remembers one of the late Bill Hodges’s old maxims (there were many): You don’t answer a perp’s
questions; the perp answers yours. So she simply sits and waits with her small hands folded beside her unwanted slice of pizza.
“Blackmail is rent,” he says. “Not even rent-to-buy, a scam Chet on Guard knows well. Let’s suppose I had three hundred thousand dollars, which I don’t—there’s a big difference between what a TV reporter makes and what a TV actor makes. But let’s suppose.”
“Let’s suppose you’ve been around for a long, long time,” Holly says, “and putting money away all the while. Let’s suppose that’s how you finance your . . .” Your what, exactly? “Your lifestyle. And your background. Bogus IDs and all.”
He smiles. It’s charming. “All right, Holly Gibney, let’s suppose that. The central problem for me remains: blackmail is rent. When the three hundred K is gone, you’ll come back with your Photoshopped pictures and your electronically altered voiceprints and threaten me with exposure all over again.”
Holly is ready for this. She didn’t need Bill to tell her that the best confabulation is the one containing the most truth. “No,” she says. “Three hundred thousand is all I want, because it’s all I need.” She pauses. “Although there is one other thing.”
“And what would that be?” The pleasant TV-trained tones have become condescending.
“Let’s stick with the money for now. Recently my Uncle Henry was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. He’s in an elder care facility that specializes in housing and treating people like him. It’s very expensive, but that’s really beside the point because he hates it there, he’s very upset, and my mother wants to bring him back home. Only she can’t care for him. She thinks she can, but she can’t. She’s getting old, she has medical problems of her own, and the house would have to be retrofitted for an invalid.” She thinks of Dan Bell. “Ramps, a stair-chair, and a bed-hoist to start with, but those things are minor. I’d want to hire round-the-clock care for him, including an RN in the daytime.”
“Such expensive plans, Holly Gibney. You must love the old dear very much.”