If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  I was out there, Barbara marvels. Just five minutes ago, when things were still all right. When I still foolishly believed I had a life ahead of me.

  The man pushes the elevator button. They hear the sound of the descending car.

  “How much money were you supposed to pay her?” Barbara asks. Beneath her fear, she feels a dull disappointment that Holly would deal with this man at all.

  “Doesn’t matter now,” he says, “because I’ve got you. Girlfriend.”

  The elevator stops. The doors open. The robo-voice welcomes them to the Frederick Building. “Going up,” it says. The doors shut. The car begins to rise.

  The man lets go of Barbara, takes off his furry Russian hat, drops it between his shoes, and lifts his hands in a magician’s flourish. “Watch this. I think you’ll like it, and our Ms. Gibney certainly deserves to see it, since it’s what made all this trouble in the first place.”

  What happens next is horrible beyond Barbara’s previous understanding of the word. In a movie it could be dismissed as no more than a cool special effect, but this is real life. A ripple runs up the round middle-aged face. It starts at the chin and rises not past the mouth but through it. The nose wavers, the cheeks stretch, the eyes shimmer, the forehead contracts. Then, suddenly, the whole head turns to semi-transparent jelly. It quivers and shimmies and sags and pulses. Inside it are confused tangles of writhing red stuff. Not blood; that red stuff is full of flocking black specks. Barbara shrieks and falls back against the wall of the elevator. Her legs fail her. Her purse slips off her shoulder and thumps to the floor. She slides down the wall of the elevator with her eyes bulging from their sockets. Her bowels and bladder let go.

  Then the jelly head solidifies, but the face that appears is entirely different from that of the man who knocked Jerome unconscious and forcibly escorted her to the elevator. It’s narrower, and the skin is two or three shades darker. The eyes are tilted at the corners instead of round. The nose is sharper and longer than the blunt beak of the man who hauled her into the elevator. The mouth is thinner.

  This man looks ten years younger than the one who grabbed her.

  “Good trick, wouldn’t you say?” Even his voice is different.

  What are you? Barbara tries to say this, but no words will come out of her mouth.

  He bends down and gently places the strap of her purse back on her shoulder. Barbara shrinks from the touch of his fingers but can’t entirely avoid them. “Don’t want to lose your wallet and credit cards, do you? They’ll help the police to identify you, in case… well, in case.” He makes a burlesque of holding his new nose. “Dear me, did we have a little accident? Oh well, you know what they say, shit happens.” He titters.

  The elevator stops. The doors slide open on the fifth-floor hall.

  16

  When the elevator stops, Holly takes one more quick glance at the screen of the computer, then clicks the mouse. She doesn’t wait to see if the floor-stops, B through 8, gray out as they were when she and Jerome did their repair-job, following the steps Jerome found at a webpage titled Erebeta Bugs and How to Fix Them. She doesn’t need to. She’ll know one way or the other.

  She walks back to the office door and looks down the twenty-five yards of hallway to the elevator. Ondowsky has Barbara by the arm… only when he looks up, she sees it’s no longer him. Now it’s George, minus the mustache and the delivery man’s brown uniform.

  “Come on, girlfriend,” he says. “Move those feet.”

  Barbara comes stumbling out. Her eyes are huge and blank and wet with tears. Her beautiful dark skin has gone the color of clay. Spittle runs from one side of her mouth. She looks almost catatonic, and Holly knows why: she saw Ondowsky change.

  This terrorized girl is her responsibility, but Holly can’t think about that now. She has to stay in the moment, has to listen, has to have Holly hope… although that has never seemed so distant.

  The elevator doors slide closed. With Bill’s gun removed from the equation, any chance Holly has depends on what happens next. At first there’s nothing and her heart turns to lead. Then, instead of staying put, as Erebeta elevators are programmed to do until they are called, she hears it descending. Thank God, she hears it descending.

  “Here’s my little girlfriend,” George the killer of children says. “She’s kind of a bad girlfriend. I believe she’s gone pee-pee and poo-poo in her pants. Come closer, Holly. You’ll smell it for yourself.”

  Holly doesn’t move from the doorway. “I’m curious,” she says. “Did you actually bring any money?”

  George grins, showing teeth that are a lot less TV-ready than those of his alter-ego. “Actually, no. There’s a cardboard box behind the Dumpster where I hid when I saw this one and her brother coming, but there’s nothing in there but catalogues. You know, the kind that come addressed to Current Resident.”

  “So you never intended to pay me,” Holly says. She takes a dozen steps down the hall, stopping when they’re fifteen yards apart. If this was football, she’d be in the red zone. “Did you?”

  “No more than you ever intended to give me that flash drive and let me go,” he says. “I can’t read minds, but I have a long history of reading body language. And faces. Yours is completely open, although I’m sure you think otherwise. Now pull your shirt out of your pants and lift it. Not all the way, those bumps on your chest hold no interest for me, just enough so I can make sure you’re not armed.”

  Holly lifts her shirt and does a complete turn without being asked.

  “Now pull up your pantslegs.”

  She does this, too.

  “No throwdown,” George says. “Good.” He cocks his head, looking at her the way an art critic might study a painting. “Gosh, you’re an ugly little thing, aren’t you?”

  Holly makes no reply.

  “Have you ever in your life had so much as a single date?”

  Holly makes no reply.

  “Ugly little waif, no more than thirty-five but already going gray. Not bothering to cover it up, either, and if that isn’t waving the white flag, I don’t know what is. Do you send your dildo a card on Valentine’s Day?”

  Holly makes no reply.

  “My guess is you compensate for your looks and insecurity with a sense of…” He breaks off and looks down at Barbara. “Jesus Christ, you’re heavy! And you stink!”

  He lets go of Barbara’s arm and she collapses in front of the women’s room door with her hands spread, her bottom raised, and her forehead on the tiles. She looks like a Muslim woman about to begin Isha’a. Her sobs are low, but Holly can hear them. Oh yes, she can hear them very well.

  George’s face changes. Not back to Chet Ondowsky’s, but into a feral sneer that shows Holly the real creature inside him. Ondowsky has a pig face, George has a fox face, but this is the face of a jackal. Of a hyena. Of Jerome’s gray bird. He kicks Barbara’s bluejeaned butt. She wails in pain and surprise.

  “Get in there!” he shouts. “Get in there, clean yourself up, let the grownups finish their business!”

  Holly wants to run those last fifteen yards, shouting at him to stop kicking her, but of course that’s what he wants. And if he really means to stash his hostage in the women’s bathroom, it may give her the chance she needs. At the very least it opens the playing field. So she holds her ground.

  “Get… in there!” He kicks her again. “I’ll deal with you after I deal with this meddling bitch. You want to pray she plays straight with me.”

  Sobbing, Barbara pushes the door to the women’s bathroom open with her head and crawls inside. Not, however, before George administers another kick to her backside. Then he looks at Holly. The sneer is gone. The smile is back. Holly guesses it’s supposed to look charming, and on Ondowsky’s face it might. Not on George’s.

  “Well, Holly. Girlfriend’s in the shithouse and now it’s just us. I can go in and open up her guts with this…” He holds up the knife. “…or you can give me what I came for and I’ll leave her alone. I�
��ll leave you both alone.”

  I know better, Holly thinks. Once you get what you came for, no one is walking away, including Jerome. If he isn’t dead already.

  She tries to project both doubt and hope. “I don’t know if I can believe you.”

  “You can. Once I have the drive, I’ll fade away. From your life and from the world of Pittsburgh broadcasting. It’s time to move along. I knew that even before this guy—” He draws the hand not holding the knife slowly down the length of his face, as if drawing down a veil. “—planted the bomb. I think maybe that’s why he planted it. So yes, Holly, you can believe me.”

  “Maybe I should run back to the office and lock the door,” she says, and hopes her face shows she’s actually considering this. “Call 911.”

  “And leave the girl to my tender mercies?” George points his long knife at the door to the women’s room and smiles. “I don’t think so. I saw how you looked at her. Besides, I’d have you before you took three steps. As I told you in the mall, I’m fast. Enough talk. Give me what I want and I’ll go away.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “What do you think?”

  She pauses, sighs, wets her lips, finally nods. “You win. Just leave us alive.”

  “I will.” As at the mall, the response is too fast. Too glib. She doesn’t believe him. He knows and doesn’t care.

  “I’m going to take my cell phone out of my pocket,” Holly says. “I have to show you a picture.”

  He says nothing, so she takes it out, very slowly. She opens her photo stream, selects the picture she took in the elevator, and holds the phone out to him.

  Now tell me, she thinks. I don’t want to do it myself, so tell me, you bastard.

  And he does. “I can’t see it. Come closer.”

  Holly steps toward him, still holding the phone out. Two steps. Three. Twelve yards away, then ten. He’s squinting at the phone. Eight yards now, and see how reluctant I am?

  “Closer, Holly. My eyes are a little wonky for a few minutes after I change.”

  You’re a black liar, she thinks but takes another step, still holding the phone out. He’ll almost certainly take her with him when he goes down. If he goes down. And that’s okay.

  “You see it, right? It’s in the elevator. Taped to the roof. Just take it and g—”

  Even in her hyper-alert state, Holly barely sees George move. At one moment he’s standing outside the women’s, squinting at the picture on her phone. At the next, he’s got one arm around her waist and the other gripping her outstretched hand. He wasn’t kidding about being fast. Her phone tumbles to the floor as he drags her toward the elevator. Once inside, he’ll kill her and take the package taped to the ceiling. Then he’ll go into the bathroom and kill Barbara.

  That, at least, is his plan. Holly has another one.

  “What are you doing?” Holly cries—not because she doesn’t know, but because this is now the required line.

  He doesn’t answer, only pushes the call button. It doesn’t light, but Holly hears the elevator hum into life. It’s coming up. She will try to break free of him at the last second. Likewise he’ll try to break free of her when he understands what’s happening. She cannot let that happen.

  George’s narrow fox face breaks into a smile. “You know what, I think this is all going to work out just fi—”

  He stops because the elevator doesn’t. It passes the fifth floor—they can see a brief shutter of light from inside as it goes by—and keeps rising. His hands loosen in surprise. Only for a moment, but it’s long enough for Holly to break his grip and step back.

  What happens next takes no more than ten seconds, but in her current amped-up state, Holly sees it all.

  The door to the stairwell bangs open and Jerome lurches out. His eyes stare from a mask of caked blood. In his hands is the mop that was on the stairwell, the wooden shaft leveled. He sees George and charges at him, yelling as he comes: “Where’s Barbara? Where’s my sister?”

  George sweeps Holly aside. She strikes the wall with a bone-rattling thud. Black dots swarm across her vision. George reaches for the mop’s shaft and yanks it easily out of Jerome’s hands. He pulls it back, meaning to strike Jerome with it, but that is when the women’s room door bangs open.

  Barbara runs out with the pepper spray from her purse in her hand. George turns his head in time to catch a faceful. He screams and covers his eyes.

  The elevator reaches the eighth floor. The hum of the machinery stops.

  Jerome is going for George. Holly screams “Jerome, no!” and drives her shoulder into his midsection. He collides with his sister and the two of them hit the wall between the two bathroom doors.

  The elevator alarm goes off, an amplified bray that screams panic panic panic.

  George turns his red and streaming eyes toward the sound just as the elevator doors open. Not just the doors on five, but on all the floors. This is the glitch that caused the elevator to be shut down.

  Holly runs at George with her arms outstretched. Her scream of fury merges with the bellowing alarm. Her outstretched hands connect with his chest and she pushes him into the shaft. For a moment he seems to hang there, eyes and mouth wide with terror and surprise. The face starts to sag and change, but before George can become Ondowsky again (if that is what’s happening), he’s gone. Holly is hardly aware of the strong brown hand—Jerome’s—that grabs the back of her shirt and saves her from following George down the shaft.

  The outsider screams as he goes.

  Holly, who considers herself a pacifist, is savagely delighted by the sound.

  Before she can hear the thud of his body at the bottom, the elevator doors slide shut. On this floor and all the other floors. The alarm stops and the car starts down, on the way to the basement, its other terminal point. The three of them watch the brief flash of light from between the doors as the car passes five.

  “You did that,” Jerome says.

  “Damn right,” Holly says.

  17

  Barbara’s knees fold and she goes down in a half-faint. The can of pepper spray falls from her relaxing hand and rolls to a stop against the elevator doors.

  Jerome kneels beside his sister. Holly pushes him gently away and takes Barbara’s hand. She brushes back the sleeve of Barbara’s coat, but before she can even begin to take a pulse, Barbara is trying to sit up.

  “Who… what was he?”

  Holly shakes her head. “No one.” This might actually be the truth.

  “Is he gone? Holly, is he gone?”

  “He’s gone.”

  “Down the elevator shaft?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good. Good.” She starts to get up.

  “Just lie still for a minute, Barb. You only grayed out. It’s Jerome I’m worried about.”

  “I’m okay,” Jerome says. “Hard head. That was the TV guy, wasn’t it? Kozlowski, or whatever.”

  “Yes.” And no. “You look like you’ve lost at least a pint of blood, Mr. Hard Head. Look at me.”

  He looks at her. His pupils are the same size, and that’s good news.

  “Can you remember the name of your book?”

  He gives her an impatient look through his raccoon mask of congealing blood. “Black Owl: The Rise and Fall of an American Gangster.” He actually laughs. “Holly, if he’d scrambled my brains, I never could have remembered the code for the side door. Who was he?”

  “The man who blew up that school in Pennsylvania. Not that we’re ever going to tell anyone that. It would raise too many questions. Lower your head, Jerome.”

  “It hurts to move it,” he says. “My neck feels sprung.”

  “Do it anyway,” Barbara says.

  “Sis, don’t mean to get personal and all, but you don’t smell so good.”

  Holly says, “I’ve got this, Barbara. There’s a pair of pants and some tee-shirts in my closet. They’ll fit you, I think. Take something to change into. Clean yourself up in the bathroom.”

 
It’s clear that Barbara wants to do just that, but she lingers. “You sure you’re all right, J?”

  “Yes,” he says. “Go on.”

  Barbara goes down the hall to Finders Keepers. Holly feels the back of Jerome’s neck, finds no swelling, and tells him again to lower his head. She sees a minor laceration at the crown and a much deeper gash lower down, but the occipital bone must have caught (and withstood) the brunt of the blow. She thinks Jerome got lucky.

  She thinks they all did.

  “I need to clean myself up, too,” Jerome says, looking at the men’s room.

  “No, don’t do that. I probably shouldn’t have let Barbara do it, either, but I don’t want her meeting the cops with her… in her current state of disarray.”

  “I sense a woman with a plan,” Jerome says, then wraps his hands around himself. “God, I’m cold.”

  “That’s shock. You probably need a hot drink. I’d make you tea, but there’s no time for that.” She is struck by a sudden, horrible thought: if Jerome had taken the elevator, her whole plan—rickety thing that it was—could have fallen apart. “Why did you take the stairs?”

  “So he wouldn’t hear me coming. Even with the world’s worst headache, I knew where he’d be. You were the only one in the building.” He pauses. “Not Kozlowski. Ondowsky.”

  Barbara returns with the clean clothes bundled in her arms. She has begun crying again. “Holly… I saw him change. His head turned to jelly. It… it…”

  “What in God’s name is she talking about?” Jerome asks.

  “Never mind now. Maybe later.” Holly gives her a brief hug. “Clean up, change your clothes. And Barbara? Whatever it was, it’s dead now. Okay?”