If It Bleeds

by Stephen King

  Drew read a couple of chapters, then went to bed, hoping his cold would be better in the morning and also hoping he wouldn’t have a cough syrup hangover. His sleep was uneasy and dream-haunted. He couldn’t remember much of those dreams the next morning. Only that in one of them he had been in a seemingly endless hallway lined with doors on both sides. One of them, he felt sure, led to a way out, but he couldn’t decide which one to try, and before he could pick one, he woke up to a cold, clear morning, a full bladder, and aching joints. He made his way to the bathroom at the end of the gallery, cursing Roy DeWitt and his besnotted bandanna.

  17

  His fever was still there, but it seemed to be lower, and the combination of Goody’s Headache Powder and Dr. King’s helped with his other symptoms. The work went pretty well, only ten pages instead of eighteen, but still amazing for him. It was true that he had to pause every now and then, looking for the right word or phrase, but he chalked that up to the infection running around in his body. And those words and phrases always came after a few seconds, clicking neatly into place.

  The story was getting good. Sheriff Jim Averill had the killer in jail, but the gun thugs had showed up on an unscheduled train, a midnight special paid for by Andy Prescott’s rich rancher daddy, and now they were laying siege to the town. Unlike Village, this book was more about plot than character and situation. That had worried Drew a little to begin with; as a teacher and reader (they weren’t the same, but surely first cousins) he had a tendency to concentrate on theme, language, and symbolism rather than story, but the pieces also seemed to be clicking into place, almost of their own accord. Best of all, there was a strange bond beginning to form between Averill and the Prescott kid, which gave his story a resonance as unexpected as that midnight train.

  Instead of going for an afternoon walk, he turned on the TV and after a lengthy hunt through the DirecTV onscreen guide, found the Weather Channel. Having access to such a bewildering array of video input up here in the williwags might have amused him on another day, but not on this one. His long session at the laptop had left him wrung out, almost hollowed out, instead of energized. Why in God’s name had he shaken DeWitt’s hand? Common politeness, of course, and completely understandable, but why in God’s name hadn’t he washed afterwards?

  Been through all that, he thought.

  Yes, and here it was again, gnawing away. It sort of reminded him of his catastrophic last try at novel-writing, when he would lie awake long after Lucy had gone to sleep, mentally deconstructing and reconstructing the few paragraphs he’d managed that day, picking at the work until it bled.

  Stop. That’s the past. This is now. Watch the goddam weather report.

  But it wasn’t a report; the Weather Channel would never be so minimalist. This was a fucking opera of doom and gloom. Drew hadn’t been able to understand his wife’s love affair with the Weather Channel, which seemed populated solely by meteorological geeks. As if to underline this, they now gave names to even non-hurricane storms. The one the store clerk had warned him about, the one his wife was so worried about, had been dubbed Pierre. Drew could not conceive of a stupider name for a storm. It was swooping down from Saskatchewan on a northeast track (which made the woman with the lip stud full of shit, it was a nor’easter) that would bring it to TR-90 either tomorrow afternoon or evening. It was packing forty-mile-an-hour sustained winds, with gusts up to sixty-five.

  “You might think that doesn’t sound too bad,” said the current weather geek, a young man with a fashionable beard scruff that made Drew’s eyes hurt. Mr. Scruffy was a poet of the Pierre Apocalypse, not quite speaking in iambic pentameter, but close. “What you need to remember, though, is that temperatures are going to fall radically when this front comes through, I mean they’re gonna drop off the table. Rain could turn to sleet, and you drivers up there in northern New England can’t discount the possibility of black ice.”

  Maybe I should go home, Drew thought.

  But it was no longer just the book that was keeping him. The idea of that long drive out Shithouse Road feeling as drained as he did today made him even more tired. And when he finally made it to something approximating civilization, was he supposed to go tooling down I-95 sipping away at alcohol-laced cold medicine?

  “The major thing, though,” the scruffy weather geek was saying, “is that this baby is going to meet a ridge of high pressure coming in from east—a very unusual phenomenon. That means our friends north of Boston could be in for what the old Yankees called a three-day blow.”

  Blow on this, Drew thought, and grabbed his crotch.

  Later, after an unsuccessful try at napping—all he did was toss and turn—Lucy called. “Listen to me, Mister.” He hated when she called him that, it was like fingers dragged down a blackboard. “The forecast is only getting worse. You need to come home.”

  “Lucy, it’s a storm, what my Pop used to call a cap of wind. Not nuclear war.”

  “You need to come home while you still can.”

  He had had enough of this, and enough of her. “No. I need to be here.”

  “You’re a fool,” she said. Then, for the first time he could remember, she hung up on him.

  18

  Drew turned on the Weather Channel as soon as he got up the following morning, thinking As a dog returneth to its vomit, so a fool repeateth his folly.

  He was hoping to hear that Autumn Storm Pierre had changed course. It had not. Nor had his cold changed course. It didn’t seem worse, but it didn’t seem better, either. He called Lucy and got her voicemail. Possibly she was running errands; possibly she just didn’t want to talk with him. That was okay with Drew either way. She was pissed at him, but she would get over it; no one trashed fifteen years of marriage over a storm, did they? Especially not one named Pierre.

  Drew scrambled a couple of eggs and managed to eat half of them before his stomach warned him that stuffing down more might lead to a forcible ejection. He scraped his plate into the garbage, sat down in front of the laptop, and called up the current document (BITTER RIVER #3). He scrolled to where he had left off, looked at the white space beneath the blinking cursor, and started to fill it. The work went all right for the first hour or so, and then the trouble began. It started with the rocking chairs Sheriff Averill and his three deputies were meant to sit in outside the Bitter River jail.

  They had to be sitting out front, in full view of the townsfolk and Dick Prescott’s gun thugs, because that was the basis of the clever plan Averill had hatched to get Prescott’s son out of town under the very noses of the hard men who were supposed to keep it from happening. The lawmen had to be seen, especially the deputy named Cal Hunt, who happened to be about the same height and build as the Prescott boy.

  Hunt was wearing a colorful Mexican serape and a ten-gallon hat decorated with silver conchos. The hat’s extravagant brim obscured his face. That was important. The serape and hat weren’t Deputy Hunt’s; he said he felt like a fool in a hat like that. Sheriff Averill didn’t care. He wanted Prescott’s men to be looking at the clothes, and not the man inside them.

  All fine. Good storytelling. Then the trouble came.

  “All right,” Sheriff Averill told his deputies. “It’s time we took a little night air. Be seen by whoever wants to look at us. Hank, bring that jug. I want to be sure those boys on the rooftops get a good look at the dumb sheriff getting drunk with his even dumber deputies.”

  “Do I have to wear this hat?” Cal Hunt almost moaned. “I’ll never live it down!”

  “What you ought to be concerned about is living through the night,” Averill said. “Now come on. Let’s just get these rocking chairs outside and

  That was where Drew stopped, transfixed by the image of the tiny Bitter River sheriff’s office containing three rocking chairs. No, four rocking chairs, because you had to add one for Averill himself. That was a lot more absurd than the ten-gallon, face-obscuring Stetson Cal Hunt was wearing, and not only because four rockers would fill the whole d
amn room. The whole idea of rocking chairs was antithetical to law enforcement, even in a small western town like Bitter River. People would laugh. Drew deleted most of the sentence and looked at what was left.

  Let’s just get these

  These what? Chairs? Would the sheriff’s office even have four chairs? It seemed unlikely. “Not like there’s a fucking waiting room,” Drew said, and wiped his forehead. “Not in a—” A sneeze surprised him and he let go before he could cover his mouth, spattering the laptop’s screen with a fine spray of spittle, distorting the words.

  “Fuck! Goddam fuck!”

  He grabbed for tissues to wipe the screen, but the Kleenex box was empty. He got a dishtowel instead, and when he’d finished cleaning the screen, he thought of how much the soggy dishtowel looked like Roy DeWitt’s bandanna. His besnotted bandanna.

  Let’s just get these

  Was his fever worse? Drew didn’t want to believe that, wanted to believe the growing heat he felt (plus the increased throbbing in his head) was just the pressure of trying to solve this idiotic rocking chair problem so he could move on, but it certainly seemed like—

  This time he managed to turn aside before the sneezing started. Not just one this time but half a dozen. He seemed to feel his sinuses bulging with each one. Like overinflated tires. His throat was throbbing, and so was his ear.

  Let’s just get these

  It came to him then. A bench! There might be a bench in the sheriff’s office where people could sit while they waited to do their little bits of business. He grinned and gave himself a thumbs up. Sick or not, the pieces were still falling into place, and was that really surprising? Creativity often seemed to run on its own clean circuit, regardless of the body’s ills. Flannery O’Connor had lupus. Stanley Elkin had multiple sclerosis. Fyodor Dostoyevsky had epilepsy, and Octavia Butler suffered from dyslexia. What was a lousy cold, maybe even the flu, compared to things like that? He could work through this. The bench proved it, the bench was genius.

  “Let’s just get this bench outside and have a few drinks.”

  “But we’re not really gonna drink, are we, Sheriff?” Jep Leonard asked. The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the brightest bulb in the

  Brightest bulb in the chandelier? God no, that was an anachronism. Or was it? The bulb part for sure, no lightbulbs in the 1880s, but there were chandeliers back then, of course there were. There was one in the saloon! If he’d had an Internet connection he could have looked at any number of old-time examples of them, but he didn’t. Just two hundred channels of TV, most of it total junk.

  Better to use a different metaphor. If it even was a metaphor; Drew wasn’t completely sure. Maybe it was just a comparative… comparative something. No, it was a metaphor. He was sure of it. Almost.

  Never mind, that wasn’t the point and this wasn’t a classroom exercise, it was a book, it was his book, so stick to the writing. Eyes on the prize.

  Not the ripest melon in the patch? Not the fastest horse in the race? No, those were awful, but—

  Then he got it. Magic! He bent and typed rapidly.

  The plan had been explained to him carefully, but Jep was not exactly the smartest kid in the classroom.

  Satisfied (well, relatively satisfied), Drew got up, had a knock of Dr. King’s, then chased it with a glass of water to wash the taste out of his mouth: a slimy mixture of snot and cold medicine.

  This is like before. This is like what happened with Village.

  He could tell himself that wasn’t true, that this time was entirely different, that the clean circuit wasn’t so clean after all because he was running a fever, a pretty high one from the way it felt, and it was all because he’d handled that bandanna.

  No you didn’t, you handled his hand. You handled the hand that handled the bandanna.

  “Handled the hand that handled the bandanna, right.”

  He turned on the cold tap and splashed his face. That made him feel a little better. He mixed Goody’s Headache Powder with more water, drank it off, then went to the door and threw it open. He felt quite sure that Moose Mom would be there, so sure that for a moment (thank you, fever) he actually thought he did see her over there by the equipment shed, but it was only shadows moving in a slight breeze.

  He took a number of deep breaths. In goes the good air, out goes the bad, when I shook his hand I must have been mad.

  Drew went back inside and sat down at the laptop. Pushing on seemed like a bad idea, but not pushing on seemed even worse. So he began to write, trying to recapture the wind that had filled his sails and brought him this far. At first it seemed to be working, but by lunchtime (not that he had any interest in eating) his interior sails had gone slack. Probably it was being sick, but it was still too much like before.

  I seem to be losing my words.

  That was what he’d told Lucy, what he’d told Al Stamper, but that wasn’t the truth; it was just what he could give them so they could dismiss it as writer’s block, something he would eventually find his way through. Or it might dissolve on its own. In truth, it was the opposite. It was having too many words. Was it a copse or a grove? Was it flaring or glaring? Or maybe staring? Was a character sunken eyed or hollow-eyed? Oh, and if hollow-eyed was hyphenated, what about sunken eyed?

  He shut down at one o’clock. He had written two pages, and the feeling that he was reverting to the nervous and neurotic man who’d almost burned down his house three years ago was getting harder to dismiss. He could tell himself to let go of the small stuff like rocking chairs versus bench, to let the story carry him, but when he looked at the screen, every word there seemed wrong. Every word seemed to have a better one hiding behind it, just out of sight.

  Was it possible that he was coming down with Alzheimer’s? Could that be it?

  “Don’t be dumb,” he said, and was dismayed at how nasal he sounded. Also hoarse. Pretty soon he’d lose his voice entirely. Not that there was anyone out here to talk to except himself.

  Get your ass home. You’ve got a wife and two fine kids to talk to.

  But if he did that, he would lose the book. He knew that as well as he knew his own name. After four or five days, when he was back in Falmouth and feeling better, he would open the Bitter River documents and the prose there would look like something someone else had written, an alien story he would have no idea how to finish. Leaving now would be like throwing away a precious gift, one that might never be given again.

  Had to be a man about it, and it went pneumonia, Roy DeWitt’s daughter had said, the subtext being just another damn fool. And was he going to do the same?

  The lady or the tiger. The book or your life. Was the choice really that stark and melodramatic? Surely not, but he surely felt like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag, there was no doubt about that.

  Nap. I need a nap When I wake up, I’ll be able to decide.

  So he took another knock of Dr. King’s Magic Elixir—or whatever it was called—and climbed the stairs to the bedroom he and Lucy had shared on other trips out here. He went to sleep, and when he woke up, the rain and wind had arrived and the choice was made for him. He had a call to make. While he still could.

  19

  “Hey, honey, it’s me. I’m sorry I pissed you off. Really.”

  She ignored this completely. “It doesn’t sound like allergies to me, Mister. It sounds like you’re sick.”

  “It’s just a cold.” He cleared his throat, or tried to. “A pretty bad one, I guess.”

  The throat-clearing provoked coughing. He covered the mouthpiece of the old-fashioned phone, but he supposed she heard it anyway. The wind gusted, rain slapped against the windows, and the lights flickered.

  “So now what? You just hole up?”

  “I think I have to,” he said, then rushed on. “It’s not the book, not now. I’d come back if I thought it was safe, but that storm is here already. The lights just flickered. I’m going to lose the power and the phone before dark, practic
ally guaranteed. Here I’ll pause so you can say I told you so.”

  “I told you so,” she said. “And now that we’ve got that out of the way, how bad are you?”

  “Not that bad,” he said, which was a far bigger lie than telling her the satellite dish didn’t work. He thought he was quite bad indeed, but if he said that, it was hard to gauge how she might react. Would she call the Presque Isle cops and request a rescue? Even in his current condition, that seemed like an overreaction. Not to mention embarrassing.

  “I hate this, Drew. I hate you being up there and cut off. Are you sure you can’t drive out?”

  “I might have been able to earlier, but I took some cold medicine before I laid down for a nap and overslept. Now I don’t dare chance it. There are still washouts and plugged culverts from last winter. A hard rain like this is apt to put long stretches of the road underwater. The Suburban might make it, but if it didn’t, I could be stranded six miles from the cabin and nine miles from the Big 90.”

  There was a pause, and in it Drew fancied he could hear what she was thinking: Had to be a man about it, didn’t you, just another damn fool. Because sometimes I told you so was just not enough.

  The wind gusted and the lights flickered again. (Or maybe they stuttered.) The phone gave a cicada buzz, then cleared.

  “Drew? Are you still there?”

  “I’m here.”

  “The phone made a funny sound.”

  “I heard it.”

  “You have food?”

  “Plenty.” Not that he felt like eating.

  She sighed. “Then hunker down. Call me tonight if the phone still works.”

  “I will. And when the weather breaks, I’ll come home.”

  “Not if there are trees down, you won’t. Not until somebody decides to come in and clear the road.”