Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  All these woods would one day be developed, bulldozed into oblivion. But in the three years they’d lived here that hadn’t happened yet—and Danny was getting to the age where soon it wouldn’t matter. In the meantime the woods and stream were part of the reason she’d wanted the place for him.

  Nature, she believed, was a teacher. She’d grown up on a farm and thought that most of what she knew about life she’d glimpsed there first and then had come to understand more fully later. Birth, death, sex, the renewal of the land, its fragility and its power, the chaos inside the order, the changes in people that came with the change of seasons. The implacability of the natural world and how important it was simply to accept that.

  She wanted all this for Danny.

  What she’d had. And what now sustained her.

  She knew that many women would have been bitter about a broken marriage that they hadn’t chosen to end. But she wasn’t. Not really. Unhappy, yes, of course—but there had never really been any bitterness. Love, she thought, was a contract you signed knowing that someday the signatures might fade. Richard had fallen out of love with her and gotten involved with someone else. A simple change of seasons. Hard as winter, but bearable and somehow even understandable. It was no longer necessary to the scheme of things that people mate for life. Reality was what it was and couldn’t be changed by her own distress in the face of it. She thought Richard’s choice of second partners was one he someday might live to regret. But that was his affair. She’d let him go.

  And she might have been bitter about Danny too. Instead she simply kept plugging away. Though the boy was far from easy. He’d never been easy. But since the breakup four years ago he always seemed, if not actually in trouble, always on the verge of it. Sliding grades. Clowning, fighting in class. Bad language around the girls at school. Once he’d been caught throwing stones at Charlie Haas on the playground. And of course there were the stealing and brushfire incidents.

  Beyond paying child-support his father was no help at all. Richard thought it was all typical boy behavior. It would pass, he said. She’d never been a boy and it was possible he was right.

  But Richard didn’t have to live with him.

  Didn’t have to endure the tantrums when he didn’t get his way or the hostile silences.

  She felt exhausted by him sometimes.

  What more could a kid get into?

  He could get into firearms, obviously.

  At age ten.

  Great. Just great.

  She wondered how he’d smuggled it home in the first place and then remembered the blanket she kept in back of the station wagon. He could have hidden a box of dynamite back there and she’d never have known it.

  Very cute, Danny. Very sneaky. Very neat.

  Her arms felt sticky with sweat, itchy from the pollen and dust in the air and the warm brush of leaves. She could barely breathe for all the damn pollen.

  But she was nearly there now.

  She could see its location in the distance to the right of the path, up a hill through a tall thin stand of birch.

  His clubhouse. His personal sanctuary.

  Aside from the occasional visit from Billy Berendt, inviolate to the world.

  Until today.

  Once, perhaps a hundred years ago, there had been a house here but it had long since burned to the ground—leaving only the root cellar—and whoever the owners were they’d never rebuilt it. He’d taken her up to look at it, all excited, shortly after they moved in and he first discovered it. At that time it was nothing but a hole in the ground five feet by eight feet wide and four feet deep, overgrown with weeds. But he’d cleared the weeds to expose the fieldstone walls and raw earth floor within and, with her permission, begged a pair of old double doors from her father’s barn, and he and Richard had spent one uncommonly ambitious afternoon painting the two doors green and sinking hinges into the walls and then attaching the doors so that they covered the hole and could be secured together by a combination padlock from the outside and a simple hook and eye from the inside.

  Total privacy.

  He called it his clubhouse.

  His private little gathering of one.

  She had always thought it was kind of sad. Possibly not even good for him.

  But Danny had always been a loner. She guessed that was his nature. He always seemed to tolerate the other neighborhood boys more than he actually befriended them—though for some reason they all seemed to like him well enough and were eager to get him out to play even though they were excluded from the clubhouse and were probably jealous that Danny’d discovered it first. For some reason that didn’t seem to matter. Maybe the place imparted status of some kind. She didn’t know. Boys, she thought.

  All she knew was that he spent a lot of time here. More than she’d have liked.

  She’d bought him a battery-powered lantern. Not much light got in through the doors, he said. A step-ladder for going up and down. Toys and books and games would disappear and then reappear in his room as well as mason jars from the kitchen and hammers and boxes of nails from the toolbox so she knew he was bringing them out here and then returning them according to some private agenda.

  She never pried.

  But now she was going to have to take all this away from him too for a while.

  She leaned on the rifle, catching her breath before starting in on the remaining trek up the slope of the hill. She heard bees buzzing in the grass beside her.

  Her sinuses were killing her.

  Warm wind ruffled her hair. She steeled herself for what was to come and headed on.

  The doors had weathered considerably since last she’d seen them. They could seriously use another paint job. She saw that the combination lock was gone. That meant he had it with him. He was inside.

  “Danny.”

  No answer. She listened. No movement either.

  “Danny. I know you’re in there.”

  She reached down for the door handles and rattled the doors.

  “Come out of here. Now.”

  She was starting to get seriously angry again. Good, she thought. You damn well should be angry.

  “I said now. Did you hear me?”

  “You’re not supposed to be here.”

  “What?”

  “I said you’re not supposed to be here. You never come out here.”

  “Well that’s too bad because I’m here now. Do I have to kick these doors apart or what?”

  She heard a click and the rattle of glass and then steps on the ladder. She heard him unfasten the hook and the door creak open.

  He slid through the doors, out of the dark below, and let the doors fall shut behind him. There was something furtive about him. Something she didn’t like. He knelt and took the padlock out of his pocket.

  “Leave it,” she said. “Stand up. Look at me.”

  He did as he was told. And saw the rifle. Glanced at it once and then turned away.

  “Where did you get this?”

  He didn’t answer. He just kept staring down the hill, arms folded across his skinny chest.

  “It’s your grampa’s, isn’t it?”

  No answer to that one either.

  “You stole it, didn’t you.”

  “I was going to put it back,” he said. Sullen. Caught. “Next time we went there.”

  “Oh, really? Were you going to put this back, too?”

  She took the bullet from her pocket and held it out to him.

  “Or were you planning to use it?”

  He sighed, staring down the hill.

  “You have more of these?”

  He nodded.

  “Where?”

  “My drawer.”

  “You’re in big trouble. You know that, don’t you.”

  He sighed again and then bent down with the padlock in his hand to secure the double doors.

  She remembered the way he’d opened them, just wide enough to slide through and no further.

  “Leave it,” she said. “
What’s down there?”

  “Just my stuff.”

  “What stuff? You have some more surprises for me?”

  “No.”

  “Open it up. I want to see.”

  “Mom . . . it’s my stuff.”

  “As of today you don’t have any stuff. Not until I say you do. Do you understand me? Now open it.”

  “Mom!”

  “Open it!”

  He stood there. He isn’t going to move, she thought.

  Why you little sonova . . .

  “God dammit!”

  She reached down and threw open one door and then the other and the first thing that hit her was the smell even with her sinus problem, the smell was rank and old and horrible beyond belief, and the second thing was the incredible clutter of rags and jars and buckets on the floor and the third was what she saw on the walls, hanging there from masonry nails pounded into the fieldstone, hung like decorations, like trophies, like the galleries she’d seen in castles in Scotland and England on her honeymoon and which were hunter’s galleries. A boy’s awful parody of that.

  His stuff . . .

  She gagged and put her hand to her mouth and dropped the bullet. She stooped reflexively to pick it up again.

  She looked at him, hoping that her knees wouldn’t buckle.

  Hoping crazily in a way that he wouldn’t even be there.

  He was staring directly at her. The first time since he’d climbed out of the root cellar. The expression on his face was neutral but the look in his eyes was not. The eyes were examining her coldly, intent on her reaction.

  As perhaps they had examined coldly what was down below.

  Adult eyes. But not the eyes of any adult she’d ever seen or ever dreamt to see.

  Was this her son?

  For a moment she felt a stunning terror of him. Of this little boy who didn’t even weigh ninety pounds yet. Who still balked at showering every day and washing his hair on schedule. It was a terror that skittered suddenly inside her and seemed to awaken all her memories of him at once, memories like claps of thunder—the stealing, the stone-throwing, the fire, the dark half-hidden glances, the bullying tantrums—terror that suddenly gave pattern to all this, all the interstices of understanding and seeing suddenly closing together for her to compose a black seamless wall of events and behavior which defined him.

  And she knew.

  She looked into his eyes and saw what he was.

  And knew what he would become.

  She reeled under the weight of it. Ten years of life.

  When had it begun? At the breast?

  In the womb?

  She needed to know the whole of it, needed to embrace the horror of this as she had always needed his embrace. However cold. However distant.

  She had always needed to embrace her son.

  “You have a light . . . down there?” she murmured.

  He nodded.

  Her voice faltered. Then, “Go turn it on,” she said.

  He preceded her down the ladder and switched on the lantern. The room was suddenly very bright.

  She stood in his chamber and looked at the walls.

  The box turtle—had he smuggled it here from her father’s house too or was this a different one and how many others? What about before he found the clubhouse? What about . . . ? The turtle was nailed to the wall by its feet. Its shriveled head lolled back onto its greying shell. The frogs were impaled by a single nail through roughly the center of their bodies and there were six of them. Some belly-up, some not. She saw a pair of withered garter snakes, three crayfish. And a salamander.

  Like the turtle the cats were nailed through all fours. He had eviscerated both of them and looped their entrails around them and nailed the entrails to the wall at intervals so that the cats were at the center of a kind of crude bull’s eye. She saw that he had strangled them with some sort of rope or twine. He had nearly taken off the head of the larger one in doing so. Its black-and-white fur was caked with old dried blood.

  The other was just a kitten.

  A tabby.

  She was aware of him watching her.

  She was aware too of the tears in her eyes and knew what he didn’t know—that the tears were for her. Not him. Not this time. She wiped them away.

  She had heard of people like this. Read about them. Saw them on the evening news. It seemed they were everywhere these days.

  She knew what they were. And what they were not.

  She had not expected her son to be one of them.

  Her son was ten. Only ten. She saw all the years of his life ahead of him. So many years.

  So much death to come.

  Treatment, she thought. He needs treatment. He needs help.

  But they did not respond to treatment.

  “I’m going back up,” she murmured. Her voice sounded flat and strange to her and she wondered if it did to him and then wondered if it was the fieldstone walls and earthen floor that made her voice sound the way it did or if it was something inside her, some seachange in her that was expressing itself now in this new strange voice.

  She thought, implacable.

  She moved up the stepladder and stepped out into the field and heard him snap off the lantern below as she threw the bolt on the rifle and inserted the bullet into the chamber. He looked up at her once just as he was near the top and she saw that no, there was nothing to save in his nature and she fired into his left eye and he fell back into the root cellar. She closed the double doors.

  She would have to return the rifle to her father’s. She would have to distract him somehow and put it back in his workshop where it belonged.

  And then she would call . . . whoever.

  Another missing boy.

  Sooner or later they’d find him, the combination padlock in his pocket and they’d wonder. Who would do such a thing?

  Such things.

  Those things on the walls.

  My God.

  How had it happened?

  It was a question she would ask herself, she thought, for a great many seasons after, as spring plunged into sweltering summer, as fall turned to winter again and the coldness of heart and mind set in for its long terrible duration.

  The Box

  “What’s in the box?” my son said.

  “Danny,” I said, “Leave the man alone.”

  It was two Sundays before Christmas and the Stamford local was packed—shoppers lined the aisles and we were lucky to have found seats. The man sat facing my daughters Clarissa and Jenny and me, the three of us squeezed together across from him and Danny in the seat beside him.

  I could understand my son’s curiosity. The man was holding the red square gift box in his lap as though afraid that the Harrison stop, coming up next, might jolt it from his grasp. He’d been clutching it that way for three stops now—since he got on.

  He was tall, perhaps six feet or more and maybe twenty pounds overweight and he was perspiring heavily despite the cold dry air rushing over us each time the train’s double doors opened behind our backs. He had a black walrus mustache and sparse thinning hair and wore a tan Burbury raincoat that had not been new for many years now over a rumpled grey business suit. I judged the pant-legs to be an inch too short for him. The socks were grey nylon, a much lighter shade than the suit, and the elastic in the left one was shot so that it bunched up over his ankle like the skin of one of those ugly pug-nosed pedigree dogs that are so trendy nowadays. The man smiled at Danny and looked down at the box, shiny red paper over cardboard about two feet square.

  “Present,” he said. Looking not at Danny but at me.

  His voice had the wet phlegmy sound of a heavy smoker. Or maybe he had a cold.