Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  Believe it or not, we were happy.

  But that night I lay in bed and thought about Danny in the hospital the next day and then for some reason about the whispered conversation I’d overheard that seemed so long ago and then about the man with the box and the day it had all begun. I felt like a fool, like somebody who was awakened from a long confused and confusing dream.

  I suddenly had to know what Danny knew.

  I got up and went to his room and shook him gently from his sleep.

  I asked him if he remembered that day on the train and the man with the box and then looking into the box and he said that yes he did and then I asked him what was in it.

  “Nothing,” he said.

  “Really nothing? You mean it was actually empty?” He nodded.

  “But didn’t he . . . I remember him telling us it was a present.”

  He nodded again. I still didn’t get it. It made no sense to me.

  “So you mean it was some kind of joke or something? He was playing some kind of joke on somebody?”

  “I don’t know. It was just . . . the box was empty.”

  He looked at me as though it was impossible for him to understand why I didn’t understand. Empty was empty. That was that.

  I let him sleep. For his last night, in his own room.

  I told you that things happened rapidly after that and they did, although it hardly seemed so at the time. Three weeks later my son smiled at me sweetly and slipped into a coma and died in just under thirty-two hours. It was unusual, I was told, for the IV not to have sustained a boy his age but sometimes it happened. By then the twins had beds two doors down the hall. Clarissa went on February 3rd and Jenny on February 5th.

  My wife, Susan, lingered until the 27th.

  And through all of this, through all these weeks now, going back and forth to the hospital each day, working when I was and am able and graciously being granted time off whenever I can’t, riding into the City from Rye and from the City back to Rye again alone on the train, I look for him. I look through every car. I walk back and forth in case he should get on one stop sooner or one stop later. I don’t want to miss him. I’m losing weight.

  Oh, I’m eating. Not as well as I should be I suppose but I’m eating.

  But I need to find him. To know what my son knew and then passed on to the others. I’m sure that the girls knew, that he passed it on to them that night in the bedroom—some terrible knowledge, some awful peace. And I think somehow, perhaps by being so very much closer to all of my children than I was ever capable of being, that Susan knew too. I’m convinced it’s so.

  I’m convinced that it was my essential loneliness that set me apart and saved me, and now of course which haunts me, makes me wander through dark corridors of commuter trains waiting for a glimpse of him—him and his damnable present, his gift, his box.

  I want to know. It’s the only way I can get close to them.

  I want to see. I have to see.

  I’m hungry.

  For Neal McPheeters

  Mail Order

  It arrived in a plain brown bubble-wrap package. No return address. Nice and private.

  Whoever invented bubble-wrap, Howard thought, must be worth a fortune.

  He made a mental note to check it. Just for amusement’s sake. It was far too late for any investing.

  The cover art was strictly cheap, a black and white drawing of some girl screaming bloody murder while shadowy male figures loomed around her—one of them raising a badly executed piece of cutlery in what was vaguely supposed to be her direction.

  The video’s title was the only word on the box, in big block letters across the front.

  Offed.

  There was nothing on the back at all.

  No credits. No copyright.

  Nothing.

  That was when his hands began to shake—turning over the box, seeing nothing.

  Because this just might be . . .

  . . . the honest-to-God real thing.

  After all these years.

  He slipped the cassette out of the box and into the VCR and hit the power button. Then Play. Sat back in his big brown leather custom-made Lazy-Boy in his oak and mahogany study and watched empty black leader tape roll hissing by.

  There was an awful lot of leader. Howard didn’t mind.

  Anticipation was half the fun of it.

  He’d waited six and a half weeks since sending his check to the Los Angeles address listed in Video Nasties.

  And maybe half his life for this tape.

  If it was what it purported to be.

  He’d been buying, collecting since college—and that was ten years ago now—starting with the classics like Blood Feast, Last House on the Left, Mark of the Devil, and good old Chainsaw, then graduating to lesser-known back-shelf items like Make Them Die Slowly and Faces of Death, both of which included real life footage of maiming, torture, and killing by the way, though mostly what were killed were only animals. And finally, to the truly obscure stuff you could only find in fanzines like The Film Threat Video Guide and Video Nasties—he subscribed to both. Movies with titles like Gorgasm, Twisted Tissue and—his favorite—Shut Up and Suffer.

  By now he had a closetful. Literally. Right over here behind him.

  It was one of the benefits of investing for a living. You had the cash and the modem hooked up to Wall Street. You just stayed here in your suite and used the phone. You had privacy and no secretarial snooping. You remained in the shadows. And in the shadows was right where he liked it. Investing through an investor who invested through investors sometimes. As though he didn’t exist at all in a way—unless he wanted to.

  And made money like there was no tomorrow.

  The paper-trail always led here, no matter how he did it. With checks attached. And he was able to retain his treasured privacy. Which, he reflected, was probably linked to this hobby of his somehow. Way back when.

  But he certainly wasn’t ashamed of it.

  He liked gore. He liked to hear the screams.

  So what.

  He was . . . different.

  So what.

  Outside the New York traffic snarled, bleating up at him through the light spring rain.

  The TV screen flickered.

  The word Offed appeared and disappeared again.

  There were no titles.

  He was aware of the sweat beading on his upper lip, of the tremor purring through his body. It was always the same.

  He leaned forward.

  Surprisingly, the print was wonderful.

  35mm, he thought. Film originally. Not video. And no grain. Good and clear.

  And they got down to it too. No preliminaries. Just a medium shot of a motel room, Anywhere USA but not too terribly shabby, bed and mirrored bureau and a bathroom off left—and a girl being led through a door, her back to the Tricky Dick Nixon masks, teeshirts and jeans, one massive belly outdoing the next for gutspill.

  The girl looked stoned, drugged-sort-of drifting over to the bed, head lolling, with one man on each arm practically holding her upright while the third disappeared out of frame, presumably to check the camera.

  She was blonde and slim, dressed conservatively, wearing a navy blue skirt and a trim white blouse, looking like a stewardess or something, with good hips and very good legs—and for now that was all he could see. Her back was still to him.

  He was already wishing for a close-up.

  Howard didn’t know why but he had the feeling the girl was going to be a looker.

  They led her to the far side of the bed and sat her down. She slumped to the pillow immediately, buried her head in it while one of the bruisers reached around in front of her and unbuttoned her blouse, laughing—the soundtrack muddy, garbled, not nearly as good as the picture—saying something to his buddy while he tugged the blouse out of her skirtwaist and then lifted it off first one arm and then the other.

  She wore a sheer white silk bra and her breasts were modest and pointed. Just the wa
y he liked them.

  Tricky Dick One turned her over on her belly so Dickie Two could get at the zipper in the back of her skirt. The girl was wearing heels. He took them off slowly, one by one, and then unzipped the skirt, lifted her a little from the waist and pulled it off her. He patted her behind and laughed. Then drew her slip down over her legs.

  Her panties were cut high, to the hip.

  For the first time the girl resisted slightly, waving at him as though shooing away an annoying pet, a cat or a dog bothering her on the bed.

  “Nooo,” she mumbled.

  “Yeees,” he laughed.

  And turned her over.

  As he did, her face came fully into frame for the very first time.

  And Howard froze.

  He knew her!

  He was ninety-nine percent sure he did! It had been just a glimpse God knows, she was turned away again, but now that he looked at her even the body looked familiar. The legs, the breasts, the willowy arms, the short blond hair.

  It had been a hell of a long time and he couldn’t even remember her first name at first, Ella or Etta—no, Greta—of course! He’d dated her back in college for a few months and finally dumped her after all kinds of messy shit between them and he remembered that at the time she had wanted to be . . .

  (. . . my God . . .)

  . . . she’d wanted to be . . .

  . . . an actress.

  Jesus! My God, he remembered her now. Remembered her perfectly. They’d seen a revival of Night of the Living Dead together. Greta liked this stuff too. It was one thing they had in common. Spent God knows how many nights curled up on his Boston sofa watching exactly this sort of slasher, body-count stuff—simulated, of course.

  And now they were . . .

  Jesus Christ!

  And now they were going to do her!

  Right in front of him!

  Or were they?

  He supposed it depended entirely on whether the film actually delivered what the ad had promised him.

  Bored with the same-old-same-old?

  Care to experience the real thing?

  Try our video! We guarantee—

  OFFED delivers! You’ll never

  need another violence fix again

  in your life, Bunky. We swear it!

  On our mothers’ graves!

  $39.95

  What if it did?

  He pushed rewind. Reran the scene. Reran it again. The girl’s head, turning.

  It sure as hell looked like Greta.

  He suddenly, desperately, needed a drink.

  He pushed pause. The image froze and flickered, shot with horizontal lines.

  He walked to the bar and poured himself a scotch. Downed it and poured himself another.

  He thought about her.

  She’d liked her sex hard, no doubt about that. Though Jesus, never this hard. He used to kid her that she wore bite-marks the way some women wore jewelry.

  And she was kinky. He’d even taped a few things on his own now-primitive camcorder with her, nothing too heavy, and she’d stolen the tapes eventually.

  Too bad.

  The woman had been damned attractive and an absolute slugger in bed but there was an edge to her he’d never really cared for. Something rough-cut and slightly lower-class in the Jersey accent, in her off-the-rack taste in clothing.

  He doubted she’d ever make it in the movies.

  And he knew from day one that it wasn’t going to last between them.

  Of course he hadn’t told her that. Not with her crawling all over his dick the way she was, willing to try anything for him—including whips and chains and clips and knives and leather, the whole magilla. No way was he going to tell her that until he had to.

  Until something more interesting came along.

  And then one day it had come along.

  Funny. He couldn’t remember her name either.

  In had been ugly, though, he remembered that. The end of the thing with Greta. She’d screamed and whined and pleaded. Showed up drunk a couple of times, pounding on his door. Begging.

  But the cancer was already finishing his father by then and he knew it was impossible, that he was going to have a lot of money soon and he knew she wasn’t up to it. Not with that accent, those tastes.

  So it was bye-bye Greta.

  Maybe for real now.

  Jesus.

  He finished the scotch, poured himself another glass just for sipping purposes and returned to his chair.

  His nerves were steadier. The scotch expanding inside him. He reached for the remote and pressed play.

  The film whirred into motion.

  And the knives were out.

  Knife, actually. One guy with a long, serrated kitchen knife and the other pulling a pair of metal garden clippers out of his back pocket, the kind you used to trim back branches, holding them up for the camera.

  Which now lurched forward a pace or two. Evidently there was no zoom lens and Tricky Dick Three was carrying it nearer to the bed on its tripod.

  It was still no closeup, but better.

  The woman who still looked ninety-nine percent like Greta moaned but did nothing to resist as the guy with the knife snipped away the shoulder-straps to her bra and then sawed through the center. Her breasts shuddered free. The nipples were pale pink, large, blending away into the paler breast flesh. Just like Greta’s.

  The man cut through the waistband of her panties and pulled them out from under her.

  Like Greta, a real blonde.

  Howard gulped his scotch. The goddamn movie just wasn’t made for sipping.

  The whole idea that this was Greta he was watching—that it even could be Greta—scared the bloody shit out of him. There was something about it so fucking ironic and infinitely more perverse than he’d ever dreamed—maybe even more than he’d ever wanted to dream—that you had to wonder. All these gruesome images. All these years collecting this stuff. All these years searching, looking for . . . what?

  Death, obviously.

  It had to be. The experience of violent death in which he was both observer and yes, participant. Participant in that he’d bought and paid for this particular tape, he’d sort of even financed the thing in a way. Allowed it to be. He and others like him.

  Okay, he’d done it a thousand times.

  But now it was someone he knew, someone he’d screwed every which way to Sunday who was going to get seriously hurt here, and you had to wonder.

  It was just possible he’d bitten off more than he could chew.

  He was about to find out. In spades.

  Because Dickie Number Three was lurching forward with the camera again, coming closer, as Dickie Number Two put the clippers back in the pocket of his greasy jeans and grabbed her by both her arms—unfortunately standing in front of her, the asshole—pulled them up over her head and held the wrists pinned to the bed.

  Her struggles were feeble, the drug still working.

  Until Dickie Number One leaned over with the sharp serrated knife and carved an X on her left breast, the center of the X the center of her nipple, blood pooling up and oozing down her side as she screamed and struggled in earnest, adrenalin kicking in and beating hell out of the sedative so that Dickie Three had come out from behind the camera to grab her legs and hold them while Dickie One carved the right side of her the same as he’d done the left.

  And then it was all three of them.

  Dickie Two working on her fingers and toes with the clippers, snipping at the joints, joints popping off all over the bed, Dickie One finding imaginative gourmet ways to carve living flesh with a serrated knife and Dickie Three generally relegated to holding down whatever part of her they were busy on at the moment.

  While Howard stared open-mouthed and trembling. Twitching. Scotch forgotten. Bolted to his chair.

  For twenty-five minutes of this.

  Until the coup de grace.

  At which point he stood up.