Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  The buzzer sounded. She brought him the steaming mug. She set it down in front of him and then walked to the living room and took a slim black dog-eared paperback off the bookshelves and brought it back with her into the kitchen. She flipped through it for a moment and found what she wanted and then sat down again.

  “You mind doing some reading?”

  “Not at all.”

  She held it out to him.

  “Pages eighty-two to ninety-four, where the scene breaks. My first novel. It made me some money and it made my reputation. Or maybe I should say notoriety.”

  She watched him slip the elastic band into his jacket pocket and settle back in the chair and begin reading and saw that he did not break the binding—no more than it was already broken, the book having been lent and lent again. So in fact he was a reader. He knew how to treat a paperback.

  He was also fast. By the time she’d refreshed her own mug he was almost through.

  “You are good,” he said, smiling, closing the book. “And you are brutal. Unusual for a woman.”

  “Try some of Joyce Carol Oates. Try Susanna Brown. It can be a brutal world, I figure. Anyhow the scene you’ve just read and a few other scenes got the publisher so upset he damn near fired the editor. Distributors were furious. So they decided to bury it, pretend it never happened. Pulled all the advertising, window posters, point-of-purchase displays, all that sort of thing—which were already set in motion by the way—and never put it into a second printing. This despite the fact that the book made money for them. That it sold a quarter-million copies, by word of mouth alone. Now I’m told it’s a collector’s item.”

  He handed her the book and sat back in his chair and looked at her.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “You’re thinking this is all very interesting and she’s paid me a good retainer and flown me out here but now let’s cut to the chase please. Let’s get on with it.”

  He nodded. “Something like that. May I?”

  He reached for another cigarette, lit it and stared at her through the smoke. The stare did not make her uncomfortable.

  “I guess the question in my mind,” he said, “is who exactly is it? Who do you want me to get rid of? Your publisher? Your editor? Who’s the target?”

  She almost laughed. She did smile. There were so many publishers, so many editors. So many distributors for that matter. To hire him to get all of them would take millions.

  “Me,” she said. “I’m the target.”

  If this surprised him she couldn’t see it. He just sat there calmly smoking, watching her. She sighed.

  “The disease always strikes me as so damn banal. Bone cancer. I smoke two and half packs a day. It should have been lung cancer at least. Something that has something to do with me, something to do with the way I live. But I’m assured it will be painful enough.”

  “So you don’t want to wait.”

  “No, I don’t want to wait. I do want something else though.”

  “Which would be what.”

  “I want it done a certain way. In fact you’ve just read the way I want it done.”

  And now she saw that she had managed to surprise him.

  “You mean an approximation. Some kind of staging.”

  “No. I want it done as closely as possible to the scene you just read. You see why I told you before that without knowing me you’d probably refuse the contract? But I’m not crazy and I’m not some kind of masochist. Someone is going to notice if you do it this way. Any other way and I’m just one more dead writer. But if you do it this way someone is going to refer it back to the book. Plenty of people will, I think. And the book is going to go back into print, big-time. In fact if you do it right they’ll all go back into print. I know the way this works.”

  He snubbed out the cigarette and nodded slowly, frowning.

  “Give me the book again,” he said.

  “Page eighty-two.”

  “I know.”

  She watched him read for a moment, reading it in a different way now, with a different understanding, then stood and went to the window by the sink. The moths fluttered, tapping with tiny feet and wings. On the hill outside she could see the dark outline of the tree. The rope was already there waiting coiled at its base beside the bucket. The pegs were driven. The kindling and logs all piled for the fire.

  “Good God,” he said. “You really want this? All of it?”

  “I want a good cop or a good forensics man to be able to go over every detail in the book and find it right there, in the flesh, outside. This is about the work, Richard, not about pain. I can handle the pain. I have a feeling you’re good. I have a feeling it won’t last long. Not as long as bone cancer anyway.”

  “The last line . . . there’s no way in hell I could . . .”

  “I anticipated that problem. And believe me I wouldn’t ask you to. So here’s the only area we’ll fudge a little.”

  She opened the drawer in front of her beside the sink and reached in and withdrew what she’d made for him weeks ago and walked over and set it on the table. Two halves of a can of Pepsi. She’d taken scissors to each half and cut into them into two jagged lines.

  “Ten years later I did a sequel,” she said. “Another attempt to get this first book back in print. It didn’t work. But these were in the sequel. Use them instead. Surrogate teeth, not real ones. Use them, take what you need to take and then dispose of them somewhere. Turn to the next chapter. Where it says 1:18 a.m. That’s how it ends for her. You haven’t read that yet. That’s how I end.”

  He read. For a moment he actually went pale. He shook his head.

  “I honestly don’t know if I can do this,” he said. “God knows you’re paying me well but . . .”

  She sat down across from him and reached urgently across the table and gripped his hand so hard her knuckles went white.

  “I’m paying you everything, Richard. Everything I have. My bank account has exactly fifty two dollars in it. I’ll show it to you. That’s what this means to me. One last gamble, Richard. All or nothing. Everything riding on the work. Your work and mine. Please. Do it right. I’m begging you.”

  He stared at her hard across the table, searching for something inside her she thought or perhaps inside himself and then at last he seemed to find what he needed.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  They lay naked side by side in the bed because that was in the book too, that was how it started and Richard had not complained or balked at that, at the wearing of two hats so to speak but now it was time for the rest of it to happen. She had found him alternately a rough and tender lover and her orgasm perhaps because it was to be her last astonished her with its fierce complexity, its rhythms, smooth and jarring, so much like the way she wrote. She watched him rise from the bed and put on his clothes and glance at her bathed in moonlight, taking her in.

  “Please. Do it all,” she said.

  “I will.”

  She lay peaceful in the silence waiting for him knowing that he would not lie to her, wondering if he’d read her now in the days and weeks to come, feeling that probably he would for how could he not be curious to give the work a try after this, thinking this as suddenly shattered glass was everywhere, she felt it spray across her breasts and stomach, her face and hair and felt hands close hard over her wrists and pull her roughly across the broken windowpane raking her backbone, the broken shards of glass cutting deep and then she was out in the cool night air exactly as it should be, exactly as she’d written, and the end of her night began.

  The New York Times reporter hung up the phone.

  My God, he thought, what he’d done to her.

  He’d promised the Dead River, Maine PD to withhold some information just in case they caught the guy and to eliminate the cranks and crazies but felt pretty certain they were withholding none from him. These cops were so excited with their find they probably would have talked to the Enquirer.

  Besides, the Times was all the news th
at’s fit to print.

  And a whole lot of this didn’t qualify.

  He went over the notes in front of him. The writer’s name was unfamiliar. Forty-nine years old. Female. Unmarried. No children. He made a mental note to get a photo. It would help if she was a looker. Eight novels under her belt. Her publisher was here in New York.

  Then the details.

  The writer had been dragged naked through her bedroom window in the middle of the night, punched in the jaw probably to unconciousness, hauled up the limb of a tree by ropes tied to her feet while two more ropes tied off each arm to pegs driven into the ground. There were indications she had awakened at some point and struggled, struggled hard, rope-burns on her wrists and ankles. The guy had taken a knife to her, slit her open from vagina to collar-bone and then slashed her throat, bleeding her into a large metal tub. Then he’d opened her up and took the heart.

  And apparently ate quite a bit of it.

  He’d taken out the liver and the kidneys and spitted her over a fire. He’d hacked meat off loins and breast, hacked off one of her legs, severed the head and cracked it open on a rock and then scooped out the brains. All these showed signs of having been significantly nibbled too.

  His story was going to be a monster.

  He dialed information and got the number for her publisher, dialed that and asked to speak to her editor. Then he waited hoping he was going to get to the guy before the police did, hoping for the perfect stunned reaction.

  His pencil was hot and ready.

  The editor sat at his desk cluttered with notes and books and contracts and unanswered correspondence not to mention the telephone which he felt had just now bitten him like a snake and gazed up at the unkempt rows of westerns, mystery novels, suspense novels, romance novels, spy novels, all of which he had bought with hopes ranging from high through meager to almost none at all, none of which had done him any good within the company, few of which had earned out their advances and thought, I’ve got to call the boss, my God I’ve got to call the boss, Jesus jumping christ I never call the boss but I’ve got to on this one.

  First, though, he thought.

  He pushed up from the swivel chair and away from the desk feeling a whole lot lighter than his two-hundred twenty-five pounds and ran out of the tiny nasty cubicle they called his goddamn office and out into the hall and leaned over his secretary’s desk and asked how many books they had of hers. How many? she said. Copies? Not copies you dummy he said, contracts! How many books of hers are still under contract! Three, she said, the last three, rights have reverted on the rest. Well we’re sure as shit buyin’ ’em back! he thundered so that a copy editor he thought a total incompetant because he actually insisted on reading a book through before he would deign to take a red pencil to the thing looked up at him and scowled because to the copy editor this was some kind of goddamn library not a fucking publishing company and he went back to his office and sat in his chair and calmed himself and laughed and shook his head and thought, I love this job and then he made the call.

  The Best

  What remained when the tears were finished was a black column driven straight through her heart.

  She decided to let it stay there.

  They were in the bedroom. Their fights were always in the bedroom. Now this final one and it was as though they were a pair of boxers breaking to their respective corners. He sat down on the bed. She sat in the chair by the dresser. Both smoking their Winstons. Both in silence. She was the one who broke it.

  “You know you’re the best I’ve ever had, Tommy.” Her voice was still a little shaky. She supposed that was all to the good.

  “I know. You told me.”

  “I’m gonna miss that. I’m gonna miss a lot of things.”

  “Yeah.”

  She looked at him a moment and then stood and began to unbutton her blouse.

  He noticed.

  “What’re you doing?”

  “One last time, Tommy. You said you’d always want me. No matter what.”

  “Hey look, I dunno.”

  “You said.”

  She slipped the blouse off her shoulders. She wore no bra. At thirty-five her breasts were still fine and she knew it. So did he. She unzipped the skirt and let it fall. She pulled down the black silk panties. Stepped out of them and walked to the bed.

  “Look Shiela . . .”

  “You owe me. I want you, y’know?”

  She leaned over and unbuckled his belt and unzipped his fly and Janine or no Janine she could see that he wanted her too. At least his body did.

  That would do.

  “Pull up.”

  “Okay but listen. This doesn’t mean anything, Shiela. I’m still outa here tomorrow.” He slid out of his teeshirt.

  “I know. Pull up.”

  He lifted his ass off the bed and she pulled down his jeans. The briefs came off with them. The black column in her heart now matched by the angry red fleshy thing rising off the bed. He looked at her.

  “Whatever. I still think this is crazy. But if you want, climb on.”

  “Condom first.”

  “Awwww, for chrissake.”

  “Condom first, Tommy. You think I want to get pregnant? Now?”

  She opened the drawer on the bedside table and took out a Trojan and peeled off the wrapper and slid it over him.

  When they were finished she took it off again. Just like she always did.

  “Hi, Janine.”

  The younger woman standing in the doorway looked startled.

  “You busy? Am I interrupting something?”

  “Jeez, Shiela, it’s after midnight.”

  Janine looked ready to run at a moment’s notice. She held the nightgown tight around her. Guilty as sin. Shiela smiled.

  “Don’t worry. It’s not as though I wasn’t expecting something. Lucy Baskin told me months ago she thought the two of you were into one another. I just looked the other way is all. You know how it is. I’m not mad at you. We can probably even still be friends. I just wanted to talk to you. Tommy said he thought it might be a good idea.”

  “Tommy did?”

  Tommy was in bed, snoring. As usual after they fucked.

  “Yeah. So what do you say? Can I come in for a minute? Just a minute?”

  “Well, I . . . I guess. Yeah. Sure.”

  She stepped aside and Shiela walked on in and when Janine turned around after shutting the door that was when Shiela planted a good hard right to her chin, an uppercut, still smiling and pleased all to hell about the six months’ boxing lessons which Tommy said were unfeminine and basically dumb because muggers didn’t box, he said, they mugged you and Janine slid down the door limp as a sack.

  Shiela reached into her purse for the blue rubber gloves she’d meant to use for oven-cleaning one of these days and put them on and grabbed Janine by the ankles and dragged her across the piss-yellow carpet into the bedroom and dropped her feet and grabbed her under the arms instead and hauled her onto the bed. She took off her coat and draped it over the fake-brass foot-rail. She took off her sneakers and put them on the floor beside her purse. Then she went to Janine’s closet for a belt that would do the trick and found one that wasn’t just cheap imitation leather and climbed up on the bed and scattered the pillows so she could kneel comfortably with Janine’s head between her knees and looped the belt around her neck.

  When she began to pull Janine woke coughing and sputtering and trying to get her fingers in under the belt but it was too late for that and the thrashing didn’t help much either. Shiela had twenty pounds on her, easy. When her tongue protruded and her face went from red to greyish blue she unlooped the belt and got off the bed and went to her purse. She put the belt in the purse for later. Then she went back to Janine.

  She tore at the nightgown noting that her own boobs were better than Janine’s though the rest of her she had to admit was young and dismayingly firm and then ripped off her panties and threw them on the floor. She took a few minutes to give the body a
good beating, concentrating on the ribs and head and did that until the face was bloody and her knuckles throbbed. She went back to her purse again. She took out the condom and pin.