Peaceable Kingdom

by Jack Ketchum

  He heard the distant thunder.

  And it must have awakened her, or else his stripping her had, because she put her hands to his shoulders as he parted her legs and entered her, feeling the welts along the insides of her thighs as she gripped him inside her and moved, swaying gently, beneath him.

  It was like nothing that had ever come before.

  She had never been so responsive to him, pulling herself up onto him, urgently close to him while the thunder rumbled, and he saw flashes of lightning beneath the closed lids of his eyes and then opened them so he could see her, could see this sudden phenomenon that was clawing at him, fingernails scoring the skin of his back and shoulders, this amazing phenomenon as his slave of love in every way now plunged in moonless black, which tore and bit and moaned as though tossed in a savage wind and who suddenly seemed to be everywhere around him at once, her fingers a thousand thorns, her body a billion petals all falling together and himself the author of this destruction, this overflowing flowering.

  The lightning flashed twice.

  He heard the rings drop off the bed and roll across the floor as her wide soft nipples opened, bloomed, and parted, smelled loam and fresh-turned earth as a strand of briar turned twice around his neck. He felt her cunt like a crown of thorns gripping him tight and tearing and felt himself throb and shoot suddenly deep within her, blood and semen, runners crawling over him, their thorns sinking deep, felt himself bleeding into her, veins, arteries pricked and severed as he looked down at the body which was no longer her body but the tangled garden of wild blood-red roses that he had made of her blossoming and erupting from tortured flesh.

  She was his earth, his ground. He had cast his seed to her again and again.

  And the creepers grew, nourished.

  The Turning

  In three years the City had changed again.

  You could almost smell the blood in the air.

  Bad blood.

  He walked down Riverside from 82nd. For six blocks no one had passed him. The cool night breeze drifted off the Hudson. Across the street the park was grey and empty in the moonlight.

  This area was one of the loveliest in New York. It still was. Old, newly-renovated townhouses along one side, the park along the other. The residents, who were extremely well-off, saw to it that the sidewalks were kept mostly clean. At night there was little traffic.

  But look. Here.

  He had to walk around her. Her filthy skirt hitched up to her fat pasty thighs. Cap pulled down over dull brown matted hair. She lay asleep, her toothless mouth wide open—a foul, black hole beneath the streetlight.

  He walked by.

  It occurred to him that this had been coming for a very long time. The wealthy—or almost wealthy—and the poor living in wholly separate camps, paths barely intersecting. The middle class, such as they were, little more than badly disguised servants to the rich. Insulated by the same cloak of privilege that draped the shoulders of their masters.

  You could no longer refer to the “growing numbers” of the poor. The poor were multitudes.

  Even here. On this quiet street.

  And not surprisingly, he heard them before he saw them.

  Ahead of him. Not far.

  He walked slowly, with a measured stride. He was in no hurry to see.

  They were across the street in the park at 78th Street, the old man helpless against a tree, the four boys going at him with fists and stones. The homeless man pleading, the sense of his words lost in broken teeth and blood and bone because the tall boy was shoving a rock into his mouth at the same time—no, a piece of jagged macadam from the street—while two others hooted their encouragement and the smallest of the boys, thin and blonde and wiry, twelve maybe, crushed his left kneecap with three rapid blows from a metal bat. The bat gleamed in the moonlight. The man collapsed, shrieking, the chunk of macadam tumbling from his mouth out onto the grass.

  He did not need to watch more.

  There were many of these groups now.

  Not all of them children.

  At 72nd Street he turned East toward Broadway. As always in the City, a single turn, a different block, and you were in another world entirely.

  Here there was plenty of traffic. Horns blared. Fire engines sudden in the distance. People passed by without a glance. While he studied faces. Hard young women, soft young men. Both with money. Barely able to conceal their fury that they did not have more. Shopowners stern and forbidding standing in doorways, defending their mercantile fortresses. And the elderly. Barely hanging on, having lived too long. Fear etched deep into pale brows and faces.

  As though they knew. Knew in their ancient bones.

  What was coming.

  And knew they had helped create it.

  And everywhere the homeless. Standing at banks like hopeless sentries, on streetcorners like whores, sprawled, squatting, kneeling on broken limbs and no limbs at all, strong and crippled and drunk and crazy, young and old and impossible to guess how old.

  Too cowed, most of them, even to beg anymore.

  He felt the turning.

  There. That one.

  He crossed Broadway, walking toward Columbus.

  That one, yes, but not this.

  She was beautiful. Perhaps that was why the owner of the bar allowed her to sit there. Perhaps her beauty offset her situation and could be counted upon to not overly offend the owner’s patrons. Perhaps the man retained a shred of pity.

  There was a dirty white cast on her right leg. A taped wooden crutch across her lap. Her clothes were too small but they were relatively clean. An empty fast-food coffee cup stood on the sidewalk beside her.

  She could not have been more than twenty. Her skin was the deep rich black of the islands, tight and soft-looking over her whippet-thin frame. Her eyes were wide, brown and luminous. The eyes of a doe trapped in headlights. Permanently startled, and fearful.

  They looked fearfully at him now as he stopped beside her.

  He saw that she was afraid to speak. Knew she would not speak. That it was necessary for her to be careful. He could already feel the stares of passersby, their disgust with him for stopping. He crouched down.

  “Are you hungry?”

  “Yes, sir. I am.”

  Her voice was soft and tired. It reminded him of the voice of someone who has just lost a loved one and now, finally, has no more tears left, who has been crying for days and who is now exhausted.

  “Your leg. What happened to it?”

  She almost smiled. She didn’t quite dare.

  “Stupid thing. I fell right off that curb here.”

  She pointed.

  “Right into. . . . whaddya call it? The bars. Over the . . . ?”

  “The grate? Over the sewer?”

  “That’s right. I guess I wasn’t looking. Fixed me up at Emergency. But they wouldn’t let me stay.”

  “You have no place to stay?”

  “No, sir. There’s a place down on West End will keep me for a week, but you need twenty dollars for that and I ain’t got twenty dollars. If I had a place, even for a week, then I got an address. Can’t nobody get a job without an address. Me, I got nothin’.”

  He reached for his wallet.

  He was certain. Not her.

  Maybe she’d even survive this. Maybe. Who knew.

  “Here’s twenty.”

  Her smile alone was worth the twenty. He thought, what beautiful teeth.

  She squealed over the twenty like a little girl. It was as though he’d given her a hundred.

  “Thank you! God, thank you!”

  She leaned over and wrapped her arms around him, hugged him, and kissed him on the cheek.

  Behind him a woman’s eyes stabbed hard at them both. They ignored her.

  “Bet you never been kissed by a black girl before,” she laughed.

  “You’d be wrong,” he said. “Now I want you to get out of here, all right? Go to that place you were talking about. I don’t want to see you out here again. You
understand?”

  “Yes, sir. You know I will. God! Thank you, sir, thank you.”

  He helped her up. Stood watching her hobble toward West End Avenue. She didn’t look back.

  “Asshole,” someone muttered behind him.

  The man walked by and shot him an angry glance over his shoulder.

  Not even a man yet, he thought. A boy. A boy who thinks he’s a man because his job pays him $100,000 a year plus bonuses.

  The boy would be lucky to survive exactly what and who he was about to pass, there on the corner of Columbus.

  That one.

  He lay up against the streetlight. Babbling madly to whatever voices babbled back inside him.

  He was already changing.

  There were more and more who were changing now.

  And not just the crazy ones.

  He had seen it happen once before. A long, long time ago. When the collective will and consciousness of an entire people had grown intense enough, black enough, angry enough, fearful enough and focused enough to rend deep into the nature of human life as it had existed up till then, all that dark cruel energy focused like a laser on an entire class, transforming them in reality into how they were perceived and imagined to be almost metaphorically.

  In the past it had been the rich—the ruling class who were perceived as vampires. Feeding off the poor and destitute.

  Now it was the poor themselves.

  And it wouldn’t be long at all before everyone in the City and in half the world for that matter would be seeing what he’d been seeing for quite a while from his own unique perspective, recognizing exactly what was happening because it had happened to him.

  Because last time it had been him. Him and a handful of others. Nobles, kings, princes.

  This time, of course, they would not be merely a handful.

  This time they would be legion.

  He could see them everywhere.

  Turning.

  Changing.

  He hoped the girl with the beautiful smile and the fine, warm skin would not be one of them.

  He had always enjoyed walking in New York. He would have continued walking, but it was late by now and he was hungry. At Columbus he hailed a taxi.

  A taxi was safer than a limousine.

  Limousine drivers always felt the need to be ingratiating. To talk to you.

  Whereas cabbies almost never bothered to glance back at anything other than traffic through their rear-view mirrors—and that was important.

  You almost weren’t there.

  “The Four Seasons,” he said.

  He had a reservation.

  To dine with a beautiful recently-divorced real-estate heiress and then return to her East Side penthouse apartment filled with drawings by Vlaminck, Emile Nolde, and Gauguin, originals, all of them, twenty-one stories above the East River, with a built-in steambath and sauna.

  Unlike most of the world, he preferred to feed upon his own.

  To Suit the Crime

  “I think you’ve done a remarkable job,” said Dugas. “Really.”

  Morgan leaned back on the red leather-studded sofa and lit a Camel, unfiltered, enjoying the first passage of smoke over his palate and up through his nose. It was wonderful to him that these old appetites were back in favor.

  “Thank you,” he said. “But it’s hardly my doing. Not even that of the Court, entirely.” He smiled. “We have all those Republican Presidents to thank—Reagan, Bush, Quayle—”

  “Not Quayle,” said Dugas. “Dear God. Not Quayle.”

  Morgan laughed. “All right. Not Quayle. His man Beavers never did amount to much. But Denninger, certainly. And Harpe. All the nominations were theirs.”

  “True.”

  “Obviously, we were abetted by history. The will of the people. It only remained for a single Democratic judge to fix upon the people and understand their will as it applied here. And we’ve always been best at that.”

  Dugas watched him raise the cigarette to his lips and draw smoke down into his lungs. It occurred to Dugas that the lips were too thin to be attractive to anyone other than a public figure—for some reason the American people like their politicians lipless—the hands too perfectly manicured and delicate. There was not an ounce of sensuality to the man. Though by reputation he was no less debauched than anyone in Washington.

  No less than himself, perhaps.

  Dugas thought, though, that had they not both been members of the same Club—empty, now, but for the two of them—he’d never have wasted his time sitting here talking to Morgan. Despite Morgan’s power, despite his undeniable accomplishments, and despite their political and career affiliations, there was something smug and distasteful about him. But here, courtesy demanded his attention.

  “It was a feeling I’d maintained since law school,” said Morgan. “That the punishment, very simply, should suit the crime. That something fundamental had been overlooked in the very structure of our adversarial system—that being the suffering of the victim. The condition of the victim at the time of his or her victimization.”

  Dugas watched him warm to his topic. Here we go, he thought. He owned a television set, after all. He’d heard this dozens of times. Still. . . .

  He nursed his single-malt whiskey and listened.

  “You, as a lawyer, understand, I’m sure. Take a boy, for instance, struck down by a drunken driver. The boy is in the prime of his life, struck unexpectedly. One moment he’s alive, perhaps happy—the next he’s dead. Is it wise and correct to sentence the driver to a given number of years in prison, to allow him the luxury of counting the days toward his release from prison, feed him, clothe him, allow him time in the yard for exercise and time in the dayroom for television, and then, finally, release him? When, over the intervening years, the bars have not disappeared, the liquor stores have not disappeared? He can even apply for a driver’s license again.”

  He doesn’t like me, Morgan thought. But he’s reasonably attentive. That will do.

  He went on. He had a point to make here, so that Dugas would thoroughly understand what followed.

  “Many years ago, when I was still on the State Court, I had a case I will never forget. A man had walked in to a college dormitory, shot the aged housemother in the forehead with a .45 caliber Smith & Wesson fitted with a silencer, and then stalked upstairs and picked a room at random. Inside were two students, young women, very pretty. The man forced them to strip at gunpoint, then forced one of the girls to tie the other to the bed and gag her. Then he tied and gagged the second girl, pushed her down on the same bed—and forced her roommate to watch while he ate her friend alive.

  “He began, I believe, with her buttocks.

  “The law being what it was back then, the usual jury of his peers sentenced him to life imprisonment in a State facility for the criminally insane. While, of course, he should have died.”

  Morgan stubbed out his cigarette.

  “Died horribly.”

  “Excuse me, gentlemen.”

  It was the waiter, Woolbourne, carrying a tray and picking up Morgan’s empty wine glass.

  “Will you be wanting another? The workmen, I’m afraid. . . .” Impertinent bastard, Dugas thought. Woolbourne addressed them both but looked only at Morgan—as though he, Dugas, didn’t matter.

  Dugas glanced toward the workmen, two large muscular types, laying down a plastic tarp across the far corner of the library. Apparently renovations were in order, though he couldn’t see the need of any.

  “What are they doing, Woolbourne?” he asked.

  “The wallpaper, I believe, sir. They’re replacing a section.” The man still didn’t look at him. Merely picked up his glass, which was not even quite empty.

  He’d’ve liked to smash that glass against Woolbourne’s well-bred patrician face.

  A goddamn waiter, for God’s sake.

  “Another,” Dugas said. “One more.”

  “Yes,” said Morgan. “One more would be fine.”

  “Ver
y good, gentlemen.”

  Dugas lit a Camel and ran his gaze over the gold and red fleur-de-lis wallpaper near the window. Perhaps the damaged section lay behind the heavy Utrecht velvet curtains.

  Morgan sighed.

  “It changed my life, that case. From that point on I knew what I wanted to do—what needed to be done. And, thank God, times have come exactly ’round to that.”