Offspring

by Jack Ketchum

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR JACK KETCHUM!

  “Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.”

  —Stephen King

  “Ketchum writes with economy and power, in sentences that tighten like noose wire.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ketchum [is] one of America’s best and most consistent writers of contemporary horror fiction.”

  —Bentley Little

  “Just when you think the worst has already happened . . . Jack Ketchum goes yet another shock further.”

  —Fangoria

  “Ketchum’s prose is tight and spare, without a single misplaced word.”

  —Cinescape.com

  “For two decades now, Jack Ketchum has been one of our best, brightest, and most reliable.”

  —Hellnotes

  “A major voice in contemporary suspense.”

  —Ed Gorman

  “Jack Ketchum is a master of suspense and horror of the human variety.”

  —Midwest Book Review

  “Jack Ketchum has been hailed as a writer whose unflinching gaze at man’s darkness is disturbingly thought-provoking. Consistently, he’s displayed a knack for taking readers to uncomfortable places, daring them to stare harsh reality in the eye.”

  —Shroud Magazine

  Other books by Jack Ketchum:

  JOYRIDE

  COVER

  OLD FLAMES

  TRIAGE (anthology)

  OFF SEASON

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  SHE WAKES

  PEACEABLE KINGDOM RED

  THE LOST

  JACK

  KETCHUM

  OFFSPRING

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  February 2011

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 1987 by Dallas Mayr

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1144-6

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-1233-7

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  “When I awoke the dire wolf Six hundred pounds of sin Was grinning at my window All I said was come on in.”

  —The Grateful Dead

  PART I

  MAY 12, 1992

  12:25 A.M.

  She stood dappled in grime and moonlight beneath the drifting branches of the shade tree and watched through the window. Behind her the others jittered.

  She touched the screen with her fingertips. It was loose. Old. She rubbed her thumb and forefinger together, felt the fine grit of rust.

  She concentrated on the girl inside. The acid-flower scent of her, riding high and strong over the musty-smelling couch on which she lay—even above the warm, grease-soaked kernels of grain in the bowl beside her.

  The girl smelled of musk. Of urine and wildflowers.

  The girl had breasts and long, dark hair.

  Older than she was.

  Her clothes were tight.

  They would hinder.

  The males pressed close, anxious to see. She let them.

  It was important that they know what lay inside, though she would guide them when the time came. The males were younger and needed guidance.

  But this was new to them, and thrilling. The lash of thin birch sticks across their bodies. For balance they would have to look carefully now.

  She felt the diamond brush her chest, its cool gold setting, swaying from the dirty knotted twine.

  The night was still. Crickets calling in the hollow.

  They watched the girl lost and deaf to them in the bright splash of voices out of the flickering light. And each, for a moment, as though brushed with the wind of one sudden mind, felt the baby asleep and alone above them in the thirsty dark—their dark, the dark of their elders, of the Woman and First Stolen.

  They imagined they could see the child, smell the child.

  They only had to watch.

  A single cloud had only to pass before the moon.

  1:46 A.M.

  Dammit, Nancy!

  Every light in the house was on again. Downstairs, anyway.

  She turned the Buick wagon up into the drive.

  Girl must think I’m made of money, she thought. I bet the stereo’s on and the TV too and there’s no Coke left in the refrigerator.

  She was just a little drunk.

  Her right rear wheel slid over the row of rocks and gravel and crushed three of the remaining tulips trying to survive at the edge of the lawn. To hell with ’em, she thought.

  She’d crushed them sober too, half as often as not.

  She cut the motor. Switched off the lights.

  She sat there a moment thinking about Dean across the bar, ignoring her, drinking his Wild Turkey, her goddamn husband for god’s sake looking right through her as though she were a ghost.

  But that was Dean. Either you got nothing or else you got a whole lot more than you’d ever want to bargain for.

  The nothing was better.

  It was humiliating, though. And typical. Whether you lived with him or without him he was Mr. Humiliation. He got his kicks that way.

  She took a deep breath to shake off the anger and opened the car door, reached for her old black purse with the .32 revolver in the zippered side pocket that she kept there just in case he tried to beat the shit out of her again like he had in the Caribou lot last Friday night, pushed away from the wheel, and got out. It was harder than it should have been. She’d never lost the weight after the baby. She guessed the beers didn’t help any. The purse felt heavy on her arm.

  Fucking Dean.

  She slammed the car door. It didn’t shut right on the driver’s side. I got to fix that, she thought.

  With what?

  With Dean gone there was hardly enough money to feed her and the baby. That and pay the sitter one night a week. With the housework and the job, that one night a week—a movie and a couple of drinks, maybe—was a necessity now that the baby was finally old enough to be left for a while. But a barmaid made next to nothing in Dead River, and nobody tipped worth a shit. Whatever you had to say about the tourists, they tipped at least.

  One more month, she thought, till tourist season. You just got to hang in there.

  She stepped across the cracked macadam to the side door, sorting through her key ring for the house key.

  She heard something thump through the open kitchen window. A Coke bottle, probably, against the too-expensive butcher-block table. Nancy eating and drinking her out of house and home again.

  I guess I could cut down on the beers, she thought. I could do that. Save a little money that way. I mean, what’s important, anyway?

  Me and the baby, right?

  She felt a flush of guilt.

  Why did she always call her the baby?

  Her name was Suzannah. S
uzi. It wasn’t always the baby. She remembered a time when she’d crooned the name. Now she hardly used it. It was as though the baby were just some sort of thing, another something in the way like the mortgage on the house and repairs on the roof or the faucet leaking down in the cellar.

  She guessed Dean had screwed the pooch on that for her too. Like everything else.

  For a moment she could almost cry.

  She walked up the stairs and fit the key in the lock.

  God dammit, Nancy!

  She didn’t need the key. The door was open.

  She’d told the girl again and again—keep it locked.

  Okay—so Dean was at the bar tonight. But he wasn’t always going to be. He was going to drop by one of these nights when she wasn’t home, when her car wasn’t there in the driveway. And twice already he’d threatened to clean her out. Pull up in Walchinski’s truck and haul away everything but the dirty laundry.

  I wouldn’t put it past him, she thought.

  I got to talk to this girl.

  “Nancy?”

  She opened the door to the dayroom where the television was on without the sound—whatever goddamn good that was—and closed the door behind her and locked it. She kept on walking toward the kitchen. And the first thing she saw was the puddle on the linoleum floor seeping around the corner into the good hardwood floor of the dayroom—Coke, she guessed, coffee, something dark and flowing and jesus! she was going to murder this girl—and stepping carefully to avoid it, she looked up and at the same time smelled the stink and suddenly what she was going to say froze inside her and so did the scream, so she could only stand there a moment trying to wrench it all into her at once like a single labored breath in a gale-force wind.

  Two of them perched on the counter by the sink. Squatting, staring at her, eyes unnaturally bright. Their dangling arms covered with blood.

  Children.

  While Nancy lay naked on the butcher-block table.

  Her body motionless. Pale.

  Her arms already gone.

  Her clothes lay scattered across the room. Her jeans beside the table—wet, brown and gleaming.

  The cabinets were open, boxes and jars broken. Flour, bread crumbs, crackers, sugar, jams and jellies spilled across the counter to the floor.

  Her arms were drying in the sink. Along with the dishes.

  All this she saw in a moment, saw too that they were ready for her while her stomach boiled and the girl with the bloody hatchet and the two identical, filthy boys who had been holding Nancy’s legs apart turned to her all serious and businesslike and not at all like the younger two squatting grinning on the counter.

  She looked at the girl and, empty eyed, the girl looked back, and each seemed to recognize the other and what her presence meant here—and for a moment the object of their thoughts was the same, simultaneous, though the thoughts themselves were as different as blood and stone. The girl’s thoughts cold, formal, almost ritualistic, an assertion of power, concerned that this woman should know everything that had happened here. Hers so suddenly urgent and up from so wrenchingly deep inside her that when her daughter’s name swelled across her lips

  (“Suzannah!”)

  she knew Dean had done nothing to change what lay between mother and daughter, it was only a kind of exhaustion of her hopes, temporary, and that given time it would have passed. And knowing this, and knowing that there was no time, she felt her heart break then and there. So that when the smallest boy, the one she hadn’t seen before, stepped out from behind the table with the white plastic trash bag pulled tight over the small, still, familiar form inside and held it up to her for her to see, she was already tearing at her purse for the revolver so she could blast them back to whatever hell they came from—and would have—had not the hatchet fallen in its fine arc to the center of her forehead and brought her instantly shuddering to her knees.

  Blind to heartbreak forever.

  3:36 A.M.

  George Peters dreamed that Mary, his wife—dead three years now—had given birth to a son.

  Their son was two years old and playing on the floor.

  There were wooden blocks all around him and toy trains ran on a track that began beneath the Christmas tree and disappeared down the hall into the Peters’ bedroom, returning, somehow, right through the living room window.

  Peters was sitting in an armchair reading the paper. It was a bright sunny day in May or June but the Christmas tree was there and the trains ran round and round.

  Mary was out visiting. Peters was minding the boy.

  Then someone was knocking on the door, urgent. Calling his name.

  He got up and it was Sam Shearing, dead eleven years now, telling him he had to get the hell out of there, he had to get out of there now, he had to grab the boy and run because the train was coming.

  Peters told him he knew the train was coming. The train went round and round.

  You don’t understand! said Shearing. You don’t fucking understand! And he started to run. Which wasn’t like Sam Shearing at all.

  Peters blinked and Sam was gone. He closed the door and went back to the living room where the boy was playing, banging his blocks together.

  Which was when he heard the train.

  Rumbling, barreling toward the house.

  Peters snatched up his son. He ran past the tree into the kitchen—a younger Peters, fast—while the engine smashed through the living room window and burst across the room, coming at them faster than any man could run, the boy hysterical in his arms and the huge black head of the thing ramming past refrigerator and dishwasher . . .

  Bearing down . . .

  He woke and it was as though he had been running, his ticker was beating so fast. He was sweating. The sheets were wet and smelled of old, stale scotch.

  At least there was no headache. He’d remembered the aspirin, for a change. But sitting up his brain felt foggy. He guessed the booze was still working in him.

  He looked at the clock. It wasn’t even four in the morning. He’d never get back to sleep now.

  And sleep was what the scotch was supposed to be about in the first place.

  Mary wouldn’t have approved, but she would have understood. There was only so much thinking and so much loneliness you were supposed to be asked to handle. Since she died it wasn’t just the nightmares that got to him, that made him want to start drinking at four in the afternoon and keep on drinking right on into the night, it was the simple fact of living in the house without her.

  Retirement with your best and oldest friend was one thing. Retirement period was another.

  He heard the knocking again. But it wasn’t in the dream this time, it was at his door. And he guessed the other had been that, too. Insistent.

  “I’m coming! Hold your horses!”

  He got up from the bed. A naked old man with a belly.

  He went to the dresser for his shorts and to the closet for his pants. Whoever it was had heard him, because the knocking stopped.

  But who the hell was coming after him at a quarter to four in the morning? Friends, drinking buddies—they were few and far between now. Half of them dead, half just moved away.

  Dead River was almost all strangers these days.

  And there he was again. Feeling sorry for himself.

  Whiner, he thought.

  He had a brother in Sarasota who kept telling him about the good life down there. He and his wife lived in a mobile-home park with a windmill out in front about a mile from Siesta Key. He’d visited once and one thing was sure, they weren’t lonely. People dropped by day and night. There was a lot of walking and bike riding going on, people with heart conditions or circulatory conditions or whatever out getting some exercise, and folks would see his brother and sister-in-law sitting in the shade of the screened-in porch and come on in for a beer.

  They went to dances, played golf, went out to restaurants and clubhouses, ran social affairs and potluck dinners.

  It wasn’t for him.

&n
bsp; There was the heat for one thing.

  He was a man who liked his seasons. The bare trees in January and the green in May. Even the winter, the way the cold could take your breath away mornings, the shoveling that steamed you up inside your clothes and the wood fires in the grate.

  What you had in Florida was just heat. Heat that was fine and pleasant about a third of the time, a little uncomfortable about a third of the time, and a third of the time like walking through steam. Like walking through clouds of your own sweat.

  The second thing was that he’d never been that social.

  There were times he’d thought it would be good to meet another woman. You could do that down there. Nobody ever seemed to stay single all that long in his brother’s park. But you had to go to the dinners and dances to do that, you had to have a certain spirit for the thing.

  While he didn’t even have the spirit to answer this goddamn door here.

  He put on a robe and pair of slippers and shuffled over. He’d forgotten to turn on the porch light again so he flicked it on now and opened the door.

  “Vic.”

  Vic Manetti was standing in the yellow light. There was a trooper leaning on the squad car behind him but at that distance Peters couldn’t make out who he was.

  Manetti was “the new guy.” Sheriff of Dead River for well over two years now but still “the new guy” to most people because he came from New York City and wasn’t local.

  “Sorry to wake you, George.”

  “That’s all right.”

  Peters respected him. He’d pushed a few back with Manetti in the Caribou from time to time—and talking about what went on in town these days, sort of keeping in touch, Peters had the impression that he was a pretty good cop. He was calm, he had brains and he was thorough. You couldn’t ask much more in a sawdust-and-cinders little burg like this.

  But now, standing there, Peters thought he’d never seen the man so uncomfortable.

  “I need to talk to you, George,” he said.

  “I guess you do. You want to come inside?”

  “Actually I was hoping you’d be willing to come with us.”