Offspring

by Jack Ketchum

  He watched the man shift around inside himself looking for the right thing to say. Then he guessed he found it.

  “I need you to look at something for me. I need your expertise on something.”

  “Expertise?” He had to smile. It wasn’t a word you heard much in Dead River.

  “I got to warn you. It’s ugly.”

  And Peters had a feeling then—maybe it was the word expertise clicking in—but some kind of light went off in his brain telling him that he knew what Manetti was talking about.

  He managed to hope he was wrong.

  “Give me a minute.”

  He walked back inside and took off the robe and slippers, found a shirt in the drawer neatly folded—neatness, even with the drinking, being something he knew Mary would have wanted him to hold on to—and a pair of shoes by the bed. He went to the kitchen. He opened the refrigerator and took out a carton of orange juice and gulped a couple of swallows. Then he went into the bathroom and splashed some water on his face and brushed his teeth. The face in the mirror looked all its sixty-six years and then some.

  He walked back to the bedroom and took his wallet off the dresser. Her photo stood there smiling at him, an aging woman but still handsome. Way before the cancer.

  Out of habit, distracted by the sight of her picture the way he guessed he almost always was, he opened the top drawer and had the .38 and its holster halfway out before he realized he wasn’t going to need it this time.

  He could leave the guns to the youngsters.

  Vic was in the squad car waiting for him. The trooper he couldn’t make out before turned out to be Miles Harrison. He’d known Miles since he was just a kid. For a while he’d been their paperboy. For some reason he could never quite hit the porch. They’d cursed him every winter.

  He said hello, asked after Miles’ mom and dad, who were fine, thanks, and got in back. They started up. And then he was looking at the backs of their heads through the plate-glass-and-wire-mesh screen.

  A funny place, he thought, for an old ex-sheriff to be riding.

  Half an hour later the scotch was trying to slide up out of him and he was remembering his breathing, trying to keep it the hell down.

  The kitchen was a goddamn slaughterhouse.

  He stood there looking at what was left of the woman and the sitter and he knew right away what he had here. He’d known since seeing the urine sprayed across the stairs outside . . . that someone had marked the place.

  And so, he guessed, did Manetti.

  “You see why I wanted you,” he said.

  Peters nodded.

  “The babysitter’s mother called it in. Her name’s Nancy Ann David, by the way, sixteen years old last March. The mother said it was getting late so she started phoning, but nobody answered. She tried some more until it got her worried and then she called us.”

  “The woman?”

  He looked down at the body on the floor. Like the sitter on the table it was naked and both its arms and legs were gone. There was a hole cut in the chest that somebody had pulled wide apart, breaking up the rib cage, and there was nothing in there where the heart was supposed to be. The skull was split and the brains were gone. Intestines trailed across the linoleum floor.

  “Her name is Loreen Ellen Kaltsas. Thirty-six years old. Separated. Husband’s name is Dean Allan Kaltsas. We’ve got him in custody and I talked to him down at the station. Evidently they didn’t much care for each other. And he admits to smacking her around. But I don’t think there’s any connection. He seems pretty damn worried about the baby.”

  “The baby’s how old, did you say?”

  “Eighteen months. No sign of her anywhere. No blood on the crib, none in her room. Nothing.”

  He stepped around the blood and urine to the girl on the table. Max Joseph, the county coroner, was working on her.

  “George.”

  “Hello, Max.”

  “How do you like this? Here we go again, huh?”

  “Christ, Max, I hope not.”

  He made himself look at her. On this one most of the left breast was gone too, sliced away.

  “Well I’ll tell you, the reason I think we’ve got another go-round, George, is what’s not here. All the meaty bits, if you catch my drift. Familiar?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Cause of death?”

  “Hell, George, they ripped her heart out.”

  He looked down at the open blue eyes. Nancy Ann David had been pretty once. Not what anyone would call a beauty, but pretty. He’d bet there were boyfriends out there. People who’d miss her.

  “What about the woman?”

  “Blow to the head. Probably an ax or a hatchet. Died instantly.”

  He walked back through the kitchen. Manetti was waiting in the dayroom. Together they walked outside. He needed some air.

  Vic offered him a cigarette. He took it and they lit up. The sky was starting to brighten now, it had that nice early-morning glow, and you could hear the birds starting to replace the crickets.

  “What do you think?” asked Manetti.

  He heard the subtext. You’re the only one left who’s been there. You’re the only one who’d know for sure.

  Everyone else had either died that night or had moved away—to someplace they wouldn’t have to think and remember so much every time they walked out into the woods or went for a swim by the shoreline.

  He ought to have done the same.

  But for Mary maybe he would have, but Mary had been born in Dead River and wanted to stay.

  Still the nightmares should have been enough to tell him. Go. Get out of here. The nightmares and all that came to him unbidden practically every day until he lifted that second or third glass of scotch. Mostly the boy, naked, drifting toward him through his sights and Peters telling him to stop but him not stopping and the shotguns roaring, all opening up at once and . . .

  And Mary was dead now. He had no family.

  The town was strangers.

  He should have gone.

  He could still go.

  Fuck the heat in Sarasota. They had air-conditioning, didn’t they?

  “Some kind of copycat, do you think?” Manetti’s voice was trying to sound hopeful.

  Peters looked at him. He looked tired, his thin, wiry body starting to curve into one big question mark. Manetti wasn’t so young anymore either.

  “After eleven years, Vic? A copycat? After eleven years go by?”

  He threw down the cigarette. The stink of flesh and blood was still there in his nostrils. The cigarette couldn’t compete.

  That and the other stink.

  The one he remembered like a stab wound somewhere that had never healed—that would probably never heal.

  The woman, bleeding, hurling herself down the cliffside, her knife slashing Daniels ear to ear. . . .

  “What I think,” he said.

  He stepped on the cigarette guttering in the grass and looked out across the hills, gray but visible now, leading down through the forest to the cliffs and to the sea. Not so far away.

  He listened for the birds. A good clean morning sound, dependable and real as daylight. The bird sounds helped.

  “What I think,” he said, “is that we missed some last time. And I think they’ve been away for a little while.”

  4:47 A.M.

  By the time David Halbard looked up from his Mac it was dawn. Enough, he thought, though he felt no strain.

  He pushed away from his desk in the leather swivel chair, released the floppy disks from their disk drives, and filed them.

  The night had gone by fast and well. Ever since college he’d been able to do this—pull all-nighters—if there was sufficient challenge to the project.

  College was thirteen years ago. He had the thinning hair to prove it. But his energy hadn’t diminished. Just keep the coffee coming and he was fine.

  David Halbard was a satisfied man. He was right now. Sipping the dregs of his tired fifth cup.

  He was a
lways a bit surprised to find himself feeling that way. His first year out of the University of Pennsylvania via Brooklyn Polytechnic had been a disaster after all. Engineering school had prepared him for the big design work, but the job at Comcorp had turned out to be completely by the book, nothing even remotely sexy. He gave it a year and a half and then quit, trusting to luck.

  The job at IBM was better—a big new machine for the U.S. Coast Guard. He and two other guys had done most of the work themselves and they’d had a terrific time. But halfway through, the Guard had scrapped the project. Too complex, they said.

  It wasn’t too complex as far as the team was concerned. It was just that the Guard was so fucking simple.

  The next three years saw two more designs come and go, and by 1986 he’d had it. Total burnout, total discouragement. At this rate he was going to wind up designing transformers somewhere or something equally boring, plugging away all day and hating himself, and hating Amy for putting up with him.

  By then he’d married her, his former assistant at IBM—similarly, her job was way beneath her—the single grace note in his messy, discordant life. They decided to simplify, to pick a place they liked and find some way to make it work. They had a little savings. They’d repair TVs and radios if they had to.

  They were young and smart and what the hell.

  The place was easy to come by. Amy came from Portland originally and still thought of Maine as home. And David, Brooklyn born, thought the coast of Maine looked fine.

  He still did.

  He turned off the Mac, got out of his chair and walked to the double plate-glass doors to the sun deck. He slid one open to let in the morning air.

  There was a breeze ruffling the tall grass and goldenrod beyond the stand of oaks but the day was going to be mild.

  Small birds fluttered through the branches, assembling, singing in the trees.

  One more cup, he thought, out here on the deck.

  He walked through the study back to the kitchen and poured himself a mugful.

  Coffee never kept him awake. Work did.

  Work was supposed to.

  He took the mug outside and sat in one of the green wooden lawn chairs along the weathered railing.

  Over his head two thick branches swayed in the breeze. The largest branch reached all the way across the deck, nearly fingering the bedroom window adjacent to the study.

  Amy lay sleeping inside.

  Got to cut that back one of these days, he thought.

  But he didn’t like to touch them, really. There were ten trees, spaced unevenly, all black oak, tall and old and venerable, and they seemed to deserve their living space.

  It was unusual for trees to grow as big as these this far north. The cold winter winds off the sea kept most things stunted, hunched low to the ground. Humbled.

  He wiggled his toes and sipped his coffee.

  He was barefoot. The sun had warmed the deck already.

  The deck was painted pinewood, gray, and it was roomy, twelve by thirty-five, room enough for four comfortable chairs, a picnic table with benches and a grill. Stilts pegged it to the side of a steep hill that rolled down through the stand of oak and scrub and flattened out to over three full acres of grasslands, another two acres of low pine, fir and cedar, and beyond that, to the point—to the cliffs and the sea.

  You couldn’t see the cliffs through the pines. But the view was still spectacular in its way. Nothing trimmed. Nothing mowed or planted. Everything wild.

  The woods are dark, he thought.

  Thank god for that.

  It was the game that had bought them the place.

  Two years before, while he was still writing code into ROM and then debugging, while Amy was designing the graphics and Phil was composing the music back in New York, they’d rented. A hundred-year-old house back in the woods. Charming except when it rained, because then the roof leaked in about a dozen places. You had a symphony of pots and pans. And nothing left to cook with at all.

  But his idea for a fast, tense, really scary horror-adventure game turned out to be right on the money. Computer Arts had snapped it up, licensing American rights at a royalty rate that struck him as surprisingly generous. And “The Woods Are Dark” became their first big win against Nintendo. In fact it was anybody’s first big win against Nintendo—they’d dominated the market for so long.

  Part of the reason was the controversy. His design had included hordes of spiders coming to devour you through trembling sticky webs, writhing snake pits, deformed half-human monsters popping out of trees, from behind bushes, and a graveyard where the dead hauled themselves slowly, painfully, hand over hand out of their graves. What you killed, bled. Bled plenty.

  Amy’s graphics were state of the art and shivery as hell and people were offended that it was mostly kids who would be playing with this thing.

  But neither David nor Computer Arts saw it that way. Compared to a PG-rated movie these days the game was innocent as Scrabble.

  Compared to every other game it was a stick of dynamite.

  So sales went through the roof, allowing the company to buy more games, all of which were selling, too.

  But “The Woods Are Dark” was Computer Arts’ equivalent to Nintendo’s “Super Mario Brothers.” No other game had topped it either here or in Japan—it was raking in as much over there now as it was at home. And the advance for the new game, “Hide and Seek,” was stunning.

  So he and Amy went house shopping.

  What they found was this, a gray cedar-shake saltbox with a view—also about a hundred years old and as isolated as the rental had been, with their nearest neighbor almost two miles north, but light-years from the other house in terms of upkeep. It had been owned by an old country doctor and his wife until he died and she moved to Arizona to be with her children. They’d had enough money and stubborn Yankee respect for things past to keep the house pretty much what it had been originally, to keep the hand-hewn beams exposed and the moldings stained, not painted, and to hold on to the old potbellied stove.

  Next week Campbell and his crew were bolting the sills to the foundation for the new addition. Much of the lumber was already piled under the deck, covered by tarps. He’d seen Campbell’s work and knew the man to be a meticulous craftsman, one who could be counted upon to keep the feel of the place and blend the old skillfully with the new. He was expensive but well worth the price.

  And hell, they had the money. Miraculously, they had a lot more money than either of them knew what to do with.

  His brokers knew.

  Nintendo had one thing right, he thought. Roughly translated from the Japanese, the word nintendo meant, “no matter how hard you work, the results are in the hands of god.”

  He figured that said it all.

  The coffee was almost gone.

  The sun was warming. He was starting to feel drowsy. He heard the sudden whir of wings and saw a bird beat hard out of the tall grass. Grouse, partridge, pheasant—some kind of game bird—he wished he knew more about these things. The bird flew a hundred yards or so and settled back into the grass again. He watched until it disappeared.

  Then looked back to where it had come from.

  And damn near dropped his coffee.

  It was far away but his eyes were pretty good, and even if they’d only been half as good there was no mistaking what was out there.

  She was standing in the grass and goldenrod. The grass was maybe three feet high, just up to her waist. If he had to guess, he’d say she was seventeen or eighteen. A teenager.

  He couldn’t make out her features but her hair was dark and long, very long. Covering her naked shoulders. Half hiding her breasts.

  He couldn’t say about the rest of her, but from the waist on up she was naked.

  Holding a flower and turning it in her hands. A red one.

  She was looking in his direction.

  At the house, or at him.

  Amy’s not going to believe this, he thought. Our very own wood sprite
out here in the yard.

  The girl stood a moment longer and then turned and walked toward the pines, a wild thick cascade of dark brown hair disappearing slowly through the bright yellow grass.

  He had to wake Amy and tell her.

  He walked back into the study and slid the door closed behind him. He was on his way to their bedroom, passing the old Defiant potbellied stove in the middle of the study when he glanced at the clock.

  Five-thirty.

  She’ll kill me, he thought.

  With good reason. Amy hadn’t been sleeping well in the past three months since Melissa was born, though Melissa was evolving (with incredible rapidity, he thought—it was amazing how swiftly infants changed) into a good easy baby who didn’t tend to wake them every half hour like some of the others he’d known. He’d only had to tend to her once tonight.

  And Amy’d slept through it soundly for a change.

  Let her go, he thought. The news could keep.

  He peeked in on his way to the bathroom.

  Her body had come back fast and he was pleased to see her sleeping naked again, the strong back, the slope of shoulder and the curve of her breast pressed into the bedsheet.

  On the other side of the room Melissa lay tiny and pink faced in her bassinet.

  You’re a pretty lucky sonovabitch, he thought. You know that?

  Home and wife and baby.

  Wood nymph and all.

  Out in the field he heard the first crow of the morning.

  5:02 A.M.

  Second Stolen moved through the shadows of the pine and cedar forest, breathing deeply of its sweet smell. Beneath her feet the fallen needles were thick, cool, wet with dew. A low branch brushed her thigh and made her nipples stiffen.

  Sensation entered her more deeply than it did the others. She was not exactly pleased by this, but she knew it to be true.

  She was nearing the edge of the forest. Already she could hear the sea.

  She had not yet found the children. But it was dawn now. She had to return.

  The Woman would be angry.

  The Woman had sensed something. The Woman had sent Second Stolen to find the children—and she had not.

  She felt a sullen shame.