Old Flames

by Jack Ketchum

  She’d already seen the shotgun. Very up close and personal.

  She behaved.

  And as a result the whippings and the torture became less frequent. She hardly even saw the headbox anymore. They let her out of the Long Box now for long periods at a time. Insisting that she exercise for the baby’s sake. Upper body bends. Belly-crunches. Leg lifts. Diagonal curls. Her diet still consisted mainly of sandwiches but they gave her juice and and milk and herbal tea and the occasional leftover Chinese takeout or slice of pizza.

  She was allowed to dress.

  Faded print house coats or shifts that even with her belly still hung loose on her frame. Kath said they’d belonged to her mother and they looked it. Cheap old ladies’ clothes that were hopelessly out of style. But she was as grateful for them as she’d have been for Ralph Lauren originals. She was not allowed pan ties or a bra.

  She still had to strip on demand.

  But it was Kath these days who did most of the demanding.

  After the first three months or so Stephen had changed. She could pinpoint easily exactly when the change began.

  The last time she’d disobeyed him.

  The first and only time she’d tried to run.

  She was upstairs by then, out of the cellar a good part of every eve ning and weekends so she could do the house work Stephen and Kath both hated. At first she was appalled at the state of the place. A nice place basically, or it could have been. Two bedrooms, one bath, a living room, a small kitchen and dining area and an attic, built just after the end of World War II on somebody’s GI Bill. But everywhere evidence of casual filth and disorder. A film of grime over everything in the bathroom, balls of hair and dust in every corner, crusted toothpaste in the sink. Dust thick on all the furniture. The drapes needed washing. The rugs needed washing. The kitchen was a greasy mess.

  But she set to all of it gladly. Anything to relieve the isolation and boredom and depression of the basement. At the kitchen sink she could look out a window to the yard and the trees and squirrels and the birds pecking at the lawn and rarely even think that beyond the trees they’d buried a man. She could open the windows and let in cool fresh air.

  Though she set to it carefully too. Any mistakes and she was up on the X-frame again or tied to the chair, her pregnancy be damned.

  The cat seemed always at her feet.

  After a while she got the house in shape and from then on it was only maintenance. Vacuuming, dusting, laundry, cleaning after meals.

  The bathroom was spotless. The windows gleamed in the sun.

  Kath laughed. “You’re a pretty good slave,” she said.

  She was.

  There were times during her third trimester when her back ached terribly and she felt very short of breath. She knew that the shortness of breath was her uterus expanded and pushing up against her diaphragm. She had to explain this to Stephen. Who’d get annoyed with her whenever she stopped working. She was relieved when the baby dropped lower in her abdomen and made breathing easier.

  For a while she’d hated the baby. The baby was the reason for her captivity. But she’d gotten used to the notion of actually having her now. Of bringing her to term and delivering.

  She’d gotten used to so much else. It wasn’t hard to get used to this.

  Then one sunny September day there was nobody around to watch her. Nobody.

  No Kath. No Stephen.

  She realized this while she was letting the cat out through the back door.

  The silence. The emptiness. Looming with potential.

  There was nobody in the whole damn house but her, free upstairs. Just finishing up the breakfast dishes.

  Kath had driven into town to do the usual Saturday shopping.

  She didn’t know where Stephen was. He just wasn’t there. Though his pickup was in the driveway.

  She couldn’t believe it. She looked around to be sure. The bedrooms, the bathroom, the cellar. Even walked upstairs to the attic. She peered out the windows front and back. Nobody there. The narrow dirt road that wound down the hill to the mailbox was empty. So was the back yard all the way to the woods. The garage door was closed. He had a shop there but if he were in it he’d have left the door open and even in broad daylight she knew a light would be on inside.

  She could leave. She could do it. She could walk away.

  She could run.

  Her heart was pounding. What about the Organization? What would they do if she got away? She could warn everyone, couldn’t she? Of course she could. Tell her mother and father and Greg and the kids’ parents and get the cops to protect them. Get these two arrested. Make them pay.

  For kidnapping. For murder.

  The Organization had a long reach, they said. They could wait and bide their time and even if Kath and Stephen were locked up in jail they’d get her. Get all of them. That was what they said.

  But how could she not run? How could she not try?

  Oh, god. She couldn’t.

  She walked to the front door and did the simplest, most amazing thing.

  She opened it.

  Walked down the wooden stairs she had walked only once before in all these months and that was going up, not down them, walked them slowly and carefully because they creaked and moaned under her feet and she was looking for him side to side all the time, around the tall hedges that needed trimming, along the line of trees far off to her right and then she was on the gravel path that led through the front yard to the road and she was running, aware of her bulk and the weakness of her legs, the legs complaining of too little exercise and her breath coming hard and then heard him behind her on the gravel, turned and saw him drop the rake why hadn’t she checked the sides of the house? he was out there raking the leaves for god’s sake and she stopped dead in her tracks because there was no way she was going to outrun him and stood her ground and looked at him.

  He stopped running. Walked up to her, shaking his head, brows knit tight.

  Then slapped her to the ground.

  “Get up,” he said. “Get your ass up!”

  He grabbed her by the arm and hauled her to her feet. Marched her back to the house, up the stairs and in. The kiss of warm sunlight disappeared behind her back like a fair-weather friend. He slammed the door. She was crying so hard she could barely see and her ear was ringing where he’d slapped her and throbbed with pain. He moved her through the house to the cellar stairs and down into the cold dark.

  “You fat fucking cow! Strip! Get your ass over to the X-frame. You run from me?”

  So furious he was spitting.

  “Turn around! Spread your legs. Get your arms up.”

  He strapped her into the manacles.

  “You run from me, you bitch? I ought to break your fucking legs. You fat sow. You cunt!”

  “Please, Stephen. The baby…”

  It was her only card.

  He was pacing the cellar, the studded whip in hand, slapping it against his jeans. Screaming at her.

  “Fuck the baby! Fuck you! You know what I ought to do? You know what I really ought to do? I ought to kill you, you little bitch. I ought to kill you right now and to hell with the baby. You try to run from me? You want to go get a cop? You want to put the cops on me? Four months you been here. Four fucking months I put up with you and your bullshit and this is what I get? You little cunt. I ought to kill you and fuck the baby, to hell with the baby, screw the fucking baby.”

  He threw the whip at her. The heavy knotted handle struck her in the eye. He moved swiftly to the worktable and came back with the red Swiss army knife in his hand open to the cutting blade. His eyes glittered.

  “You want to fuck around? You want to call the cops on me? Well how ’bout we give ’em something. How ’bout we really give ’em something? How ’bout we do this?”

  He stabbed her. The soft flesh below her left shoulder.

  She felt the sudden punch of the thing and the searing burst of pain.

  “How ’bout we do this?”

&
nbsp; He shoved the knife into her inner thigh. The pain was a hammer and a snake bite. Her body slammed back against the X-frame and she screamed. Through the sudden panic she saw where he was going. The hand drew back. Pointed at her swollen abdomen.

  “How ’bout we…”

  “STEPHENNOPLEEEASETHEBABY!” she wailed.

  He stopped. Stared at her.

  His face went pale. He staggered once and lowered the knife and then looked away from her, looked down at the floor as though studying something there and then walked slowly over to the worktable and folded back the blade of the knife and put it carefully down. Then just stood there staring at the table. Blood was rolling down her side over her hip and down her thigh across her calf and pooling at her foot. She hung there shaking. Sobbing, watching him.

  “I better clean you up,” he murmured. “I better clean up the mess you made. Before Kath comes home.”

  Now, a month later, those were practically his last words to her.

  He seemed to have lost interest.

  She was damn well glad of that but worried as to why. He moped around the house, drank too much beer at night in front of the TV. Mornings Kath would let her out of the Long Box and half the time he’d be still in bed or only just getting up. She’d see the empty bottles. There were times beads of sweat would break out over his forehead. For no apparent reason. He walked with a kind of stoop. His muscle tone seemed to have gone slack. He seemed almost as depressed as she was. Kath said he was worried about money, with taxes and mortgage payments being what they were. But Sara thought it was something else.

  She didn’t know why she should be worried. So what if he was depressed? Why should she care? The man had almost killed her. She didn’t know what it signified or why it should concern her but it did.

  Her apprehension resolved itself into something infinitely worse the week before Halloween when she went up into the attic looking for a replacement bag for the vacuum cleaner. And saw what they’d stored there.

  “When this is over I want to find another,” he said.

  They were lying in bed back to back. She guessed he couldn’t sleep.

  She knew what he meant and she didn’t like it one bit. The baby was supposed to be the glue. The baby was supposed to be sufficient. How long did he think this was going to go on? With how many?

  “Jesus, Stephen. With a baby in the house?”

  He snorted. “The baby won’t know.”

  “What about us? What about our lives? What about our friends? The baby’s got to have friends and so do we.”

  “The baby isn’t going to need any friends the first year or two. I want somebody younger this time, Kath. She’s too fucking old. She doesn’t do it for me. She’s fucking disgusting.”

  He was serious for god’s sake. She thought back to Shawna, the first one. She’d been younger all right. Sixteen.

  Buried in back a few feet away from McCann.

  He’d been playing with electricity. They hadn’t known she had a bad heart.

  How many?

  “Stephen, I want my life back. I want to have Gail over. I want to go out to dinner and a movie sometimes. I mean, is that a lot to ask?”

  “I’m talking about a year or two. Once the baby’s older I’ll…settle down.”

  Sure. Sure you will.

  “We’ll take it easy for a while. But right now, you know. I’ve got needs.”

  Like his needs were the most ordinary, matter-of-fact thing in the world.

  “Stephen…”

  “Look. You want it to be you again? Is that what you want?”

  She did not.

  But she didn’t want this either.

  “We’re going to get caught. You know that. We try again, we’re gonna get caught.”

  “That’s paranoid. We just have to be careful, that’s all. Like always.”

  She turned to him.

  “Do you realize how close we came? With McCann? What if Elsie or somebody else had seen us and not just him? We’re lucky we didn’t get caught right there.”

  “Unlucky, Kath. McCann was a one-in-a-million shot for chrissake. Besides, we won’t be taking her in front of some crowd at an abortion clinic. We’ll be taking her off the street. Any street. It’ll be completely anonymous. Just like Shawna was.”

  She couldn’t believe he was saying this.

  “Listen to yourself. Don’t you get it? You fucking killed Shawna!”

  He turned and got up on one elbow and pointed his finger at her inches from her face. Jabbing at her.

  “Don’t talk to me like that, Kath. You hear me? Not ever.”

  He stared at her a long moment and then rolled over again.

  “I’m your husband. You married me better or worse. You’ll do as I say.”

  He was sick of her. Sick of her whining and sick of her sloppy body and sloppy habits. He wondered what the hell kind of mother she was going to make. He thought that maybe he’d been wrong about this all along. Right from the start. That maybe a kid was going to be one great big pain in the ass, period.

  He was even more sick of Sara Foster. Her body repulsed him. The swollen blue-veined breasts, the stretch marks, the varicose veins in the backs of her knees. Even her hair had lost its sheen. And the belly itself—the thing itself. She was living with a parasite inside her body for god’s sake. How could a woman do that? He wouldn’t tell Kath this but experience was the best teacher and he’d privately decided that the Movement was all wrong. It wasn’t a kid in there, not yet. Once it was born it would be, sure. But for now it was nothing more than a tiny parasite feeding off her and depending on her for everything from its oxygen and food to dumping its piss and shit.

  The whole damn thing was gross.

  He couldn’t kill her, hell, he couldn’t even play with her now the way he’d played with her before, it was ashes with her body being what it was and ashes in the face of what he really wanted to do because he couldn’t wait to kill her. It was the only thing left he hadn’t done to the bitch when you came right down to it and he knew he’d come then which he hadn’t lately, hadn’t really come.

  They’d cut and pull and tear it out of her and that’d be the end of the miserable fucking life of Sara Foster.

  That in mind, he slept.

  FIFTEEN

  “Kath. Please. What is this?”

  There in the attic.

  A stainless steel cart on wheels. Sponges. Sterile pads, gauze pads. Scalpels and forceps. A box of disposable syringes. Packages of sterile drapes. An IV drip. The question was rhetorical. The need to ask it, frightening.

  She knew damn well what it was.

  This wasn’t her first delivery.

  “You’re planning to do it here? In the house? You can’t be.”

  “Of course we are.” She laughed. “What did you think, we’re bringing you to the hospital? You’d have the cops on us in seconds.”

  “No I wouldn’t.”

  Kath patted her shoulder. “Don’t shit a shitter, Sara. Now come on back downstairs. Don’t worry about that stuff.”

  “I wouldn’t say anything. I swear!”

  “Right. Come on or I’m telling Stephen.”

  She was losing her mind. She had to be. This couldn’t be happening.

  “Wait. All right. Wait. These things here. What are they?”

  “Clamps.”

  They were huge.

  “And this?”

  “A spreader.”

  “My god. What for?”

  She shrugged. “We might have to…you know, a cesarean section. You use them to hold back the organs…stomach, whatever. The spreader’s for the ribs.”

  “Jesus christ, Kath!”

  “You got to be prepared, right? You might have complications.”

  “I’m not going to have any complications!”

  Kath headed for the stairs. Sara reached out and grabbed her arm. Something she had never dared to do before. But she couldn’t let it go at this.

  “Listen.
Listen to me. Who told you to get all this? A doctor?”

  “No doctor.”

  “You’re not even going to get me a doctor? The Organization can’t spare a doctor?”

  “We don’t need a doctor. I’m a nurse, remember? Look, we’ve got everything here. Anesthetics, whatever. Anything you’re going to need. Don’t get all upset about it for chrissake. Midwives deliver babies all the time.”

  “Midwives don’t perform surgery, Kath!”

  “Well, neither will we. Not unless we have to.”

  She looked away, up to the high naked wooden beams of the ceiling.

  And in that moment Sara simply didn’t believe her.

  She felt herself flush and the contents of her stomach rise.

  My god, she thought. I’ve been such a fool. Such a terrible fool. I never saw it.

  I never saw it coming.

  There weren’t even any stirrups. They’d never even considered normal delivery.

  This was what they were planning—had been all along. She was their little experiment. The baby would be the fruit of that experiment. But Sara was as expendable as one of these throw-away syringes here. In fact she had to be expendable. They couldn’t keep her captive here forever for god’s sake, not even the Organization could isolate her that much. Sooner or later somebody would come around to visit. Sooner or later somebody from the outside was going to know.

  Certainty washed over her. Washed her clean.

  They were going to kill her.

  The birthing was how.

  The Organization be damned. It was time to see what she could do about that.

  She was well into her seventh month.

  It was time to see right now.

  Should have locked the damn door, she thought. Fucking stupid not to. It was sloppy.

  Stephen would be pissed. But it was Stephen’s fault too.

  There was nothing to do but try to repair the damages.

  They sat at the dining room table over some hot herbal tea. Grandma’s Tummy Mint. Celestial Seasonings. She supposed it was meant to be nice and reassuring. It wasn’t. Outside the window the day was gray and still and dark. In a couple of weeks kids would be out trick-or-treating. She wondered if any of them would bother to come out this way.