by Jack Ketchum
Table of Contents
Praise
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
Title Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
I
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
II
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
III
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
IV
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-One
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
V
Chapter Thirty-Four
Chapter Thirty-Five
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Chapter Thirty-Eight
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Forty
Chapter Forty-One
Chapter Forty-Two
Chapter Forty-Three
Chapter Forty-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
EPILOGUE
Chapter Forty-Seven
Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door
Teaser chapter
HIGH PRAISE FOR JACK KETCHUP AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR!
“The Girl Next Door is alive. It does not just promise terror, but actually delivers it.”
—Stephen King
“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
“This is the real stuff, an uncomfortable dip into the pitch blackness.”
—Locus
“The reader, even though repulsed by the story, cannot look away. Definitely NOT for the faint of heart.”
—Cemetery Dance
“Realism is what makes this novel so terrifying. The monsters are human, and all the more horrifying for it.”
—Afraid Magazine
“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
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
SHE WAKES
PEACEABLE KINGDOM
RED
THE LOST
A LEISURE BOOK®
June 2005
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
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New York, NY 10016
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”
The Girl Next Door copyright © 1989 by Dallas Mayr “Returns” copyright © 2002 by Dallas Mayr “Do You Love Your Wife?” copyright © 2005 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, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-8439-5543-0
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Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.
“You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?”
—Tom Waits
“I never want to hear the screams
Of the teenage girls in other people’s dreams.”
—The Specials
“The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee.”
—Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
Chapter One
You think you know about pain?
Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.
She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting—her own cat and a neighbor’s—and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back against her mother’s turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its way back down her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.
My second wife says that’s pain.
She doesn’t know shit, that woman.
Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.
There’s an image that haunts her.
She is driving down a rain-slick highway on a hot summer morning in a rented Volvo, her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully because she knows how treacherous new rain on hot streets can be, when a Volkswagen passes her and fishtails into her lane. Its rear bumper with the “Live Free or Die” plates slides over and kisses her grille. Almost gently. The rain does the rest. The Volvo reels, swerves, glides over an embankment and suddenly she and her lover are tumbling through space, they are weightless and turning, and up is down and then up and then down again. At some point the steering wheel breaks her shoulder. The rearview mirror cracks her wrist.
Then the rolling stops and she’s staring up at the gas pedal overhead. She looks for her lover but he isn’t there anymore; he’s disappeared, it’s magic. She finds the door on the driver’s side and opens it, crawls out onto wet grass, stands and peers through the rain. And this is the image that haunts her—a man like a sack of blood, flayed, skinned alive, lying in front of the car in a spray of glass spackled red.
This sack is her lover.
And this is why she’s closer. Even though she blocks what she knows—even though she sleeps nights.
She knows that pain is not just a matter of hurting, of her own startled body complaining at some invasion of the flesh.
Pain can work from the outside in.
I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its cruelest, purest form. Without drugs or sleep or even shock or coma to dull it for you.
You see it and you take it in. And then it’s you.
You’re host to a long white worm that gnaws and eats, growing, filling your intestines until finally you cough one morning and up comes the blind pale head of the thing sliding from your mouth like a second tongue.
No, my wives don’t know about that. Not exactly. Though Evelyn is close.
But I do.
You’ll have to trust me on that for starters.
I have for a very long
time.
I try to remember that we were all kids when these things happened, just kids, barely out of our Davy Crockett coonskin caps for God’s sake, not fully formed. It’s much too hard to believe that what I am today is what I was then except hidden now and disguised. Kids get second chances. I like to think I’m using mine.
Though after two divorces, bad ones, the worm is apt to gnaw a little.
Still I like to remember that it was the Fifties, a period of strange repressions, secrets, hysteria. I think about Joe McCarthy, though I barely remember thinking of him at all back then except to wonder what it was that would make my father race home from work every day to catch the committee hearings on TV I think about the Cold War. About air-raid drills in the school basement and films we saw of atomic testing—department-store mannequins imploding, blown across mockup living rooms, disintegrating, burning. About copies of Playboy and Man’s Action hidden in wax paper back by the brook, so moldy after a while that you hated to touch them. I think about Elvis being denounced by the Reverend Deitz at Grace Lutheran Church when I was ten and the rock ‘n’ roll riots at Alan Freed’s shows at the Paramount.
I say to myself something weird was happening, some great American boil about to burst. That it was happening all over, not just at Ruth’s house but everywhere.
And sometimes that makes it easier.
What we did.
I’m forty-one now. Born in 1946, seventeen months to the day after we dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima.
Matisse had just turned eighty.
I make a hundred fifty grand a year, working the floor on Wall Street. Two marriages, no kids. A home in Rye and a company apartment in the city. Most places I go I use limousines, though in Rye I drive a blue Mercedes.
It may be that I’m about to marry again. The woman I love knows nothing of what I’m writing here—nor did my other wives—and I don’t really know if I ever mean to tell her. Why should I? I’m successful, even-tempered, generous, a careful and considerate lover.
And nothing in my life has been right since the summer of 1958, when Ruth and Donny and Willie and all the rest of us met Meg Loughlin and her sister Susan.
Chapter Two
I was alone back by the brook, lying on my stomach across the Big Rock with a tin can in my hand. I was scooping up crayfish. I had two of them already in a larger can beside me. Little ones. I was looking for their mama.
The brook ran fast along either side of me. I could feel the spray on my bare feet dangling near the water. The water was cold, the sun warm.
I heard a sound in the bushes and looked up. The prettiest girl I’d ever seen was smiling at me over the embankment.
She had long tanned legs and long red hair tied back in a ponytail, wore shorts and a pale-colored blouse open at the neck. I was twelve and a half. She was older.
I remember smiling back at her, though I was rarely agreeable to strangers.
“Crayfish,” I said. I dumped out a tin of water.
“Really?”
I nodded.
“Big ones?”
“Not these. You can find them, though.”
“Can I see?”
She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me.
Her eyes were green. She looked around.
To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it. You had room for four kids sitting or six standing up. It had been a pirate ship, Nemo’s Nautilus, and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the water was maybe three and a half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, not scared at all.
“We call this the Big Rock,” I said. “We used to, I mean. When we were kids.”
“I like it,” she said. “Can I see the crayfish? I’m Meg.”
“I’m David. Sure.”
She peered down into the can. Time went by and we said nothing. She studied them. Then she straightened up again.
“Neat.”
“I just catch ‘em and look at ’em awhile and then let them go.”
“Do they bite?”
“The big ones do. They can’t hurt you, though. And the little ones just try to run.”
“They look like lobsters.”
“You never saw a crayfish before?”
“Don’t think they have them in New York City.” She laughed. I didn’t mind. “We get lobsters, though. They can hurt you.”
“Can you keep one? I mean, you can’t keep a lobster like a pet or anything, right?”
She laughed again. “No. You eat them.”
“You can’t keep a crayfish either. They die. One day or maybe two, tops. I hear people eat them too, though.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. Some do. In Louisiana or Florida or someplace.”
We looked down into the can.
“I don’t know,” she said, smiling. “There’s not a whole lot to eat down there.”
“Let’s get some big ones.”
We lay across the Rock side by side. I took the can and slipped both arms down into the brook. The trick was to turn the stones one at a time, slowly so as not to muddy the water, then have the can there ready for whatever scooted out from under. The water was so deep I had my shortsleeve shirt rolled all the way up to my shoulders. I was aware of how long and skinny my arms must look to her. I know they looked that way to me.
I felt pretty strange beside her, actually. Uncomfortable but excited. She was different from the other girls I knew, from Denise or Cheryl on the block or even the girls at school. For one thing she was maybe a hundred times prettier. As far as I was concerned she was prettier than Natalie Wood. Probably she was smarter than the girls I knew too, more sophisticated. She lived in New York City after all and had eaten lobsters. And she moved just like a boy. She had this strong hard body and easy grace about her.
All that made me nervous and I missed the first one. Not an enormous crayfish but bigger than what we had. It scudded backward beneath the Rock.
She asked if she could try. I gave her the can.
“New York City, huh?”
“Yup.”
She rolled up her sleeves and dipped down into the water. And that was when I noticed the scar.
“Jeez. What’s that?”
It started just inside her left elbow and ran down to the wrist like a long pink twisted worm. She saw where I was looking.
“Accident,” she said. “We were in a car.” Then she looked back into the water where you could see her reflection shimmering.
“Jeez.”
But then she didn’t seem to want to talk much after that.
“Got any more of ’em?”
I don’t know why scars are always so fascinating to boys, but they are, it’s a fact of life, and I just couldn’t help it. I couldn’t shut up about it yet. Even though I knew she wanted me to, even though we’d just met. I watched her turn over a rock. There was nothing under it. She did it correctly though; she didn’t muddy the water. I thought she was terrific.
She shrugged.
“A few. That’s the worst.”
“Can I see ’em?”
“No. I don’t think so.”
She laughed and looked at me a certain way and I got the message. And then I did shut up for a while.
She turned another rock. Nothing.
“I guess it was a bad one, huh? The accident?”
She didn’t answer that at all and I didn’t blame her. I knew how stupid and awkward it sounded, how insensitive, the moment I said it. I blushed and was glad she wasn’t looking.
Then she got one.
The rock slid over and the crayfish backed right out into the can and all she had to do was bring it up.
She poured off some water and tilted the can toward the sunlight. You could see that nice gold color they have. Its tail was up and its pincers waving and it was stalking the bottom of the can, looking for somebody to fight.
“You got her!”
“First try!”
“Great! She’s really great.”
“Let’s put her in with the others.”
She poured the water out slowly so as not to disturb her or lose her exactly the way you were supposed to, though nobody had told her, and then when there was only an inch or so left in the can, plunked her into the bigger can. The two that were already in there gave her plenty of room. That was good because crayfish would kill each other sometimes, they’d kill their own kind, and these two others were just little guys.
In a while the new one calmed down and we sat there watching her. She looked primitive, efficient, deadly, beautiful. Very pretty color and very sleek of design.
I stuck my finger in the can to stir her up again.
“Don’t.”
Her hand was on my arm. It was cool and soft.
I took my finger out again.
I offered her a stick of Wrigley’s and took one myself. Then all you could hear for a while was the wind whooshing through the tall thin grass across the embankment and rustling the brush along the brook and the sound of the brook running fast from last night’s rain, and us chewing.
“You’ll put them back, right? You promise?”
“Sure. I always do.”
“Good.”
She sighed and then stood up.
“I’ve got to get back I guess. We’ve got shopping to do. But I wanted to look around first thing. I mean, we’ve never had a woods before. Thanks, David. It was fun.”