by Jack Ketchum
I heard what I wanted to hear and took the step.
The stone was heavy, wet and slimy on the bottom. My leg tore painfully as I bent to lift it. But the weight felt good in my hands.
I was lucky. The rock was standing free of other stones and lifting it hadn't made a sound. The animal feasted on, oblivious to everything but the blood smell and the eating sounds, nearly sated with pleasure.
The woman crooned and stroked, smoothing the short thick hair that gleamed in the light of the moon.
I guess I'd pictured leaning over him and crushing his skull. But that was impossible. I couldn't risk another step toward him. There were too many stones between me and him to warn him. He was four-and-a-half feet long. I wasn't even sure I could throw the rock that far, much less hope to hit his skull with any accuracy.
He stood straight legged on all fours, legs splayed slightly, neck and head down, back arched. I studied him. The back was vulnerable. Not to pitchforks, but to weight.
So I knew what I had to do.
I didn't even breathe.
I was a million years old. A caveman in the moonlight.
I raised it. It must have weighed thirtyfive pounds. I pulled together every inch of muscle. I arched my back and bent my arms at the elbow and then snapped forward-the rock and me with it.
The rock arced down.
It looked right.
I wondered if I'd catch Mary's hand in there.
I hit the bad leg much too hard. I stumbled, fell.
There was a snapping sound like rock against rock and I felt a sudden rush of despair. I heard Casey call my name. I hit solidly with both hands in front of me. Something roared beside me. I felt the heat of its body terribly near my face and head, smelled its raw moist breath.
I rolled over. Stones bruised my back and thighs. Suddenly I was staring into the enormous snapping mouth only inches away, spraying me with spittle, sounds like shots from a pistol-and beneath it, that immense ungodly roar. Casey screamed and the head jerked away from me.
She'd used the pitchfork.
Two of the tines had entered its neck at the shoulder. She was strong and she'd sunk them deep.
The body whipped around.
I saw where the rock had hit him. His back legs were dragging, as useless as Casey's arm. I felt a savage flush of pleasure. We'd broken him, skewered him. Casey held on.
The woman was on her feet and moving toward them.
I lunged at her, grabbed her by the legs and pulled her down. The legs felt scaly in my hands, dry as leather. The woman whirled and shrieked at me, pounding me with her hands. I saw her face. Eyes dark and glittering. A crone's face, a Halloween mask, pointed, webbed and shrill. Waves of foam spilling out of her toothless mouth, over her chin. Her breath a reek of corpses.
Beside me the dog whipped side to side. And still Casey held the pitchfork, leaning her weight into the handle, sinking it deeper.
Leaning in too far.
The dog screamed, dug in with his front paws and heaved. His shoulder muscles rippled, his eyes tossed and rolled. I knew what he was going to do. It was impossible but I saw it coming. I tried to warn her.
"Casey! Drop it!"
I reached for a rock. I pulled myself up over the woman until I straddled her. Brittle claws broke off along my cheek. I felt the blood
well up. I saw her dark eyes close a split second before I hit her.
The nose broke open. The cheekbones fell away at a strange, sunken angle The legs kicked and trembled. I looked up.
The dog heaved.
The muscles in his neck were thick and hard as rigging. The pain must have been amazing but there was nothing in him but a crazy meanness now. I could see Casey's grip faltering on the pitchfork. The dog lurched toward her, sinking it deeper. He got it into him good and solid and then he jerked it away from her as though she were a child in a bad match of tug-of-war.
He got free of her.
And then he hauled himself toward her.
At her. A fast, drunken lunge. While she struggled for balance.
I was on my feet, trying to get to him on the other side, to the handle of the pitchfork, to push it so far into him that it would stop him. It quivered like a bowstring. My foot slowed me down.
Just enough.
I had my hands on the handle as he went for her again and even the crippled arm worked somehow as she tried to fend him off, the immense heavy bulk of him that tore up high into her neck below the chin and ripped her apart and covered them both with ash ower of hri0ht hloorl
I screamed.
The animal pulled her down, its right front paw tearing four long gashes from the base of her neck to her stomach.
I don't even think she felt them.
But I did.
I had the handle by then. I had it and I used it. I was screeching with rage and pain and I pushed, screamed and pushed with all my strength, the image of her open mouth and eyes searing into my brain.
The animal let go of her and tried to shake me, just as it had done to her. It thrashed at me. Snapped. Pulled. But I was crazy then, and I was using two good hands instead of one and I stayed on, riding him on the end of a long sharp stick, pressing it deeper with a power I never knew I had, riding him down into the night.
There was blood rolling off his shoulder and I saw it change suddenly from a dark ooze to a bright arterial spray. And then he was more than even my rage and hatred could contain.
He hit one side of the cave and then the other. The mouth foamed and spilled. The useless hind legs began to twitch. Its howling chilled me to the bone.
A moment later the massive head turned upward one last time. The mouth opened and closed as though baying at the far unseen moon. Its head moved slowly down. Its cloudy eyes froze like small round stones.
I went to Casey.
I had to crawl. My body was trembling with exhaustion and something else, something close to shock. I felt myself moving in and out of reality as though a drug were working in me. I would see her there just beyond me, blue eyes open wide, lips parted. I'd see the tides of red sliding over her body. And then she'd be alive and laughing at me across a long white beach, she'd be upstairs in my apartment walking slowly toward me, I'd touch her, smell her hair, her skin.
I'd feel the sea worn stones beneath my hands and knees and that would bring me back. I didn't want to come back. I moved toward her. It was slow and hard, like moving through deep water.
I had nearly reached her when I saw him standing there.
Ben Crouch.
He was tall, hard, powerful. His hair was long and matted as Mary's had been. His beard was sparse, long in patches, almost nonexistent elsewhere. The clothes were filthy rags, shapeless, torn. His arms were bare. The muscles in them bunched and shifted as he clenched his long yellow fingers into fists. I felt the strength of him. It was like being in the presence of the dog again. It pulsed off him in angry waves and crashed like breakers against the walls of the cave.
His small dark eyes played slowly across the room, over all of us there, and then came to rest on me.
Casey's axe handle lay at his feet. He stooped slowly to pick it up.
His gaze never left me.
I had expected to see imbecility in his eyes. It wasn't there. I felt him measuring me. His mouth was set in a thin taut line. Rafferty
was wrong. All of us were wrong. It was no idiot standing there. He was far more dangerous than that.
On the axe handle his grip had turned the knuckles white.
I filled each hand with a stone. Puny things to use against him. My strength had not returned to me. I waited.
He looked at Casey.
Then at the dog.
Then at Mary. He looked at her for a long time.
And then his eyes returned to me.
As I say, my mind was not quite working right just then.
And I'm not sure it is at all possible to see your own face reflected in the face of another. I've already told you that there
was a feeling of being drugged by then. But that's what I seemed to see there. My own face. Me in him. The same loss. The same fear and frustration and anger. And finally, the same mute empty resignation.
My stomach rolled, my head tumbled. I closed my eyes for a moment.
When I opened them, he was gone.
They found us on the pebble beach.
They thought we both were dead, because I wasn't responding to much by then. We were lying together, and I guess I'd arranged her arms around me somehow. A lot of that's missing, and I don't necessarily want it back.
I wonder how I got her down there.
I never could have carried her, not with my leg the way it was. So I suppose I dragged her down, just to get us out of there. But I don't remember that either.
I have no idea how long we waited.
There were two parties, one that came through the tunnel like we had, another searching along the beach. I'm told they arrived at nearly the same time, the second group a bit behind the first. Kim was with the second party. They wouldn't let her go in through the wall.
She says that the first she saw of me was one of the policemen wrapping me in a blanket. There was a second blanket covering Casey. I was glad she hadn't seen her. Gladder still that she hadn't seen Steven.
She'd pointed out the entrance to them, and that was all. They said it was possibly dangerous.
Days later, we almost laughed at that.
+ +
I was sedated, hospitalized, treated for the leg wound and assorted cuts and bruises.
My parents came to visit, and they each had the good grace not to mention how stupid it all had been. My mother thanked god a lot. She seemed nervous all the time and astonished that I'd lived. My father always seemed to carry a kind of hearty seriousness about him around me, as though we were both somehow transported back to World War II and I was his bunkmate, who'd had the bad fortune to get himself shot but who would doubtlessly recover. Strangely, I appreciated that.
Rafferty came by.
It was awkward. About all he could do was tell me how sorry he was and shake his head in wonderment. I think he felt a little responsible. As though it all went back to that day we went through the garbage cans together. I tried to reassure him. Thought maybe, in a way, it did.
I learned from Rafferty that all they'd ever found of Ben Crouch was a set of footprints leading down the beach which stopped in the dark wet sand at the tide line. Drowned? Everyone seemed to think so. I hoped not. I sincerely hoped not.
And still do.
Kim was there constantly. "When you're up to it," she said, "I want to know how it was. Not now, but sometime."
She never mentioned it after that. She'd just sit long hours holding my hand and watching me stare off into space, into blue eyes and sunlight, and she didn't disturb me and didn't need to talk. I appreciated that most of all.
Once I was out I saw a lot of Kim. My mother once hinted that she thought it might turn into something. It did, but not the way she was thinking. It became a friendship, and a strong one-one I maintain to this day with letters and phone calls. She's five hundred miles away now. Her husband understands.
One afternoon toward the end of August, I made good on a promise to tell her what went on in there. It was rough on both of us but worth it. We sat in Harmon's for a long time afterward, sipping cokes, saying nothing.
By then I knew I was leaving town, going to Boston. I had a job there that my dad had arranged for me, and I was hoping a small Beacon Hill school was going to accept me for the fall term. As it turned out I did get in. Just barely. She was returning to Chestnut Hill. There was no staying in Dead River after what happened. Not for either of us.
Kim never saw the town again.
I went home now and then to visit my folks. But it was never good for me. It was strictly duty.
Anyway, we sat there a long time while hamburgers slid in and out of the microwave and sodas were poured and people came and went, and I got to thinking about Casey and that last time we'd had together when she'd said she loved me, and how changed she was by then. I knew it was finally clear to her as it was to me that the end of all the useless risk was not thrills but waste and death, a death from within-and that our being in love had finally repudiated all that, and we were strangely happy. In the midst of all the terror, we were happy. The caves had shown us the worst the world could do to you, and for just a moment, something of the best.
I was going to Boston because I wasn't dying anymore. Inside, I felt cleaner than I'd ever been.
I tried to explain that to Kim.
"You've got a second chance, "she said. "Me too. So do I." Then she shook her head. "Steve and Casey they were both so good at the end."
A year ago last December I drove by the Crouch place and there was smoke coming out of the chimney. Someone was living there. I wondered if they knew. I asked Rafferty.
"Sure, they know. Everybody does. But the guy living there is just a caretaker. He'll be there two or three months, tops, while the surveyors and execs do their work. You know who owns the property now?
Central Maine Power. The town bought it from the bank just like everybody wanted them to do for Ben and Mary. Then CMP bought it from the town. Scuttlebutt is that what we're going to have there is a waste dump from the nuclear plant in Wiscassett. Ain't that a killer?
Nobody knows for sure, of course. But god knows it
would be just like the town fathers. Bring some industry into town.
Some jobs. And of course, ten years down the road you kill the fish."
He paid some serious attention to his beer.
"That house is well over a hundred years old, you know."
I'm thirtyfive this coming November. Basically, college paid off pretty well for me. I'm employed.
I think of Casey.
I can't say I've been in love that way since. Not once. But then I never really expected to be. I think of her often, and sometimes it seems that everything I do is just a substitute for having her there.
Sometimes.
Because the woman I live with I'm close to.
She is switching careers at thirty-seven. And I'm writing this. It's no big thing, but both of us have our little risks.