by Jack Ketchum
She shook her head.
“The pain stops. A little more time, a little more therapy, and it stops.”
He looked at her, gave it a moment. He thought, trust me.
“Tell me about it, Leslie,” he said.
For a moment he thought it wouldn’t happen. Then she leaned back in the chair and closed her eyes and when she opened them again she was remembering.
“There was a boy,” she said. “I don’t know where he came from. Not one of the usual boys, I mean. Not one of theirs. Spanish, I think, Cuban or Mexican, about Patricia’s age. Patricia had had a lot of some kind of drugs and so had the boy and they both were naked and they put her down on the table, the altar, with the boy standing over her, everybody chanting while he put his penis in and started doing it. He was doing it a long while and it was hurting. And then Mr. Gannet reached over with this knife he had, this sacrifical knife which was very, very sharp, and he cut the boy . . . you know the place, right between the . . . the balls and the asshole? that skin there?”
Hooker nodded.
“And there was blood running out of him, all this blood, running down his legs and dripping off the altar but I guess because of the drugs or because it was doing it, I don’t know, he didn’t know it at first, he just kept doing it to her but Patricia knew, she could feel it pooling up under her real warm and wet and finally the boy got it too, he started screaming and went to pull out of her but by then Mr. Gannet was around the side of him and cut him across his throat with the knife and Patricia was screaming and the boy was coughing blood, it was all over the place, all over her, she tasted it, and all the others were around them catching the blood with bowls, drinking the blood from his neck and from between his legs and she could smell his shit and they were catching that in bowls too and smearing it across their faces, across their mouths, and instead of coming inside her he just released it, you know? He pissed inside her.
“Well, then the boy fell on top of her, he was dead, and Mr. Gannet handed Patricia the knife and told her to stab him in the name of Lord Satan and she was so scared and so mad at the boy—it was weird—so really completely furious at him, that she did. Stabbed him over and over over.”
She stopped, puzzled.
“I wonder why she was so angry at him? And not at them.”
He let her consider it a moment. There wasn’t time to get into it now though he knew perfectly well where the anger of one victim toward another usually came from. Another session.
“What happened then?”
She shrugged. “They ate the boy’s heart. They smeared her with his blood. Then they did it to her one at a time. Then they let her go upstairs to shower and then they let her sleep.”
Ten minutes after three. They’d got through it. It was over.
He felt shaken. Elated too. He couldn’t believe what he had here.
“I’m going to count to five, Leslie,” he said. “When I get to five I’ll be speaking to Patricia again and she’ll be awake, rested, relaxed and comfortable and she’ll remember none of this. You did very well. Thank you.”
“Doctor?”
“Yes?”
“Patricia’s scared again.”
“She needn’t be.”
“She knows I told. That I told you everything.”
“Patricia’s going to be fine, believe me. I’m going to count to five now, all right? Close your eyes.”
He counted.
Patricia opened her eyes and smiled.
“Well, how’d we do?” she said.
“You did beautifully.” He returned her smile. “I want to go over this with you as soon as possible. But I’ve got another patient outside right now.”
He consulted his book.
“How is three o’clock Wednesday—day after tomorrow?”
“Fine.”
“We’ve made a breakthrough here, Patricia. You should know that.”
“Really? Then can’t you . . . ?”
“No. I’m afraid not. Not right now. This is going to take some time. I’m scheduling you for two hours again Wednesday, all right?”
“All right.”
He handed her up the jacket on the floor in front of him. She didn’t even ask how it got there. She was practically an old pro at this by now. She gathered up her coat and purse and stood to leave. Hesitated and then turned back to him.
“Should I be worried?” she said.
“Worried about what?”
“I don’t know. Just . . . worried.”
“No. Not at all. We’re already through the worst of it. There are some very difficult issues to face, I won’t deny that for a moment, but now at least we know what we’re dealing with. We know for sure. It’s going to take some time. But you’re going to have a life, Patricia. A full, integrated life. Without hiding. Without fear.”
She smiled. “I’ll see you Wednesday, then, Doctor. And I guess . . . well, I guess we’ll just see.”
She stepped through the door to the waiting room and closed it gently behind her. He walked to the table beside her empty chair and turned off the recorder. Pushed the rewind button and heard the sibilant hiss of tape which was her voice and his so that he knew it hadn’t failed him and then heard it click back into the start position. He unpugged the recorder, walked to his desk, opened the top drawer and slipped it away.
In the waiting room outside he heard a chair thump against the wall. His three o’clock was probably impatient as hell right now, would probably need some soothing of feathers. That was all right. At the moment he felt up to anything. He walked across the room and opened the door.
The man crouched over her, a big man all in black—jacket, shoes, trousers—crouched over her so that Hooker could see her lifeless eyes and open mouth and the back of his head moving side to side just below her chin. There was blood all over the walls and the landscape paintings hung there to set his patients at ease, blood still pulsing up from out of her neck over and around both sides of the man’s head, drenching his long black greasy hair and he looked up at Hooker and grinned, his face a thin bright mask of red, teeth dripping paler blood, thinned with saliva. Hooker saw the knife in his left hand and the bloodstained silver pentagram around his neck.
“Session’s over,” hissed the man. “Patient’s cured.”
He stepped back through the doorway to his office as though somebody had shoved him. Tried to slam the door. The bloody left hand shot out against it with a crack and thrust him back into the room.
The man stood on the threshold.
For a moment as he approached him Hooker thought of all the people, all the structure, all the wealth of invention and will to survive that had just died out there in the waiting room and the only solace was that the tape would outlive them, the man would not know about the tape, his work would go on in a way, and in a way so would she go on, despite and not because of his ambitions for them both though it was not enough, not nearly enough for either of them or for her children. He thought publish or perish or both because of course that was what had done it to them and then heard the whimper of a dog which was his whimper as the knife came down and down.
Father and Son
The old man feels a cool flutter like the rush of air off tiny wings against his forearm and stirs in bed. He’s almost awake on this warm summer night but not quite. The gin takes hold again and drags him back to sleep.
The second time he feels it across his cheek and now he’s startled full awake, aware that this is not right somehow. Somehow a bird or a bat got into his bedroom and his heart is pounding which it shouldn’t be, not after two bypasses, the latest being just two weeks past.
He reaches across the yellowed sheets for the table-lamp and fumbles for the switch. The room snaps into focus. His eyes are still fine even though the rest of him’s shot to hell. He looks around and there’s no bird nor any bat either. He doesn’t know about birds necessarily but bats will go to ground in bright light, find someplace in the shadows to wait it out, like
under the bed or in some dark corner so he gets up, woozy from sleep and booze but easier in the heart and searches behind the night-table and bending slowly and carefully under the dresser and as best his skinny legs can manage checks beneath the bed.
Nothing. The bedroom door is closed. Windows too. He’s heard that even a warm breeze can kill a man his age if he lies in it long enough so he keeps them that way permanently. Which means there’s no way into the room and no way out.
Now ain’t that a hell of a thing he thinks. I felt something.
I know goddamn well I did.
And now he’s got to piss like a racehorse.
Old prick would have woke me up anyhow he thinks, sooner or later.
He opens the door and shuffles out into the hall, passes his son Joey’s room and peers in. Joey’s not there. The bed’s a mess but then it always is. Probably passed out in front of the TV again he thinks and realizes then that he can hear it dimly, canned laughter, some stupid sitcom, so he bypasses the bathroom for the moment and goes to the living room and there he is in the overstuffed chair. He’s snoring, a two-hundred-eighty pound rumble that’s nearly as loud as the laughter. There’s a bottle of that cheap bourbon he drinks between his legs so that it looks like he’s been jerking off on a whiskey bottle and fell asleep halfway through it.
The old man can remember real erections.
He can remember when neither of them were drunks.
It’s over fifteen years now since the bright winter morning his wife Ella and Joey’s wife Susan went out grocery shopping and then through the windshield of his pickup together—or in Susan’s case, only halfway through. He’d been seventy by then and said to hell with it. Joey’d been only fifty-two and weighed in at a trim one-hundred-eighty pounds. Good-looking boy. But Joey’d said to hell with it too.
The old man’s bladder’s killing him.
He turns and once inside the bathroom closes and locks the door because Joey has been known to blunder in unannounced, they both have, and sits his tired bones down on the toilet. For all the pressure up there you’d think it would come flooding out of him but it doesn’t, it takes a whole painful minute or more and once it’s started he finds himself gasping, that’s how good it feels.
He surveys the bathroom. It’s filthy, it’s desperate for a cleaning. There’s something growing on the shower curtain and it seems to have spread to the tub. Whisps and balls of hair all over the tiled floor, Joey’s hair mostly since his own is mostly gone. Even the soap is disgusting. They ought to hire somebody he thinks. He’s too weak to clean it and Joey’s too goddamn lazy.
He thinks about those wings. That breeze against his cheek.
The strangest goddamn thing.
He’s almost finished, it’s just dribbling out of him when he hears a crash, glass hitting the floor and breaking and skiddering across hardwood and then he hears a thud. He knows what it is, it can only be one thing. It can only be Joey. Suddenly his heart’s pounding again.
“Joey! You okay, son?”
Once his voice had a bellow to it. Now it’s all phlegm and gristle.
He flushes the toilet and uses the edge of the sink to help him stand and goes to the door and throws its lock. Pushes it.
The door budges half an inch and stops.
“Joey?”
Through the crack he can see him there lying belly-up on the floor. The bottom of the door in fact is pressing on what for Joey passes for a ribcage. He pushes the door again with the same results. He tries again, really getting his shoulder into it this time, his feet braced against the stained base of the toilet. He pushes with all his might, all eighty-five pounds of him, until he can’t push any more.
No go.
He curses the sad silly sonovabitch who made a bathroom door open outward rather than in.
He looks around for something to wedge into the crack. Maybe he can pry the door open. No plunger beneath the sink, Joey’s left it in the damn kitchen again. The toilet seat is thicker than the crack and he’s got no screwdriver to remove it anyway.
There’s no point yelling for help. The bathroom faces the overgrown back yard and the Mackenzies next door are his own driveway and their driveway away and they never come by. Never go near his place. It’s arguable if they’d help even if they did hear him, the Scots bastards.
No getting through that tiny window either.
He can’t count on anybody coming to his rescue. The liquor delivery was yesterday and the soda and junkfood and TV dinners today and neither is due again for another week. His friends are all dead and Joey’s had nobody since Susan died and the garage closed down and he started to seriously drink.
It looks like he’s going to have to stick around in here awhile. Till Joey comes to.
And then a sickening thought occurs to him. He has to sit back down on the toilet it’s so bad. A thought so perfectly formed and awful it makes him dizzy.
Joey’s own triple-bypass was a little over year ago. The doctors said the same thing they’d said to him.
Quit drinking.
They hadn’t. Neither of them.
So that there’s every goddamn chance in the world Joey might never come to. That Joey’s gone for good.
It’s a bathroom so water’s no problem. Booze is though. When the shakes start hitting him he drinks the rubbing alcohol and the aftershave and then Joey’s old dusty bottle of cologne. That staves them off for a while but then they’re at him again and so is the craving. He can’t do much but curse and scream and roll around on the floor holding his knees and jerking, spasming for God knows how long and by the time it’s over he’s pissed and shit his pyjamas and there are bruises all over him where he’s slammed into the toilet or the tub or the pipes.
It’s a bathroom so water’s no problem. Food is though. He has no sense of time in here not going through what he’s going through but he’s guessing it’s been a few days at least when the hunger finally gets to him so that it’s like a mad dog tearing at his stomach and even with Joey’s stink drifting in from the hallway he has to eat. He eats a half-full tube of toothpaste and then a full one, chases it with water. He tries a bar of soap but throws it right back up again. He shreds the toilet paper and swallows that. Anything to fill his stomach. The bottle of aspirin is tempting but he knows it’s going to kill him if he does so he flushes them down the toilet against the moment they might become inevitable.
He’s so weak he can barely sit up straight. He can barely shred the toilet paper and chew and swallow.
He’s in and out of focus all the time now, like even his eyes are betraying him. But it’s not his eyes, it’s the rest of him. He sleeps and doesn’t sleep and one is pretty much the same as the other. There’s nothing to do but sit or lie there thinking about the past and Ella and the place they used to have down by the river and his dead brother Henry and his dead sister Laurie and his parents both long dead but the one thing he thinks about most is how his son has killed him and when he thinks about that he often as not starts to cry thin miserable old-man’s tears because he maybe could have helped him had he not been so goddamn drunk himself, a disgusting excuse for a father and then he thinks about the wings.
He feels the wings.
Actually feels them now, the tiny brush of air against his cheek. Just like before.
And just like before they wake him up again. He’s been sleeping. He’s startled.
He hears voices outside, people entering the house, people having entered the goddamn house and they’re moving down the hallway toward Joey’s bloated fly-blown body on the floor and he pulls himself up to tell them he’s in here dammit he’s not dead yet and the wings rush away with his heart.
Thanks to Dale Meyers Cooper.
The Business
The cockroach was not too big but it was coming right at him, moving in that drunken way they have, a little to the left, a little to the right, appropriate in this place, moving past Mama’s beer spill on a trajectory that would take it directly yet indire
ctly to his Scotch.
“Hey, Billy,” he said to the barman. “pass me another napkin, will ya?”
Billy didn’t like him. Howard knew that. He couldn’t have cared less. He got service because he left a decent tip, and that was that. Billy handed him the cocktail napkin.
Howard squished the bug. If you had a potato chip stuffed with onion dip, that was what it felt like.
Mama didn’t notice. First, she was busy talking to his brother Norman and his bimbo soon-to-be-wife girlfriend Sonya, and second, Mama was going blind as a stump, bless her.