Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  RAVE REVIEWS FOR JACK KETCHUM!

  “Ketchum has become a kind of hero to those of us who write tales of terror and suspense. He is, quite simply, one of the best in the business.”

  —Stephen King

  “Ketchum writes with economy and power, in sentences that tighten like noose wire.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “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

  “Ketchum’s prose is tight and spare, without a single misplaced word.”

  —Cinescape.com

  “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

  “Jack Ketchum has been hailed as a writer whose unflinching gaze at man’s darkness is disturbingly thought-provoking. Consistently, he’s displayed a knack for taking readers to uncomfortable places, daring them to stare harsh reality in the eye.”

  —Shroud Magazine

  Other books by Jack Ketchum:

  JOYRIDE

  COVER

  OLD FLAMES

  TRIAGE (anthology)

  OFFSPRING

  OFF SEASON

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  SHE WAKES

  RED

  THE LOST

  JACK KETCHUM

  PEACEABLE KINGDOM

  DORCHESTER PUBLISHING

  January 2011

  Published by

  Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  200 Madison Avenue

  New York, NY 10016

  Copyright © 2003 by Dallas Mayr

  For individual story copyrights, see page 416.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 13: 978-1-4285-1236-8

  E-ISBN: 978-1-4285-1231-3

  The “DP” logo is the property of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.

  Printed in the United States of America.

  Visit us online at www.dorchesterpub.com.

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  The Rifle

  The Box

  Mail Order

  Luck

  The Haunt

  Megan’s Law

  If Memory Serves

  Father and Son

  The Business

  Mother and Daughter

  When the Penny Drops

  Rabid Squirrels in Love

  Sundays

  Twins

  Amid the Walking Wounded

  The Great San Diego Sleazy Bimbo Massacre

  The Holding Cell

  The Work

  The Best

  Redemption

  The Exit at Toledo Blade Boulevard

  Chain Letter

  Forever

  Gone

  Closing Time

  The Rose

  The Turning

  To Suit the Crime

  Lines: or Like Franco, Elvis Is Still Dead

  The Visitor

  Snakes

  Firedance

  Afterword

  Introduction

  I don’t know why you put up with me.

  It’s a matter of consistency. Or in my case, inconsistency.

  As a writer I’m all over the place.

  Take the books. Suppose you came to my stuff through Off Season way back when and you kinda liked its violent streak and its extreme stance so you’re looking for more of the same. You have to wait a while—four whole years—and then when you finally do find a new Ketchum title on the racks what do you get? Hide and Seek. A quiet little first-person suspense story, a love story no less with, yeah, some nasty low-ball curves thrown at you at the end but compared to the first book, practically good-natured.

  Or here’s another scenario. Suppose the first book of mine you read is Hide and Seek, and you miss Cover completely—hell, almost everybody did—and the next thing you find is The Girl Next Door. Now I’m going to do a lot of supposing here and assume that you ignore the ditsy skullheaded cheerleader on the cover, you assume it’s not Ketchum doing an R.L. Stine ripoff and actually buy the thing and sit down to read it and at first it’s another quiet little first-person memoir-type novel so you’re comfortable with that from having read Hide and Seek, so you get a little into it and then a little more into it and finally you say . . .

  . . . what the hell is this shit! Has he gone totally out of his fucking mind?

  Then maybe your first Ketchum book’s She Wakes. Ancient Greek Gods and Goddesses, zombies and cats and snakes all chasing one another all over the Aegean. Then you pick up Red.

  Hmmm. That’s interesting.

  This one seems to be about an old guy and his dog.

  Has he gone totally out of his mind?

  You get the point.

  Still, should you need any further proof of my inconsistency, that’s what this volume is about—to rid you of any notion other than that once and for all. And I welcome it wholeheartedly. The short-fiction form is where a writer gets to move around most anyway. Unlike a novel you don’t have to live with an idea or a set of ideas for six months or a year, so as long as you obey whatever idea you do have you can zig and zag to your heart’s delight. Experiment. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. Get in, get out, go on to something else.

  So there’s stuff in here like “To Suit the Crime” that’s as ice-cold heartless as anything I’ve ever done and stuff like “Firedance” which is almost cuddly. Surreal stories like “The Holding Cell” and “Chain Letter” and the odd black comedy like “The Haunt” or “The Business.” You even get my one and only vampire story in “The Turning” and an honest-to-God UFO yarn in “Amid the Walking Wounded.”

  There’s even a Western.

  As I say, I’m all over the place. And I think that I’ve been very fortunate in that most of my readers seem to expect that of me by now and apparently have no real urge to pin me down. Peter Straub once paid me the compliment of saying that he thought a lot of people came to my writing for the wrong reasons but stuck with me for the right ones. I suspect there’s some truth in that.

  But there’s also the fact that in my experience most of my readers are first and foremost plain old-fashioned readers. Good readers. They’re not looking for cozy brand-name output and that means I don’t have to give it to ’em. They’re not lazy and have little patience with pre-fab beach-bag books or Oprah’s opine du jour. They’re questers.

  They know that every now and then you’re gonna get lucky and pure gold like King and Straub’s Black House will simply drop into your lap at the local supermarket but after that, if your bent is horror and suspense fiction, you’re gonna have to get you
r hands dirty and root around for more. Find a Ramsey Campbell or an Edward Lee. They expect diversity and search it out. They want what all good readers want—to be taken somewhere in a book or a story that’s really worth visiting for a while. Maybe even worth thinking about after.

  If that place happens to scare the hell out of you all the better.

  Some of the stories collected here try to do exactly that and some don’t. Sure, they all tend to proceed from some dark place—it’s me after all—but sometimes they’ve got something else on their mind too. And that’s one of the reasons this book is called Peaceable Kingdom.

  I wasn’t just being ironic, honest.

  The title comes from the final story in the book, “Firedance.”

  Yep, the almost cuddly one. Keep in mind that I said almost.

  For those of you who might be a little rusty on your Old Testament or art history the phrase derives from a passage in Isaiah 11:6–9, which a number of nineteenth-century naif painters favored, often rendering the scene beautifully and using Peaceable Kingdom as the title for their works. I reference the paintings in my story. But here’s an excerpt from the biblical passage:

  The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid; and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them . . . and they shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain . . .

  Wolf and lamb. Leopard and goat-kid. Calf and lion, little piggy and little child.

  Diversity, union, harmony. Hopes I have for this collection.

  With the predators among them all defanged for good.

  And that, finally, is my wish for us all, concealed or obvious somewhere in each of these stories—they shall not hurt or destroy.

  Not on my damn mountain.

  Jack Ketchum

  December, 2001

  The Rifle

  She found the rifle standing on its stock in the back of his cluttered closet.

  Unexpected as a snake in there.

  Not that he’d made very much attempt to hide it.

  It was leaning in the corner behind the twenty-pound fiberglass bow and the quiver of target arrows his father had bought him for Christmas—over her objections. His winter jacket hung in front of it. She’d moved the jacket aside. And there it was.

  He’d complained in the past about her going in his closet and for a long time she’d obliged him. Privacy, she knew, was important to a ten-year-old—it was especially important to Danny. But when you noticed dustballs rolling out from under the door somebody was going to have to get in there and clean and obviously it wasn’t going to be him.

  She was only planning to vacuum.

  Now this.

  She reached around behind her and turned off the Electrolux. For a moment she just knelt there staring at the rifle in the heavy summer silence.

  A slim black barrel lurking in the shadows.

  A secret, she thought.

  Yet another.

  She reached inside and grasped the cool metal. Drew it out into the light.

  The rifle was an old bolt-action .22. Her brother had owned one very much like it when he was fifteen—took it down to the VFW target range on Saturdays for a while. Then he discovered girls.

  Danny was only ten.

  Where in God’s name had he got it?

  Richard wouldn’t have bought it for him. Not even her ex-husband was fool enough to think for one minute that she’d allow a weapon in the house. No, it had to be . . .

  . . . her father’s.

  Which meant that Danny had also stolen it.

  They’d visited his farm the weekend before last. She was struck again by how empty the house seemed now that her mother was gone and had sat in the kitchen with her father drinking cup after cup of black coffee, knowing how starved for conversation he was now. So that Danny was on his own most of the day. Through the big bay window she saw him go into the barn where her father kept his two remaining horses. A little later noticed him walking through the field of long dry grass toward the woods and stream beyond. And then she’d forgotten all about him until what must have been over an hour had passed and he came slamming in through the screen door with a big box turtle in his hand, Danny all excited until she told him to put it back by the stream where he’d found it, that they weren’t taking a turtle all the way back to Connecticut with them and that was that.

  Her father kept his newer guns behind glass on a rack in the living room.

  The older ones, the ones he never used anymore, were stacked in the workshop of the cellar.

  She examined the stock. It was scratched and pitted. Her sinuses were giving her hell this summer and she could barely smell a thing but she sniffed it anyway. It smelled of earth and mold. It was her father’s, all right. She sniffed again, the scent of old gun oil on her hands. Probably he hadn’t used it in years.

  It would be months before her father noticed it was missing. If then.

  She threw the bolt. Inside a brass shell casing gleamed.

  She felt a sudden mix of shock and fury.

  My God.

  He’d loaded the Goddamn thing.

  Her father would never have left it loaded. That meant that Danny had searched around the basement for shells as well. And found some. How many more did he have? Where were they?

  She resisted the urge to go tearing through his drawers, rummaging through his closet.

  That could wait.

  What she needed to do now was find him and confront him. One more confrontation. More and more as he got older.

  She wondered how he’d explain this away.

  It was not going to be like stealing Milky Ways from the Pathmark Store.

  It was not going to be like the fire he and Billy Berendt had set, yet denied they’d set, in the field behind the Catholic Church last year.

  He couldn’t say that he’d meant to pay for the candy bars but didn’t because he got to looking at the comic books and forgot they were in his pocket. He couldn’t claim that the two eyewitnesses—kids from the rougher part of town who’d seen Billy and Danny go into the field and then come out running and laughing just before smoke appeared on the horizon—had it in for him.

  The rifle was concrete. The bullet even more so.

  They did not lend themselves to easy explanation.

  It was not going to be like the jackknife from Nowhere or the brand-new Sega Genesis computer game from Nowhere or the Bic cigarette lighters that kept cropping up which he’d always found on the street. What a lucky kid.

  She was angry. She was scared.

  Angry and scared enough so that her hands were shaking as she removed the shell from the breech and put it in her jeans pocket. She felt a by-now all-too-familiar access of what could only be called grief, a feeling that even though her son was only ten she’d already lost him somehow, as though there were something in him she could no longer touch or speak to and for which mourning was easily as justifiable and as appropriate as her father’s grief over the loss of her mother.

  She knew it was important to push that feeling aside. To let the anger flow freely instead. She needed the anger. Otherwise too much love and loss, too much sympathy and—let’s face it—too much plain old-fashioned self-pity would only weaken her.

  Tough love, she thought. That’s what’s left.

  She’d tried the shrinks. Tried the counselors. She’d tried to understand him.

  Taking things away from him, privileges—the computer, TV, the movies—was the only thing that seemed to work anymore.

  Well, they’re all going out the window today. Everything.

  She slid the black bolt of the rifle back into position and marched on out of the room. She knew where to find him.

  At the clubhouse.

  The grass in her back yard tickled her ankles. It was time to cut the lawn again. Humidity made the stock of the rifle feel sticky in her hand. She slid between the two pine trees in back of the lawn out onto the well-worn pa
th into the woods.

  The path belonged to the boys. Billy Berendt, Danny, Charlie Haas and the others. She never came back this way. Hardly ever. Only when she was calling him for supper and he was late and didn’t answer. Even then she rarely had to venture this far. The path was only two feet wide at most through thick, waist-high brush, dry brown grass and briars as tall as she was. A path the width of a boy’s body—not the width of hers. She was glad of the jeans—already studded with burrs—and unhappy with the short-sleeve blouse. A thorn bush scored two thin lines of blood along her upper arm. She used the barrel of the rifle to part another. She heard the stream rushing over its rocky bed through a line of trees to her left. The path split ahead of her. She took it to the right, away from the stream.

  All these woods would one day be developed, bulldozed into oblivion. But in the three years they’d lived here that hadn’t happened yet—and Danny was getting to the age where soon it wouldn’t matter. In the meantime the woods and stream were part of the reason she’d wanted the place for him.

  Nature, she believed, was a teacher. She’d grown up on a farm and thought that most of what she knew about life she’d glimpsed there first and then had come to understand more fully later. Birth, death, sex, the renewal of the land, its fragility and its power, the chaos inside the order, the changes in people that came with the change of seasons. The implacability of the natural world and how important it was simply to accept that.

  She wanted all this for Danny.

  What she’d had. And what now sustained her.

  She knew that many women would have been bitter about a broken marriage that they hadn’t chosen to end. But she wasn’t. Not really. Unhappy, yes, of course—but there had never really been any bitterness. Love, she thought, was a contract you signed knowing that someday the signatures might fade. Richard had fallen out of love with her and gotten involved with someone else. A simple change of seasons. Hard as winter, but bearable and somehow even understandable. It was no longer necessary to the scheme of things that people mate for life. Reality was what it was and couldn’t be changed by her own distress in the face of it. She thought Richard’s choice of second partners was one he someday might live to regret. But that was his affair. She’d let him go.