Peaceable Kingdom (mobi)

by Jack Ketchum

  The cop had said I wasn’t supposed to discuss the matter with my fellow citizens.

  This citizen figured, fuck that.

  Doc Stringer says I can control this thing if I want to. Stay on the meds, stay with the meditation program and no drinking. I kinda hope he’s right. One more screwup like last time and I’ll have some nigger pole up my ass for the rest of my natural life. Or unless I get so old nobody wants to bother anymore.

  It’s a bitch, though. You do it the first time, you just naturally want more. And me, I’ve done it four times. Though obviously not in a real long while.

  My favorite was the second one, the redhead. A real redhead too. Eighteen, nineteen maybe. I never did find out how old she was because that one never made the papers. I looked for it, God knows. But I guess she didn’t tell.

  Tough little bitch.

  I wonder how she explained the missing nipple to her boyfriend or her parents or whoever.

  I hate my job.

  I hate this stupid goddamn little town.

  I want to fuck something silly. I want to fuck something till it screams.

  I couldn’t believe it. I talked to Norm Green and he wouldn’t do a thing. Nothing. Not so much as a get-out-of-town call from a pay phone. He said he was just going to go with the program, however much he damn well hated it. And Norm and Beverly have a daughter, Clara, who’s exactly my daughter’s age. If she didn’t go to St. Philomena’s Catholic school she’d be in the same classes as Michelle. I talked to Fred and Susan Grummon too and though Susan was obviously terrified Fred said the same thing as Norm, basically. The guy will either fuck up or he won’t. If he does they’ll put him away again. If he doesn’t, no problem. We talked to our kids and the kids know all about him. They’ll be careful.

  Bullshit. A guy like that is a running sore.

  What you did with a running sore was stop it.

  I couldn’t sleep that night. Every time I closed my eyes I kept seeing this guy leaning on my daughter’s bicycle. Punching her out. Dragging her into the woods. Tearing off her blouse, her jeans. And worse.

  Michelle doesn’t even ride a bicycle anymore.

  I got up feeling groggy but angry too. This guy was not going to fuck with us. No way. Not if I could help it.

  Well, what would you do?

  All day Sunday I kept looking out the window, watching for a glimpse of a white Ford Escort. Looking for the guy strolling down the sidewalk. I kept staring at the mug shots. The face looked really sinister to me now. The temptation to just walk up the street and knock on the door and beat the living shit out of him when he opened it was strong as the winter wind around here but I resisted. I resisted calling him too. His number was probably unlisted anyhow. When Michelle and some girlfriends went to an afternoon matinee at the Colony I resisted following them.

  I was suddenly all will. All purpose and design.

  I’m not due at the office these days until ten but Monday I got up early and planted myself on the front porch with a glass of orange juice, some toast and a cup of coffee and watched the street. I figured Knott would probably have to be at the garage by nine and I was right. At quarter to nine I saw his car pull out of the driveway and roll on down the street. I took my breakfast back inside. Michelle was still asleep.

  I went out again and walked up to the old Hadley place which was now the Knott place and paused just long enough to reassure myself that what I remembered about the house was right. No matter where you parked in the driveway you had to cross at least a dozen or so feet of lawn along a fieldstone pathway once you came off the front porch steps and the same would be true if you used the back steps and had parked your car in back. Either way was doable.

  I went home and showered and shaved and went to work.

  Tuesday I got up earlier. This time I skipped breakfast and showered and shaved and brushed my teeth right away and except for my tie and sport jacket, dressed for work. Two years ago a group of us at the office had attended a management seminar at Stowe, Vermont and I still had the ski mask in my drawer so I took that and a pair of leather gloves and my tie and jacket with me and drove to the mall.

  I worked my way through college. Every kid in my family did. My brother. My cousins. I worked for my uncle as a repo man. It’s no big thing to jimmy a door and hotwire a car once you know how. Back then I got so I could do it in thirty seconds flat. I was a little rusty. It took me forty-five.

  The vehicle was a Jeep Wagoneer. I figured four-wheel drive might be handy. It was eight thirty-nine exactly when I pulled up to the curb of the Lindsay place across the street from Knott and a little way down. I left the Wagoneer in gear with my foot on the brake and put on the ski mask rolled up like a hat, ready to pull down. I wasn’t worried about being seen parked there. The Lindsays had a summer home in the lakes district up in Sparta. They’d be there until September. It occured to me that for the Lindsays none of this would have happened at all. It’d have no reality whatsoever for them. If a tree falls in the forest. . .

  At eight forty-two he walked down the steps in front.

  I lifted my foot off the brake. I pulled down the mask. I hit the gas and headed for the lawn.

  I want to fuck something till it screams but I won’t. Not in the immediate future anyway. That I’m pretty sure of. I think I maybe can actually do this thing. Maybe. Maybe it’s the meds or maybe it’s just being free now not in Rahway anymore and not obsessing all the time as Doc Stringer would say but it’s kinda easier now, the urge is less than it was in the joint and a whole lot less than it was before the joint. Yesterday at work I didn’t think about doing it once. Not once all fucking day long. First time. I didn’t particularly think about being scared either of the other guys. For me that’s fucking amazing. I don’t know what’s changed but something.

  I mean, you never know about me.

  I’m a major screw-up.

  But maybe.

  I hit him the first time and he didn’t even seem to hear me, I caught him at the right hip and he went down into the bushes and I just kept coming never mind the bushes, the front tires rolling over his legs and I could feel the bump and hear him scream but what I really needed to do was get at the chest or the head so I backed up and turned the wheel a little and put it back into drive and then rode over him again and this time I heard a kind of pop and no scream at all and when I backed up I saw that my left front tire had rolled over his neck, that the Wagoneer’s weight had pretty much disconnected his head from his body and had flattened his neck like roadkill which in fact was exactly what the little fucker was now.

  I backed up onto the street and saw Susan Grummon in her slip standing at the door to her house looking toward Knott’s and then looking at me and registering the ski mask and then stepping back inside and slamming the door behind her. Of course she’d call the cops. No problem.

  I drove carefully back to the Mall and parked the Wagoneer exactly where I’d found it. I got into my own car and drove around back to the WalMart Dumpster and tossed the gloves and ski mask. I drove to the office, put on the tie and jacket and adjusted the tie in my rear-view mirror and had a busy and productive day at work.

  That night when I came home Michelle told me that the police had been here and talked to her. That they were questioning everyone on the street. I figured that was only natural. As his neighbors we were the likely suspects after all. They told her to have me call when I got home from work so I did. We set up an interview for tomorrow morning. Nine o’clock sharp.

  I have no problem with that at all. I probably won’t even be late for work, they said.

  Michelle, though. Michelle was pretty shook up over the whole thing. You couldn’t blame her. The murder. The police and all.

  So I did what I usually do.

  I took her to bed.

  I comforted her.

  What would you do?

  If Memory Serves

  Patricia sat relaxed in the armchair across the room.

  The metronome on t
he table in front of her had done its work in record time.

  “I’d like to speak with Leslie,” Hooker said.

  The woman looked at him, sighed, and shook her head.

  “God! Leslie again. I don’t get it. What the hell’s wrong with speaking to me once in a while?”

  Hooker shrugged. “You lie. You evade. You try to confuse things. If you didn’t lie so much, Susan, maybe I’d want to talk to you more often. Nothing personal.”

  She pouted, leaned back in the chair and folded her arms across her breasts.

  “I’m only trying to cover my butt, y’know,” she said.

  “I know. And I understand. It just doesn’t help matters much at this juncture. Let me talk to Leslie, okay?”

  The eyelids fluttered. The woman threw back her head and howled. Then gave him a meek bright sidelong glance and began to whimper.

  “Leslie. Not Katie.”

  Katie was a dog.

  Only the second such dog ever recorded in the history of MPD—Multiple Personality Disorder. Hooker had written about her extensively in the article he’d done for the Journal of Psychiatric Medicine. Speculation mostly and observation of the physical aspects. Crawling, snuffling, howls. Katie’s connection to the other personalities had seemed vague at the time. Now, knowing what he did, it was clearer.

  “Hi, Doctor Hooker.”

  “Hi, Leslie.”

  “I guess you want to talk some more.”

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m not supposed to.”

  “Why?”

  “Patricia doesn’t want me to.”

  “I think she does want you to, Leslie.”

  “She’s scared.”

  “Scared of what?”

  She shifted uncomfortably in the seat, a typical teenage girl wrestling with a problem. Like all the personalities who had emerged so far other than the dog Katie and Lynette, who was only five years old, Leslie had come into the world at sixteen and sixteen she remained.

  “They said they’d hurt her, remember? If she talked. They said they’d kill her.”

  “I remember.”

  “So?”

  “So that was quite a long time ago, wasn’t it.”

  Twenty-two years to be exact. The woman sitting in front of him was thirty-eight and the mother of two, both girls, ages eight and ten. Until her divorce a year and a half ago she had been a successful editor for a large paperback book company and then a chronic alcoholic who finally had sought therapy when she found herself having beaten her oldest child with a soup ladle across the face and head without remembering having done so. Four months into treatment the first personality—little Lynette—had emerged.

  “I don’t know about this, doctor.”

  “You’ve done fine so far, Leslie. Why stop now?”

  “I don’t want to stop.”

  “Then don’t. Believe me, it’s going to help Patricia enormously in the long run. Enormously.”

  She thought for a moment and then sighed.

  “Okay. I guess I owe her that.”

  He allowed himself to relax. It was a crucial point. Had she balked here it might have been weeks before she allowed herself to address all this again. It had happened before.

  And today, finally, he had Patricia’s permission to record their sessions.

  “You were talking last time about how they—the Gannets—‘passed her around’ I think you said.”

  ‘Uh-huh.”

  “And you were talking sexually passed around, correct?”

  “Yes.”

  “Can you tell me who her mom and Dad were giving her to?”

  “Lots of people. That whole group they had there. Mr. and Mrs. Dennison, Judge Blackburn, Mr. and Mrs. Siddons, Mr. Hayes, Doctor Scott and Mrs. Scott, Mr. Seymour, Miss Naylor.”

  “The schoolteacher.”

  “Right. And Mr. Harley. There were others. But those were the main ones.”

  “Her mom and Dad, did these people pay them for this?”

  “No. They just allowed it. It was just okay by them.”

  “And this was when Patricia was how old?”

  “Three. Maybe four.”

  He suspected it was five. Lynette’s age.

  The age she’d begun hiding.

  “So then what would these people do to her again?”

  This was all familiar territory but he needed it for the tape.

  “Well, she would be naked pretty much always and they would put their fingers in her, in her bum, in her vagina, and some of the men would put their penises in and sometimes make her put their penises in her mouth, and they would spank her real hard and Doctor Scott, he liked to put these long needles in her . . .”

  “Acupuncture needles?”

  “I don’t know. Just big long needles.”

  “Go on.”

  “He’d put them in her, stick them everywhere. And Mrs. Scott always wanted her to lick her vagina.”

  It was a hallmark of Leslie’s personality that none of this seemed to embarrass her in the slightest. She treated this catalogue of childhood horrors with a detachment that was almost clinical. Admirable, he thought, were it not so sad and frightening.

  “Mrs. Siddons liked to twist her nipples until she cried. And Miss Naylor always wanted to have her breasts sucked like Patricia was a little baby and she was her mommy. Mr. Hayes would put her in the tub and pee on her and one time he shit on her too. On her belly. Sort of stood over her and bent his legs a little.”

  “And there were other kids involved, right?”

  She nodded. “Danny Scott, Ritchie Siddons, and the Dennison twins.”

  “Did Patricia ever try to resist at all? Ever try to run away?”

  “A couple times she tried. But she was too little to go anywhere. The Gannets beat her bad for it. So she didn’t try anymore.”

  She stopped. Tears were rolling down her cheeks in a sudden stream.

  “Leslie?”

  Her chin trembled and the large brown eyes were doe’s eyes, liquid, innocent.

  “Lynette? Is that you?”

  “They hurt me! Mommy and Daddy . . .”

  “I know. It’s all right, Lynette. Mommy and Daddy won’t hurt you any more. I promise. I swear.”

  That was true enough. Mommy and Daddy were dead in a car accident nearly ten years before. He was drunk. The telephone pole unforgiving. As far as Hooker was concerned, good riddance.

  “They hurt me!”

  “I know they did, Lynette. But that’s all over now. Mommy and Daddy can never hurt you again. You understand?”

  She sniffled. The tears abated.

  “Are you okay now?”

  She hesitated, then nodded.

  “Good. If it’s all right then, can you let me talk to Leslie again?”

  “Oh for chrissakes, fuck Leslie!”

  The voice was deep and husky.

  Sadie.

  Only the third time she’d appeared.

  The first two times were trouble. He could see this was not going to be an exception. She was up and out of her chair and striding over.

  “You want to talk sex, honey? You feel like a turn-on? Is that it? Then you better talk to me.”

  He was halfway up out of his own chair when she reached down and pushed him back again.

  Then lifted her skirt and straddled him.

  “Sadie . . .”

  “I know. We been through this before. ‘It’s inappropriate for a patient and therapist’ blah blah blah. Loosen up, will ya?” She shrugged off her jacket.

  “Get off me, Sadie.”

  “Loosen up. You know you want little Sadie.”

  “What I want is to talk to . . .”

  “Yeah, Leslie. I know. But will Leslie do this for you, Doc?”

  She pulled the sweater off over her head. Underneath it her breasts were naked. They were lovely breasts, full and firm for her age and the fact that she’d born two children—and judging by the size and shape of the nipples, breastfed a
t least one of them.

  Lovely but for the scars.

  Small puckered burn-scars. Over a dozen on the breasts alone. Many more on her stomach, neck and shoulders.

  He could still make out the swastika carved just above her navel.

  He had never seen the evidence first-hand before.

  “You want to talk about those, Sadie?”

  She laughed. “Talk about what? My tits?”

  “Those burns. The swastika.”

  She pushed off him angrily and scooped up the sweater and walked to the window. Slipped the sweater on. Walked back to her chair and dug in her purse for a pack of Winston Lights.

  Sadie smoked. The others didn’t.

  “I don’t allow cigarettes. You know that, Sadie.”

  She gave him a look, disgusted, and tossed the pack back into her purse. Sadie would rebel but only so far. Then like all the others she was forced to obey.

  “Oh, fuck you, Doc. Talk to your precious Leslie. Have a wonderful time. You asshole.”

  She dropped into the chair and looked at him. The eyes softened. Her face went slowly neutral.

  Leslie again.

  Now if he could just keep her here for the duration.

  The session was running long. He could see that already. The clock on the wall above and behind her read two-fifty. But this was all much too productive to quit in ten minutes. He had a first-time patient who was probably already outside there in the waiting room—his three o’clock appointment. It wasn’t the best way to start a doctor-patient relationship but the man would have to hold on awhile.

  It wasn’t just Patricia who had something on the line here.

  This case was going to make his reputation, no doubt about it. The first article, published six months ago, had gone a long way toward doing that already. AP had picked up on it. My God, The New York Times. For Warhol’s classic fifteen minutes he and his unnamed patient were famous.

  Soon they’d be more so. His first paper was only the beginning.

  “Leslie.”

  “Hi. Hello again.”

  “We were talking about all the sexual things they did to Patricia. But there were other things too, weren’t there.”

  She nodded.

  “Would you mind going over them for me again?”

  “There were all the witchy things,” she said.