The Secret Life of Souls

by Jack Ketchum

  Delia’s iPad still rests on the nightstand by the bed. She dives for bed and iPad at the same time and as the dog leaps up to straddle her on the bed, turns and rams the tablet into the side of its head. The dog reels, falling off the bed but it’s back on her in an instant, snapping at her face while she batters at its shoulders, back, and head and feels herself weakening, ineffectual, useless, the two of them eye to eye, Pat unable to look away as the dog moves effortlessly up her body, takes her lower jaw into its own jaws, clamps down, and pulls.

  The sound that escapes her as her jaw rolls and disjoints is unlike anything she’s ever heard before or thought she could possibly make, a high-pitched stuttering wail of sound, like machine-gun fire ricocheting in this tiny room, sliding down octaves to a roar, then to a low moan through the seeping welter of blood which pools at her collarbone

  The dog releases her and there’s that stare again, the stare that has so enraged her on the landing but it isn’t rage she’s feeling now but only pain and terror and her hand goes to her exposed neck. She’s aware of the dog’s weight along her body, her thighs, her exposed bloody breasts.

  Then it releases her, rises up on all fours, alert, the bed trembling beneath them.

  It gazes around the room. Suddenly still but for its breathing. As though the dog were seeing the room for the first time. Its eyes roam.

  It begins to whine as if in pain, as though the dog were hurt and bleeding here and not her.

  Its eyes narrow. It growls. Jumps off the bed.

  And then it’s in Delia’s closet, standing on its hind legs and tearing at the clothes inside, tearing them off the hangers to the floor. Dresses, blouses, costumes, a straw bonnet, a beaded handbag, ripping them down and savaging them, snarling, on the bedroom floor. Auditions, performances. Her daughter’s past torn to pieces here in front of her.

  Patricia—for the moment—forgotten.

  A breeze on her cheek through the open window.

  The roof.

  She crawls across the bed. Shards of glass dig deeper into her hands as she grips the windowsill and wrenches herself into the open air. Behind her all sounds cease. She has her left leg over the sill, its ruined toe curling back on itself as it touches the roof and she screeches in pain into the dimming evening sky.

  She feels the weight of the dog hit the bed, she pulls her right leg free of both room and dog and whirls in sudden intuition and slams the window down behind her and hears it thunk against the dog’s back, the dog howling, half in and half out the window so she pushes it down harder still thinking, got you, bitch, and turns toward the tree, the tree the dog had climbed years ago it seems, in another world amid smoke and flame.

  She reaches into the branches and grips one, stout and steady, lets her feet drop off the roof and then she’s hanging there, legs swinging, going hand over hand as best she can, not built for this, jerking her body toward the trunk of the thing but there’s blood on her hands, her hands are slick with it and she feels herself slipping, fingers like talons but sliding down anyway over the rough, sap-smelling wood.

  She feels the weight of her body clawing her to earth and at last her hands give way and she tumbles free-fall through the tree, its branches knife blades, razors, hammers. She glimpses the spread of roots and grass rising fast below, skewed to one side as her body takes one final turn and then sees nothing at all.

  You need to do something, he thinks. Now. You need to stop hiding. You need to go to her. But exactly who he needs to go to he’s not exactly certain.

  He flings open his bedroom door. In the hall Caity’s howl shudders through his body. He has barely a second to register Delia’s torn clothes strewn across her room before he sees Caity struggling at the window, trapped, arching her back, rear paws scrabbling for purchase against the wall. He throws himself across the bed, takes her hindquarters under one arm and rams the window open with the other. She yelps in freedom. Reaches up and licks his face, his chin, his lips. But she wants down.

  He lets go.

  She tears across the bedroom floor and down the stairs and he follows. She whines in frustration as her front paws scratch uselessly at the double glass doors and then she does the most amazing thing, something he’s never seen her even attempt to do before. She raises her right front paw, wedges her claws between the door and the doorjamb, shifts the bulk of her body and simply pushes.

  The door slides open. Caity is outside.

  She awakens to pain and utter clarity. The dog has somehow gotten free, the fucking dog is streaking toward her across the lawn. She bolts upright to her feet and instantly finds her balance, screw the pain and fuck you, dog, you’re dead! burning like a fever.

  The dog flings itself up at her and her timing’s perfect, a dancer’s timing, a dancer’s perfect balance too as heedless of her ruined foot she steps to one side and the dog goes hurtling past her head first into the metal slide behind her. Before the dog can right itself her hands are tight around its neck and she slams the head down to the rim of the slide and dog seems almost to scream with pain, an almost human sound—wonderful, exalting—and she slams it down again. The dog goes limp in her hands and she lets it fall.

  She stumbles onto the patio and there’s Robbie standing just inside the doorway.

  “Useless,” she mutters, “you get the fuck out of my way,” and she shoves the useless little prick as hard as she can, her fury in no way abated, fury at the dog, at him, at Bart, at the whole miserable shithole of a world and hears him tumble into the kitchen chairs and table and doesn’t even turn to look.

  She’s getting the hell out of there. Through her own goddamn front door to her own goddamn street.

  She’s never loved anybody, nobody, not a soul, it was all a lie, he thinks as the arm of the chair gouges his eye and cracks his nose and he slides down across the cold kitchen tiles.

  She’s halfway across the living room marching like the soldier she is and has always been when the dog’s front teeth crush through the palm of her right hand and its back teeth pulp her thumb and index finger and pull her to the floor.

  The dog shakes the thumb free. She sees it, hears it, drop to the floor.

  Blood spurts across the muzzle of the dog, across her, across the sofa and she thrashes at it, slapping at the thing, screaming at the thing, thinking crazily you were supposed to die! you’re supposed to be dead goddammit! as the dog hunkers down and appears to listen—to what she has no idea, but not to her, somehow she knows that—to something deep inside its unknowable brain perhaps, yet she thinks she sees sadness, yes sadness in its eyes for a moment as it pauses above her but then it rears and darts forward and its teeth find her throat as she has known they would and an arc of blood pulses far and wide and pulses again as the dog jerks its head back and something breaks inside her so that when she looks down she sees something stubby, white, a tube of some sort, glistening, flecked with blood and surrounded by bright raw flesh depending from her neck, leaning like a finger toward her collarbone.

  The room turns red, blood in her eyes that she has no will, no strength to wipe away. She sees Robbie standing over her, leaning heavily on the arm of the sofa and thinks she sees a phone in his hand—it’s definitely a phone, a cell phone—and she tries to say call, call somebody but it doesn’t sound like that, it sounds wrong.

  And she thinks, who would he call anyway.

  He can’t watch her. Can’t watch the blood pool around her shoulders, neck, and head. Can’t watch her die although he knows it, feels it when she does. He has the phone in his shaky bloodstained hand, he’s punched in the first two digits of 911 almost automatically when through the swarm of thoughts and feelings a single one emerges like a drowning man gasping to the surface.

  My god. Caity. Delia.

  They kill a dog for this.

  Blood still seeps from his nose so he wipes it with the bottom of his How To Kill A Zombie T-shirt which is already so stained from the initial spurt and steady drip that it looks like blood is par
t of the design.

  His blood. Not hers.

  He considers this.

  He has a bloody nose. And judging by the tenderness beneath his right eye, if he doesn’t have a shiner by now it won’t be long before he does.

  He thinks it through. And yes, he can call 911. He can.

  He knows what to say.

  They’d argued. It got violent. He’d confronted her with his suspicions, that it was her, his mom, not Caity, who was responsible for his sister’s death and she denied it at first, got furious with him, then finally confessed and when she did she went crazy, went after him either to shut him up, prevent him from telling or out of guilt or something, he doesn’t know, only that she went after him and gave him this black eye and this bloody nose and he was afraid she’d push him down the stairs, afraid for his life, he thought she was going to kill him too just like Delia but then Caity came between them, Caity went after her, Caity rescued him, if it weren’t for Caity god knows what she’d have done.

  You can do this, he thinks. You can make them believe it. They have to believe. Caity’s already a hero dog, isn’t she? Everybody knows that. He even thinks Pearl might back him up. And not just about Caity. He thinks that Pearl might have her own suspicions about his mother too.

  So quiet, he thinks. The house is so weirdly quiet. Like a thunderstorm just passed.

  Where is she? Where’s Caity? He hadn’t been able to look at her either. After.

  He finds her waiting by the water dish. The water dish is empty. He fills it from the sink. When she’s done he fills it again.

  Then he dials 911.

  We sit in the bathtub. The water’s warm.

  Robbie’s got the handheld showerhead, washing away the blood. And with it, the pain.

  The soap smells wonderful.

  We can hear sirens in the distance. But they’re off a ways yet. We have time. We wonder if Robbie can hear them or if it’s only us.

  There’s a tiny sliver of glass in our right front paw wedged between the pads. We hold it up to him. He gets a tweezer from the medicine cabinet and gently pulls it free.

  We kiss him in that way dogs do.

  He wipes his face and smiles. The first we’ve seen him smile all day.

  “Thanks, sis,” he says.

  We kiss him once again.

  “We’re losing him!” says the man in white hovering above him and instantly the man is gone, his daughter’s face, her unburned face small and round and smiling is there instead and Bart feels something cold and wet against his chest and thinks I’m sorry, sorry for everything and the world turns to sparks of flame and darkness all around.

  EPILOGUE

  Happy Halloween!”

  Aunt Ev sounds great as usual, hale and hearty. Rob thinks she’ll probably live to be a hundred, that woman, even though arthritis has driven her finally to leave the place outside Hamburg, his place now, and move to a smaller home in Sparta, one-story, so she doesn’t have to climb “those darn stairs.” They kid her about moving to the Great Big City, which by Sussex County standards, Sparta is.

  She asks after the family and he sips his cup of coffee and tells her all is well. He gazes through the double glass doors in the kitchen out past the fieldstone patio to a pair of squirrels racing around the wheels of the wooden eighteenth-century auto-top surrey he’s found at auction and restored himself, which sits in his half-acre yard, roughly where, in that other house, the swing set and slide had been.

  Family excepted, he guesses the surrey’s his pride and joy. After all, it had been that long-ago model with the spindle-back seats he’d made for Delia which had got him interested in antiques in the first place. Then when Evvie took him in, practically the entire house was furnished in American Country, some of it in pretty bad shape. Rob found he had a knack for fitting and gluing, for repair. Building models—those he hadn’t tromped to death in his frequent fits of pique—had taught him meticulousness and patience.

  He has his own business now, he and Ana. Their own shop out back off the driveway at the edge of the ten acres of woods that horseshoe the property, and a permanent stall among the almost forty other dealers and restorers at Main Street’s Hamburg Antique Center. Ana has a fine hand with the much older stuff, the American Primitive. Their pie safe, the sea chest that doubles as their coffee table, the Windsor chairs, the rolltop desk—they’re all her doing.

  But it’s still the surrey that holds pride of place for him amid all their stuff. In bad weather he’ll zip it up in plastic, oust the truck from the garage, and wheel it in against the depredations of rough North Jersey winters and refinish it every spring. In summertime he and Ana take their drinks and sit out there and watch the world go by.

  Outside the glass doors—adding them for the light has been their sole alteration to the place—the two squirrels have been joined by a third who sits perched atop the surrey’s right front wheel munching something between its paws that looks suspiciously like one of the kids’ Dorito chips.

  “You all set for some trick-or-treaters tonight?” he asks his aunt.

  “Got three boxes of Reese’s Pieces. I figure that oughta do ’em.”

  “Oh yeah? How very E.T. of you! They’re Charlie’s favorite, y’know.”

  It’s Charlie’s favorite movie too. His eight-year-old son has a crush on Dee Wallace. Which he thinks shows very good taste on his part.

  “’Course I do. Why do you think I bought so many of ’em? Charlie can have the leftovers. Got a box of mini Mars bars too.”

  “For Stella.”

  “Yup. For Stella.”

  “You spoil us, Ev.”

  “Hey, you turned out okay, didn’t you? And I spoiled the bejeezus out of you.”

  Next to Christmas, Halloween is Ev’s favorite holiday. You didn’t get many trick-or-treaters out here in the sticks and she’d always said she missed that, but now that she’s in town she gets plenty. She loves seeing the kids playing dress up, the monsters and ballerinas and superheros.

  Hell, she loves kids, period. She’d proven that with him.

  “I found the perfect pumpkin over at John Fee’s day before yesterday,” he says. “It’s sitting right here on the mantel over the fireplace. I can’t decide whether to carve it or not. Like I say, it’s perfect.”

  “Carve it. That fresh-cut pumpkin smell, remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “And who the heck wants perfect?”

  She reminds him about next Saturday. Boiled New England dinner at her house. Ham, potatoes, and cabbage, and thick-sliced German bread from Manger’s Bakery.

  “We’ll be there. Six o’clock sharp.”

  “Six o’clock sharp. Go carve that pumpkin. Caity loves the smell.”

  He smiles. “Yes, Caity does.”

  At the mention of her name she looks up from in front of the living room fireplace in which three logs smolder and trots over.

  “Want to say hello, Ev?”

  “Nah. I’ll see her on Saturday. Give her a hug for me.”

  “Will do. Love you, Aunt Ev.”

  “Love you too, Robbie.”

  She’s the only one in the world still allowed to call him Robbie. To everybody else including his wife he’s Rob.

  True to his word he hangs up and bends down and gives Caity a hug around the shoulders and a kiss atop her head, ruffles the fur on her chest which has grown back white and silky after the burning so long ago.

  Over twenty years ago.

  At thirty-two there’s already some salt-and-pepper in his hair but not a trace in Caity’s. Aging seems somehow to have passed her by.

  He’d taken her to a vet once—only once—about two years ago. She’d sprained her ankle in a mole-hole chasing after some rabbit one early summer morning and the limp was bad. He was afraid the leg was broken. The vet was a woman who looked barely old enough to be out of college. But like most folks around here her tongue was sharp and salty.

  She listened to Caity’s heart and breathin
g, took her pulse and set down the stethoscope and shook her head.

  “I’ll be good goddamned if I get it,” she said. “Pardon my French. How old did you say this dog is?”

  “We don’t know exactly. She’s . . . a rescue.”

  “I got to tell you, this dog confuses hell out of me. Her temp’s two degrees below normal, her pulse is reading at sixty beats per minute. Which is old-dog slow. But I don’t see an old dog here, do you? And her breathing’s all wrong. She should be coming in at about twenty-four breaths per minute. Caity’s is twelve, for god’s sake. More like a human than a Queensland Heeler. Never seen a damn thing like it.”

  And you won’t again, Rob thought. But he kept his mouth shut tight on that one.

  She x-rayed the leg and diagnosed a sprain, proscribed some anti-inflammatory drugs and told him about ice packs and heating pads and sent him on his way.

  “You come back soon now,” she said. “Dogs need their regular checkups.”

  He very much doubts he will. Happily there’s never been any need to. He grooms her often, brushes her teeth against tooth decay, feeds her lean human food and kibble, and she never has so much as a sniffle.

  He wishes he could say as much for his kids.

  Both of whom now burst through the front door, Ana holding it open for them, all three of them loaded down with shopping bags.