Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

The Girl Next Door (31 page)

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

11.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

ads

Hope turned to frustration, frustration to anger, anger to a dull resignation. Then the cycle began again. There was nothing to do but wait and bathe Meg’s face and forehead.

She was feverish. The back of her head was sticky with crusting blood.

We drifted in and out of sleep.

My mind kept latching on to singsongs, jingles.
Use Ajax! The foaming cleanser-da-da-da-da-dadum-dum. Wash the dirt right down the drain-da-dada-da-da-dum. Over the river and though the woods ... the river and through the woods ... the river and through the
... I couldn’t hold on to anything. I couldn’t let go of anything, either.

Sometimes Susan would start to cry.

Sometimes Meg would shuffle and moan.

I was happy when she’d moan. It meant she was alive.

She woke twice.

The first time she woke I was running the cloth over her face and was just about to quit for a while when she opened her eyes. I almost dropped it I was so surprised. Then I hid it behind me because it was pink with blood and I didn’t want her to see. Somehow the idea really bothered me.

“David?”

“Yeah.”

She seemed to listen. I looked down into her eyes and saw that one of her pupils was half again as large as the other—and I wondered what she was seeing.

“Do you hear her?” she said. “Is she ... there?”

“I only hear the radio. She’s there, though.”

“The radio. Yes.” She nodded slowly.

“Sometimes I hear her,” she said. “All day long. Willie and Woofer too ... and Donny. I used to think I could listen ... and hear and learn something, figure out why she was doing this to me ... by listening to her walk across a room, or sit in a chair. I ... never did.”

“Meg? Listen. I don’t think you ought to be talking, you know? You’re hurt pretty bad.”

It was a strain, you could see that. There was a slurring to her words, as though her tongue had suddenly become the wrong size for her.

“Unh-unh,” she said. “No. I want to talk. I never talk. I never have anybody to talk to. But ... ?”

She looked at me strangely. “How come
you’re
here?”

“We’re both here. Me and Susan both. They locked us in. Remember?”

She tried to smile.

“I thought maybe you were a fantasy. I think you’ve been that before for me sometimes. I have a lot ... a lot of fantasies. I have them and then they ... go away. And then sometimes you try to have one, you want one, and you can’t. You can’t think of anything. And then later ... you do.

“I used to beg her, you know? To stop. Just to let me go. I thought, she’s got to, she’ll do it a while and then she’ll let me go, she’ll see she should like me, and then I thought no she won’t stop, I’ve got to get out but I can’t, I don’t understand her, how could she let him
burn me
?”

“Please, Meg ...”

She licked her lips. She smiled.

“You’re taking care of me though, aren’t you.”

“Yes.”

“And Susan too.”

“Yes.”

“Where is she?”

“She’s sleeping.”

“It’s hard for her too,” she said.

“I know. I know it is.”

I was worried. Her voice was getting weaker. I had to bend very close now in order to hear her.

“Do me a favor?” she said.

“Sure.”

She gripped my hand. Her grip was not strong.

“Get my mother’s ring back? You know my mother’s ring? She won’t listen to me. She doesn’t care. But maybe ... Could you ask her? Could you get me back my ring?”

“I’ll get it.”

“You promise?”

“Yes.”

She let go.

“Thanks,” she said.

Then a moment later she said, “You know? I never really loved my mother enough. Isn’t that strange? Did you?”

“No. I guess not.”

She closed her eyes.

“I think I’d like to sleep now.”

“Sure,” I said. “You rest.”

“It’s a funny thing,” she said. “There’s no pain. You’d think there would be. They burned me and burned me but there’s no pain.”

“Rest,” I said.

She nodded. And then she did. And I sat listening for Officer Jennings’s knock, the lyrics to “Green Door” riding absurdly through my head like a garish painted carousel, round and round: ...
midnight, one more night without sleepin‘lwatchin’, ‘til the morning comes creepin’/green door, what’s that secret you’re keepin’?/green door?l

Until I slept too.

When I woke it was probably dawn.

Susan was shaking me.

“Stop her!” she said, her voice a frightened whisper. “Stop her! Please! Don’t let her
do
that!”

For a moment I thought I was home in my bed.

I looked around. I remembered.

And Meg wasn’t there beside me anymore.

My heart began to pound, my throat tightened.

Then I saw her.

She’d thrown off the blanket so she was naked, hunched over in the corner by the worktable. Her long matted hair hung down across her shoulders. Her back was streaked with dull brown stains, crisscross channels of drying blood. The back of her head gleamed wetly under the work light.

I could see the muscles pull along her shoulders and outward from the elegant line of vertebrae as she worked. I heard the scrabble of fingernails.

I got up and went to her.

She was digging.

Digging with her fingers at the concrete floor where it met the cinderblock wall. Tunneling out. Tiny sounds of exertion escaping her. Her fingernails broken back and bleeding, one gone already, the tips of her fingers bloody too, her blood mixing with the grit she dug from the flaking concrete in an uneven yielding of the substances of each. Her final refusal to submit. Her final act of defiance. The will rising up over a defeated body, to force itself on solid stone.

The stone was Ruth. Impenetrable—yielding just grit and fragments.

Ruth was the stone.

“Meg. Come on. Please.” I said.

I put my hands under her arms and lifted her up. She came away as easily as an infant child.

Her body felt warm and full of life.

I laid her back on the mattress again and covered her with the blanket. Susan handed me the bucket and I bathed her fingertips. The water turned redder.

I began to cry.

I didn’t want to cry because Susan was there but it wasn’t anything I could help or hinder. It just came, flowed, like Meg’s blood across the cinderblock.

Her heat was fever. Her heat had been a lie.

I could almost smell the death on her.

I had seen it in the expanded pupil of her eye, a widening hole into which a mind could disappear.

I bathed her fingers.

When I was finished I shifted Susan over so she could lie between us and we lay together quietly watching her shallow breathing, each breath of air flowing through her lungs another moment binding the moments together, another few seconds’ grace, the flickering of her half-open eyelids speaking of the life that roiled gently beneath the wounded surface—and when she opened her eyes again we weren’t startled. We were happy to see Meg there looking out at us, the old Meg, the one who lived before this in the very same time as we did and not in this fevered dream-space.

She moved her lips. Then smiled.

“I think I’m going to make it,” she said, and reached for Susan’s hand. “I think I’ll be fine.”

In the artificial glare of the work light, in the dawn that for us was not a dawn, she died.

Chapter Forty-Six

The knock at the door could not have come more than an hour and a half later.

I heard them rising from their beds. I heard masculine voices and heavy unfamiliar footsteps crossing the living room to the dining room and coming down the stairs.

They threw the bolt and opened the door and Jennings was there, along with my father and another cop named Thompson who we knew from the VFW. Donny, Willie, Woofer and Ruth stood behind them, making no attempt to escape or even to explain, just watching while Jennings went to Meg and raised her eyelid and felt for the pulse that wasn’t there.

My father came over and put his arm around me.
Jesus Christ
he said, shaking his head.
Thank God we found you. Thank God we found you.
I think it was the first time I’d ever heard him use the words but I also think he meant it.

Jennings pulled the blanket up over Meg’s head and Officer Thompson went to comfort Susan, who couldn’t stop crying. She’d been quiet ever since Meg died and now the relief and sadness were pouring out of her.

Ruth and the others watched impassively.

Jennings, who Meg had warned about Ruth on the Fourth of July, looked ready to kill.

Red-faced, barely controlling his voice, he kept shooting questions at her—and you could see it wasn’t so much questions he wanted to shoot as the pistol he kept stroking on his hip.
How’d this happen? how’d that happen? how long has she been down here? who put that writing there?

For a while Ruth wouldn’t answer. All she’d do was stand there scratching at the open sores on her face. Then she said, “I want a lawyer.”

Jennings acted like he didn’t hear her. He kept on with the questions but all she’d say was, “I want to call a lawyer,” like she was preparing to take the Fifth and that was that.

Jennings got madder and madder. But that didn’t help. I could have told him that.

Ruth was the rock.

And following her example so were her kids.

I wasn’t. I took a deep breath and tried not to think about my father standing beside me.

“I’ll tell you everything you want to know,” I said. “Me and Susan will.”

“You saw all this?”

“Most,” I said.

“Some of these wounds occurred weeks ago. You see any of that?”

“Some of it. Enough.”

“You saw it?”

“Yes.”

His eyes narrowed. “Are you kept or keeper here, kid?” he said.

I turned to my father. “I never hurt her, Dad. I never did. Honest.”

“You never helped her, either,” said Jennings.

It was only what I’d been telling myself all night long.

Except that Jennings’s voice clenched at the words like a fist and hurled them at me. For a moment they took my breath away.

There’s correct and then there’s right, I thought.

“No,” I said. “No, I never did.”

“You tried,” said Susan, crying.

“Did he?” said Thompson.

Susan nodded.

Jennings looked at me another long moment and then he nodded too.

“Okay,” he said. “We’ll talk it over later. We better call in, Phil. Everybody upstairs.”

Ruth murmured something.

“What?” asked Jennings.

She was talking into her chest, mumbling.

“I can’t hear you, lady.”

Ruth’s head shot up, eyes glaring.

“I said she was a
slut
,” said Ruth. “
She
wrote those words!
She
did! ‘I FUCK. FUCK ME.’ You think I wrote ‘em? She wrote ’em herself,
on
herself, because she was
proud
of it!

“I was tryin’ to teach her, to discipline her, to show her some decency. She wrote it just to spite me, ‘I FUCK. FUCK ME.’ And she did, she fucked
everybody
. She fucked him, that’s for sure.”

She pointed at me. Then at Willie and Donny.

“And him and him too. She fucked ’em all! She’d have fucked little Ralphie if I hadn’t stopped her, hadn’t tied her up down here where nobody had to see her legs and her ass and her cunt, her
cunt
—because, mister, that’s all she was was a cunt, woman who don’t know any better than to give in to a man any time he asks her for a piece of pussy. And I did her a goddamn
favor
. So fuck you and what you think. Goddamn meat in a uniform. Big soldier. Big shit. Fuck you! I did her a goddamn favor ...”

“Lady,” said Jennings. “I think you should shut up now.”

He leaned in close and it was like he was looking at something he’d stepped in on the sidewalk.

“You understand my meaning, lady? Mrs. Chandler? Please, I really hope you do. That piss trap you call a mouth—you keep it
shut.”

BOOK: The Girl Next Door

11.45Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub

Read Book Download Book

ads