The Girl Next Door (27 page)

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Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

BOOK: The Girl Next Door
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I slept badly—and late.
I looked at the clock and it was almost noon. I got into my clothes and ran downstairs, gulped down the requisite bowl of cereal because my mother was standing there complaining about people who slept all day and where it got them as adults—mostly jail and unemployment—and bolted out the door smack into the sticky August sunlight.
There was no way I dared going straight to the Chandlers’. What if they’d figured it was me?
I ran through the woods to the Rock.
The little pyramid I’d made of stones and dollars was still there.
In the light of day it no longer looked like an offering. It looked like a pile of dogshit sitting on a pile of leaves. It sat there mocking me.
I knew what it meant. She hadn’t got out.
They’d caught her.
She was still inside.
I felt this terrible sick feeling in my gut and the cereal nearly slid up again. I was angry and then I was scared and then I was plain confused. Suppose they had decided it was me who threw the bolt? Or suppose they’d done something to make Meg tell them?
What was I supposed to do now?
Get out of town?
You could go to the cops
, I thought. You could go see Mr. Jennings.
And then I thought, great, and tell him what? That Ruth’s been torturing Meg for months and I know she has for a fact because I’ve sort of been helping?
I’d seen enough cop shows to know what an accomplice was.
And I knew a kid—a friend of my cousin’s from West Orange—who’d done almost a year in Juvenile for getting drunk on beer and stealing his neighbor’s car. According to him they could beat you, they could drug you, they could stick you in a straightjacket if they wanted to. And they let you out when they were damn good and ready.
There’s got to be some other way, I thought.
Like Meg said about keeping the money—we could try again. Think it through better this time.
If they didn’t know about me already.
There was only one way to find that out.
I climbed over to the Rock and gathered up the fives and singles and put them in my pocket.
Then I took a real deep breath.
And then I went over.
Chapter Forty
Willie met me at the door and it was clear that even if they knew or suspected, Willie had other more urgent things on his mind.
“Come on,” he said.
He looked drawn and tired, excited though, the two combining to make him uglier than ever. You knew he hadn’t washed and his breath was foul even for him.
“Close the door behind you.”
I did.
We went downstairs.
And Ruth was there, sitting in her folding chair. And Woofer. Eddie and Denise perched on the worktable. And Susan sat bloodlessly silent crying next to Ruth.
Every one of them sitting quiet while on the cold damp concrete floor Donny lay grunting on top of Meg
with his pants
down
around his ankles, raping her, her naked body tied
hands
and feet between
the four-by-four
support beams.
And I guessed Ruth had finally changed her mind once and for all about touching.
I felt sick.
I turned to get out of there.
“Unh-unh,” said Willie. “You stay.”
And the carving knife in his hand and the look in his eyes said he was right. I stayed.
They were all so quiet in there you could hear the two flies buzzing.
It seemed like a bad sick dream. So I did what you do in a dream. Passively I watched it unfold.
Donny covered most of her. I could see only her lower body—her legs and thighs. Either they were very much bruised since yesterday or had gotten very dirty. The soles of her feet were black.
I could almost feel his weight on top of her, pressing down, pounding her to the rough hard floor. She was gagged but not blindfolded. Behind the gag I could hear her pain and the helpless outrage.
He groaned and arched suddenly and clutched her burned breast and then rolled slowly off her.
Beside me Willie breathed relief.
“There now,” said Ruth, nodding. “That’s what you’re good for.”
Denise and Woofer giggled.
Donny pulled up his pants. He zipped them. He glanced at me but wouldn’t meet my eyes. I couldn’t blame him. I wouldn’t have met his either.
“You probably got the clap now,” Ruth said. “But never mind. They’ve got cures these days.”
Susan suddenly started sobbing.
“Mommeee!”
She kept rocking back and forth in her chair.
“I want my
mommeeee!”
“Oh, shut up why doncha?” said Woofer.
“Yeah,” said Eddie.
“Shut the fuck up,” said Ruth. “Shut up!”
She kicked her chair. She backed up and kicked it again and Susan tumbled off it. She lay there screaming, scraping the floor with her braces.
“Stay
there!” said Ruth. “You just stay there! Stay where you are.” Then she looked around at the rest of us. “Who else wants a turn?” she said. “Davy? Eddie?”
“Me,” said Willie.
Ruth looked at him.
“I don’t know about that,” she said. “Your brother’s just had her. Seems sorta like incest to me. I dunno.”
“Aw hell, Mom!” said Willie.
“Well, it
does.
Not that the little whore would give a damn. But I’d feel a whole lot better if it was Eddie or Davy.”
“Davy don’t
want
her for chrissake!”
“Sure he does.”
“No, he don’t!”
She looked at me. I looked away.
She shrugged. “Maybe not. Boy’s sensible. I know I wouldn’t touch her. But then I’m not a man am I. Eddie?”
“I want to cut her,” said Eddie.
“Yeah. Me too!” said Woofer.
“Cut her?” Ruth looked puzzled.
“You said that we could cut her, Mrs. Chandler,” said Denise.
“I did?”
“Sure you did,” said Woofer.
“I did? When? Cut her how?”
“Hey. Come on, I want to fuck her,” said Willie.
“Shut up,” said Ruth. “I’m talking to Ralphie. Cut her how?”
“Put something on her,” said Ralphie. “So people’ d know. So people’d know she was a whore.”
“That’s right. Like a scarlet letter or something,” said Denise. “Like in the Classic Comic.”
“Oh, you mean like brand her,” said Ruth. “You mean brand her, not cut her.”
“You said cut her,” said Woofer.
“Don’t tell me what I said. Don’t you tell your mother.”
“You did, Mrs. Chandler,” said Eddie. “Honest. You said cut her.”
“I did?”
“I heard you. We all did.”
Ruth nodded. She thought about it. Then she sighed.
“Okay. We’ll want a needle. Ralphie, go up and get my sewing kit out of the ... I think it’s in the hall closet.”
“Okay.”
He ran by me.
I couldn’t believe this was happening.
“Ruth,” I said. “Ruth?”
She looked at me. Her eyes seemed to quiver, to shudder in their sockets.
“What.”
“You’re not really doing this, are you?”
“I said we could. So I guess we will.”
She leaned close to me. I could smell the cigarette smoke leaking from every pore.
“You know what the bitch tried to do last night?” she said. “She tried to get out of here. Somebody left the door unlocked. We figure it was Donny because he was the last one in yesterday and besides, Donny’s sweet on her. Always has been. So I finally let him have her. You have a woman, you don’t much want her anymore. I figure Donny’s cured now.
“But it’s good to let people see and know what she is. Don’t you think?”
“Mom,”
said Willie. He was whining now.
“What.”
“Why can’t I?”
“Can’t what?”
“Fuck
her!”
“Because I
said
so, goddammit! It’s incest! Now you leave me the hell alone about it. You want to go skinnydipping into your own brother’s scum? That what you want? Don’t talk to me. You’re disgusting! Just like your goddamn father.”
“Ruth,” I said. “You ... you can’t do this.”
“Can’t?”
“No.”
“No? Why not?”
“It’s not ... it’s not right.”
She got up. She walked over to me and I had to look at her. I had to look straight in her eye.
“Please don’t tell me what’s right, boy,” she said.
Her voice was a low trembling growl. I was aware of her shaking with a fury that was only barely under control. The eyes flickered like guttering candles. I stepped backward. I thought, my God, this was a woman I’d liked once. A woman I’d thought funny, sometimes even pretty. One of the guys.
This woman scared the hell out of me.
She’ll kill you, I thought. She’ll kill us all including her own kids and not even care or think about it till later.
If she feels like it.
“Don’t you tell me,” she said.
And I think she knew what was in my mind then. I think she read me completely.
It didn’t concern her. She turned to Willie.
“This boy tries to leave,” she said. “Cut his balls off and hand ’em over here to me. You got that?”
Willie returned her smile. “Sure, Mom,” he said.
Woofer came running into the room holding a battered cardboard shoebox. He handed it to Ruth.
“It wasn’t there,” he said.
“high?”
“It wasn’t in the closet. It was in the bedroom on the dresser.”
“Oh.”
She opened it. I caught a glimpse of jumbled twine and balls of thread, pincushions, buttons, needles. She put it down on the worktable and rummaged through it.
Eddie moved off the table to give her room and peered down over her shoulder.
“Here we go,” she said. She turned to Woofer, “we have to heat this through, though, or she’ll get an infection.”
She held a long thick sewing needle.
The room was suddenly crackling with tension.
I looked at the needle and then at Meg lying on the floor and she was looking at it too and so was Susan.
“Who gets to do it?” said Eddie.
“Well, I guess to be fair you can each do a letter. That okay?”
“Great. What’ll we write?”
Ruth thought about it.
“Suppose we keep it simple. How ‘bout we write, ‘I fuck. Fuck me.’ That ought to do it. That ought to tell whoever needs to know.”
“Sure,” said Denise. “That’ll be great.” To me at that moment she looked just like Ruth. The same twitchy light in her eyes, the same tense expectancy.
“Wow,” said Woofer. “That’s a lot of letters. Almost two each.”
Ruth counted, nodded.
“Actually,” she said, “if David doesn’t want in on this, and I suspect he doesn’t, you could make it two each and I’ll just take the one over. David?”
I shook my head.
“I figured,” said Ruth. But she didn’t seem angry or mocking about it.
“Okay,” said Ruth. “I’ll take the
I
. Let’s do it.”
“Ruth?” I said.
“Ruth?”
Willie moved closer to me, moving the carving knife in slow lazy circles right beneath my chin. He made me very nervous because you couldn’t tell with Willie. I looked at Eddie and watched him fiddle with the blade of his own Swiss Army knife, eyes cold and dead as I knew they’d be even before I looked. Then at Donny. It was a new Donny. There was no help from him either.
But Ruth just turned to me, still not angry, sounding calm and sort of weary. Almost like she were trying to tell me something I should have known all along, strictly for my own benefit. As though she were doing something really nice for me. As though of all the people here in this room, I was her favorite.
“David,” she said, “I’m telling you. Just leave this be.”
“I want to go, then,” I said. “I want to get out of here.”
“No.”
“I don’t want to see this.”
“Then don’t look.”

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