Off Season - Jack Ketchum [28]
The damp of night had brought out the ghost crabs now. A favored game for the women was to rout them. A quick step to the right or left was enough to scatter crabs for six or seven feet around. The women liked to see their fast, skittish sideward motion. They did not try to catch them, only to scare them.
The crabs had gills and needed to keep them moist, so they burrowed deep into the wet sand during the day and hunted at night or in rainy, overcast weather. At night their pale bodies blended so well with the sand that it was only when they moved that you saw them.
Then it was as if the beach itself were alive and shifting underfoot. The women laughed and chased them, dimly imagining that the very beach was afraid of them, darting ever away.
8:05 P.M.
The man was naked when the women returned to the cave. His red shirt, tattered jeans, and heavy boots hung from a rack over the fire. The fire was made of softwoods because of the good thick smoke. He wanted to carry the scent of fire. He did not think that for months now the cave had smelled of urine, fecal matter, dampness, and rotten meat, and that he carried those scents in his very flesh now. He did not notice. He only thought that the woman in the house would have her own fire, and the smell of this one would render him undetectable as he stalked her.
The two women laughed as they entered.
“We shit the steps,” said the younger one. She reached down to take his penis in her hand. She knew her prank might anger him. But in the past this had always kept him at bay. The man’s penis began to swell immediately. He grinned at her and buried his left hand in her long dirty hair. He pulled her toward him, and the woman began to laugh again.
The middle and third fingers on the man’s right hand were missing just above the knuckle. He moved that hand inside the open checked shirt and slid it roughly over her breasts, his thumb and forefinger lingering to pinch the long pointed nipples. Her eyes remained dull but her tongue moved out between her teeth and wagged at him provocatively. The man had waited for that.
He let got of her hair and slapped her. She fell to the ground, whimpering, and spit blood onto the dirt floor of the cave. The older woman took a step away from him. He was dangerous now. For a moment they merely glared at one another. Then both women moved quickly away, back into the cool depths of the cave, and left him alone again.
In the dim light they saw a third woman to the rear of the cave, preparing a kind of sausage for roasting. The woman was pregnant and nearing the end of her term. The swell of her belly seemed to augment her look of lazy, bovine stupidity. Like the others, she was unnaturally pale from scant exposure to the sun. Like them, her hair was long and filthy, and the bearskin she wore was stained and stiff in places with dirt, food, and ashes.
“We shit the steps,” repeated the young one. Forgetting the man’s anger, they both began to laugh again, and now the strangeness in the older, fat woman’s mouth and jaw no longer seemed so unusual—she had no teeth. It gave her an odd, reptilian look. Her toothless gums moved endlessly, like a lizard swallowing a large fly. She knelt down beside the pregnant woman and the neck of her shapeless dress billowed open, revealing long thin pendulous breasts.
“There are others,” said the younger woman, leaning back against the damp wall of the cave. “Two woman, three men. We saw through the window.”
The pregnant woman nodded. None of this was her concern at the moment. The sausages were nearly ready. She had begun almost an hour ago, slicing the intestine into eighteen-inch strips, turning them inside out and then taking them to the brook for washing. When she returned to the cave she opened up the spine, shoulder, and thighbones to get to