Off Season - Jack Ketchum [66]
She knew she’d worked herself up to looking hard and ugly now. In fact she was counting on it. Once, long ago, the same expression she knew she wore now had startled her in a mirror. It was the night she threw Gordon out for good. Is that me? she’d thought. I look like a bitter old hag. I look like I hate the world. And she did. Now she looked like that and with a much better reason. She thought of Carla and felt a surge of rage. She used the rage, keeping it under control, pouring it into her face and body. If that look in his eyes was only murder, then trying to face him down like this was an awful miscalculation. But she did not think it was murder. She thought it was cunt. Well, fuck him, she thought. I’m sorry, Laura, but here we go again. If it’s me or you, I’m damned if it’s me.
He put down the torch and reached into his pocket. She heard the rattle of metal. Then the keys were in his hands. He fumbled at them like a nervous adolescent. He glanced down at both women again, and Marjie felt a sudden chill at knowing that he’d chosen between them. His eyes gave away everything. Even though he’d chosen as she thought he would, she felt no relief. Instead it filled her with remorse and horror. Oh my God, Laura, she thought, are you in for it. Are you in for it now. The key turned in the lock. And Marjie found herself wishing for a forgiveness she knew she’d never find. The fear of dying, she thought, makes you very unfair.
He threw the door open and reached inside. He tittered as his fingers closed over Laura’s wrist. He jerked the girl toward him, out of the cage and into his arms, and it was as if she’d come suddenly to life. Her eyes went wild and seemed to fix for a moment on the blade he held between his teeth. Her head wrenched backward and she screamed. “Shut up!” he said, slushing his words over the knife, and slapped her. The slap was effective. It stopped the scream. And for a few seconds they simply stared at each other, the man grinning at her and holding her tightly with both arms around her waist while Laura’s eyes seemed to grow wider and wider, focused entirely on the knife and the evil, smirking mouth.
I have to watch, thought Marjie. Tonight, tomorrow, it could be me. I need to know what he does to her. And maybe that will stop him from doing the same to me, from killing me. She realized that for the past few seconds she had not even dared to breathe. The man and woman now stood before her as if suspended in time, and somehow she joined them in a strange deep empathy, deeper than any she’d ever known before. Like Laura, she barely moved. She could almost feel his arms around her, her hands against his chest, could almost smell the foulness of his breath. Then as quickly as it had come, the feeling was gone and she felt released from them. Something had warned her away. Something told her that Laura was as good as dead.
For Laura, those few moments brought back a measure of self-consciousness she had not known since she watched the grim warfare on the attic stairs. It was the touch of him that shocked her, the force of their contact, and she knew him for the enemy now—not just a cruel phantom presence who frightened her with fire but a flesh-and-blood man who had murdered Jim and Dan and Carla. In a few seconds everything that she had seen throughout the night but had remained unwilling to accept washed over her all at once, in all its alien horror.
She saw Carla’s body blackened by fire, the children attacking Nick (was Nick alive?), and the woman’s teeth in Dan’s neck as he fell backward through the doorway in a blast of gunfire. She heard gunfire again and saw a hand fall to the floor and then another object, a head, a child’s head, which she had held in her lap and . . .
Suddenly it was not a nameless, sightless fear that held her in thrall, but the fear of her own death so close at