Off Season - Jack Ketchum [86]
I did keep it, though.
I was going through some old papers and there it was, by now completely forgotten, a sheaf of yellowing paper. I read it through and it surprised me. It still didn’t work at all in terms of the book. But that didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t working.
And reading it over I remembered that for years thereafter I’d retained a certain fondness for the story, a certain regret that I couldn’t fit it in. That was why I’d held onto it for so long. She Wakes was my only supernatural novel for one thing and I liked the way the story took the reader back to the horrors of reality. In it Chase is a budding psychic, yes, but the antagonist he faces is completely possible within the real world, completely human, with no supernatural powers whatsoever. In fact—and this is the second reason I liked the piece—she’s borrowed directly and quite consciously from my first novel, Off Season. The mute sinister little sister of my ferocious group of cannibals on the coast of Maine. The nearest town to Chase’s dad’s farm is Dead River, just as in Off Season, only here that stunted northern coastline is observed mostly in winter. The town sheriff is Sheriff Peters, a momentary appearance. The little girl in the story prefigures the sole young survivor of my initial feral clan who was to reappear, with her own brand-new family of people-eaters, in the sequel Offspring, written ten years after the original—though the story itself is set some thirty years before the original, some time in the early 1950s.
Confused yet? I can only beg pardon and say that sometimes the roots of what one imagines in this business are tangled even for the writer.
Anyway, for any of you readers out there who might be interested in what was left out of the original plan for She Wakes or are looking for more in the way of Off Season, I give you Winter Child. Hopefully it stands on its own without either book to support its claim to a few minutes of your attention. I’ve gone over the red-ink scratchings-out and writings-in and the many paste-ups—the thing was written on a typewriter!—to give the story a final shape, but otherwise it remains the same as it was back in 1988, for better or worse. My castaway, my orphan in the snow.
—J. K. December 1996
WINTER CHILD
The waiter brought the wine, uncorked the bottles, placed a cash-register stub under the ashtray along with the breakfast stubs and walked away.
Chase began to pour.
“I was just a boy,” he said. “Seven years old. But it was the very last year of my childhood . . .”
My father was not young that winter, he was fifty-five. But he was still big and strong and probably could have remained a jack for ten more years had it not been for the injury to his back. The lumber company had reduced him to clerking, probably because he was one of the few men along the timberline in all of northern Maine who could add a six-figure column and still know birch from poplar. He wasn’t happy at it though, and I think the only reason he stayed was the land.
We owned thirty-two acres, most of it rough scrub and bare mountain but some of it prime. We were alone there, he and I. My mother had died two years ago in the dead of winter the same way my younger sister June had only weeks before her, of pneumonia. Bad lungs ran on the female side.
So there we were, just the two of us on all that land, the nearest neighbor six miles east past Horsekill Creek and over the hills halfway to Dead River, halfway to the sea. And it was winter again, and we’d survived just one other winter since my mother and June died, and the first big snowfall reminded us hard.
If depression can kill a man then my father was in a lot of trouble that season.
There was plenty to keep him busy. It wasn’t that. There was the job—he reported there daily after dropping me off at