Off Season - Jack Ketchum [94]
They walked through the living room and past the kitchen and peered in. There was nobody there. The sink was clean, the counter, bare.
Then we got to my father’s bedroom and Aunt Lucy started wailing, hands to her face, moaning and wailing, and Wendorf started saying oh my god, oh lord like a mantra over and over and staring into the room while Aunt Lucy turned and ran past me and got sick all over the rug by the burnt-out fireplace.
He lay on the bed in a pair of yellow pyjamas. The pyjamas were ripped open and crusted with dried blood. His mouth was pried open, his eyes stared up at the ceiling. His arms and legs were spread wide like you do making angels in the snow. His intestines trailed out of him to the floor and then looped back up to the headboard like a long brown-grey snake. His heart lay beneath his right arm and his liver below his hand and even I could tell that both had been partially eaten, and the intestines chewed.
I took it all in. I thought about Betty’s one male pup. And it was only when Wendorf tried to lead me out of there that I began to cry.
“Dogs,” said Sheriff Peters late that evening. “Must have got starving hungry and gone for him. I’m sorry you had to see it, son.”
But that was just for my benefit. He wasn’t fooling me or anybody.
There was plenty of food in the cupboard and my father would have starved himself before he’d let the dogs go without. It was Elizabeth. There were footprints leading out the back door for maybe twenty feet or so and then they disappeared into the drifts.
I knew it was her and so did he. They searched for her for weeks but I knew they wouldn’t find her—I just wondered about the fate of Betty and the pups. But the sheriff had seen what I’d seen, and he knew. He’d looked at my father’s face. At his open mouth.
Spread wide by the cigar-shaped body of the Monitor.
Wherever she’d come from, she’d gone back.
It wasn’t to the sea.
Table of Contents
PART ISEPT. 12, 1981
PART II SEPT. 13, 1981
PART III SEPT. 14, 1981