Red - Jack Ketchum [55]
And coming to rest there.
Gently moving, slowly. This is a caress.
Peggy can’t help it, she begins to cry.
It’s as though she’s seen a miracle. Felt a miracle.
And she thinks, maybe I have.
“Oh my god, Peggy!” her mother says from behind her. “What in god’s name have you done?”
~ * ~
Climbing painfully down the front steps she saw that the cellar door was open and she thought is that it? Is that who’s doing all that screaming out there in the barn? Has Chris finally decided to feed the damn woman to the dogs? It’s crazy but no crazier than anything else he’s done lately. So she decided to check.
And now she stands at the top of the stairs and sees her daughter down there with her looking up at her as though dazed and the woman free of her chains and coming at her like a bullet from a gun.
~ * ~
This woman belongs to the man. She has stood by him as he hurt her with hot water and then with cold. She has hit her, held a gun to her head.
She takes the stairs three at a time and when she rams her shoulder into the woman’s midsection, lifts her up and slams her down into the dirt she howls in pain. The Woman kneels and straddles her. She waves her arms trying to hit her or push her away and she bats them off like pests, like insects, like flies.
She is shaking her head and shouting. Her eyes are wide. The Woman digs her thumb and forefinger into those eyes and they pop like pits from ripe fruit and roll across her cheeks. She leans down and quickly bolts first one and then the other. Then her teeth find the soft flesh of her cheek.
The man’s woman is no longer shouting now. She is making choking sounds as though it were she and not the Woman doing the eating.
The Woman chews, swallows, leans down and drinks from the sweet seep and spurt of blood. She turns the head beneath her hand, which offers no resistance — she has seen this many times before with the grievously wounded, it is almost like a kind of sleep — and bites deep into the other cheek.
She glances up as she chews and sees a thresher machine leaning against the side of the house, one of its blades propped upright beside it. She finishes chewing and sucks the blood from this cheek too. Then she hoists the woman up onto her shoulder and walks to the house.
She tosses her high up onto the steps. Hears her backbone crack against them and sees her head thump down like a log on a woodpile and loll off to one side.
She picks up the blade and runs her finger up and down.
It lacks a proper edge but it will do.
~ * ~
Peg hears her mother’s shouts Chris!Peg!please!help!help! and then hears no more and even the dogs have abruptly stopped but it is as though she were tranced there standing in the cellar, she knows she should try to help her mother but she cannot, she’s rooted there — and what she feels most strongly is a sense of safety though that makes no sense to her at all.
Safety. And calm. Though there’s a wild woman loose. Safety.
Strange.
And then she thinks god! Darleen! and realizes her little sister’s utter lack of safety — her vulnerability to everybody concerned dashes the calm, fills her with terror suddenly and breaks the spell.
She runs up the stairs and sees that the sun is setting, her house bathed in a warm yellow-orange light, sees her mother’s broken body on the stairs in that same soft glow, steps over and around it and hurries inside, calling her sister’s name.
THIRTY FOUR
Cleek is rapt.
He has seen the dogs ravage a raccoon felled from a tree at night under the beams of his and his buddies’ flashlights but never anything like this. Nor has he ever seen his daughter at work. If anything she’s the most vicious of the four. She’s digging teeth and bloody hands into the remains of the teacher’s right breast all the way down to the exposed ribs. Agnes is at her side tearing into the woman’s haunch while George and Lily have an arm and leg respectively chewed to the bone.
They’re working as a team.
The teacher’s face is gone. Her ears are gone. Her cunt and