Off Season Read online

  HIGH PRAISE FOR JACK KETCHUM AND OFF SEASON!

  “If you read Off Season at Thanksgiving, you probably won’t sleep until Christmas.”

  —Stephen King

  “[Off Season] still influence[s] horror today. Only a novel of expert articulation and emotional truth can cast such a long shadow, and Ketchum’s is both.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ketchum [is] one of America’s best and most consistent writers of contemporary horror fiction.”

  —Bentley Little

  “Just when you think the worst has already happened… Jack Ketchum goes yet another shock further.”

  —Fangoria

  “Ketchum’s prose is tight and spare, without a single misplaced word.”

  —Cinescape.com

  “For two decades now, Jack Ketchum has been one of our best, brightest, and most reliable.”

  —Hellnotes

  “Welcome to Jack Ketchum’s ferocious and unforgettable first novel.”

  —Douglas E. Winter

  “A major voice in contemporary suspense.”

  —Ed Gorman

  “Jack Ketchum is a master of suspense and horror of the human variety.”

  —The Midwest Book Review

  Other books by Jack Ketchum:

  THE GIRL NEXT DOOR

  SHE WAKES

  PEACEABLE KINGDOM

  RED

  THE LOST

  OFF SEASON

  The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious.

  Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.

  Copyright © 1980, 1999 by Dallas Mayr

  Copyright © 1998 by Dallas Mayr for Winter Child

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by 47North

  P.O. Box 400818

  Las Vegas, NV 89140

  ISBN-13: 9781477840528

  ISBN-10: 1477840524

  Two writers have made it their business over the years to make sure I didn’t simply disappear into the woodwork career-wise—the late and dearly missed Robert Bloch, to whom I dedicated Hide and Seek, and Stephen King. This one’s for Steve, with much gratitude. Who it turns out read the original Way Back When.

  This title was previously published by Dorchester Publishing; this version has been reproduced from the Dorchester book archive files.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  OFF SEASON

  WINTER CHILD

  OFF SEASON

  “My God! My God!

  Must I die like this?”

  —Jack Slade

  “Sodom and Gomorrah,

  they run the roadhouse.”

  —John Cougar

  PART I

  SEPT. 12, 1981

  12:26 A.M.

  They watched her cross the meadow and step over the low stone wall, into the woods beyond. She looked awkward. She would be easy to catch.

  They took their time. Breaking off the white birch switches, peeling the bark away. They could hear her moving through the underbrush. They looked at one another and smiled, but said nothing. They peeled the switches, and then they started after her.

  She thanked God for the moonlight. She had nearly missed seeing the old cellar hole, and it was deep. Now she moved carefully around it and kept running, through the long grass and cattails, past white pine, black pine, birch, and poplar. Beneath her feet moss and lichen. The scent of rot and evergreen. She heard them tumble through the slashing behind her, their voices light and musical; children playing in the dark. She remembered their hands on her; coarse strong little hands with long sharp dirty nails that raked her skin as they clutched at her. She shuddered. She heard them laughing close behind. In front of her, the forest thickened.

  She had to go more slowly now. It was terribly hard to see. Long branches tugged at her hair and poked cruelly at her eyes. She crossed her bare arms in front of her to protect her face; the woods scraped them and they bled. Behind her the children paused and listened. She began to cry.

  Stupid, she thought, stupid to start crying now. She heard them move again nearby. Could they see her? She plunged ahead through the thick scrub. Old brittle branches stabbed through her thin cotton dress as if she were naked, raking new troughs of blood along her arms and legs and stomach. The pain did not stop her; it drove her on. She gave up trying to protect her face and beat back the branches with her arms, thrashing her way through the scrub to the clearing.

  She took a deep breath and immediately she smelled the sea. It could not be far. She broke into a run. There might be houses there, fishermen’s cottages. Someone. The meadow was long and wide. Soon she heard the sound of surf ahead and she kicked off her shoes and raced barefoot toward the sound; while eleven small pale bodies broke through the last stands of brush and watched her in the moonlight.

  She could see nothing ahead of her, no houses, no lights. Only the wide plain of tall grass. What if there was only the sea ahead of her? She would be cornered, trapped. But she would not think of that. Hurry, she told herself, faster. Her lungs felt cold and ached inside her. The sound was louder now. The sea was very near, somewhere just beyond the meadow.

  She heard them running behind her and knew that they were close, too. She ran with a power that surprised her. She heard them laughing. Their laughter was horrible; cold, evil. She saw some of them moving up alongside her, running without effort, watching her and grinning, their bared teeth and eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

  They knew she was defenseless. They were playing with her. All she could do was run and hope against hope that they tired of the game. She could see no house nearby. She was going to die alone. She heard one of them yipping like a dog behind her and suddenly she felt something slash across the backs of her legs. The pain was sharp and intense and it nearly made her fall. She was not going to make it. They were all around her; it was impossible. She felt her bowels give way, and knew she was giving in to panic.

  For the thousandth time she cursed herself for stopping the car, for playing the Good Samaritan. But it had shocked her to see the little girl stumbling alone along the dark, lonely road. She had swung around a corner and suddenly there she was, her dress torn almost to the waist, and in the headlights she could see that the girl had her hands to her face and seemed to be crying. She could not have been more than six years old.

  So she’d stopped the car and approached her, thinking, Accident, rape; and the girl had looked up at her with those intense black eyes that had not the slightest trace of tears in them, and grinned at her. Something made her turn around, then, to glance back at the car and she saw them standing in front of it, blocking her return. Suddenly she was afraid. She screamed at them to get away from the car, knowing they would not. “Get the hell out of here,” she’d yelled, feeling helpless and foolish, and that was when they first began to laugh at her and first began advancing. That was when she felt their hands on her and knew they meant to kill her.

  Now the runners beside her started to close in. She permitted herself a look at them. Filthy. Awful. There were four of them, three to the left of her and one to the right. The group of three were all boys and the single runner was a young girl. She veered toward the girl and rammed her. Her momentum flung the girl away and she heard a cry of pain. There were whoops of laughter from the others. She felt a quick burning pain cross her back and shoulders, then two lashes in quick succession across her buttocks. Her legs felt weak and rubbery. She knew her strength was waning. Yet her fear of falling was worse than the pain, much worse. I
f she fell they would beat her to death. Her thighs and shoulders felt wet and she knew they had bloodied her. And now the sea was so close she could taste it, feel the spray upon her body. She kept running.

  She saw that the runners to her left had been joined by a new boy, a big boy moving fast. My God, she thought, what is he wearing? Some skin, some animal. Who in God’s name are these people? There were two more children to the right of her now. She could not tell if they were boys or girls. They moved easily through the tall grass. Stop playing with me, she thought, oh please stop. The big boy broke out ahead of her, darting directly into her path. So now she was surrounded. He glanced back over his shoulder and in the moonlight, she saw that his face was a solid mass of scabs and pimples.

  The fear was cold and hollow inside her now. Their switches cut deep into her back and legs. There was nothing to do but keep running. There was only running, running and the sea.

  She stared hard at the boy’s back, trying to focus, trying to keep up her strength and courage. Then suddenly he whirled and she saw the blur of his switch and all at once her face exploded with pain. Her nose was bleeding and her face felt raw from cheek to cheek. The taste of blood in her mouth. It was hard to breathe. She knew she would have to stop soon. She felt as if something were already dead inside her. She almost ran into the boy as he halted in front of her. Her eyes darted to the right and left of him, looking for a way out. She could not look at him. Not until she had to.

  She saw something glint in the moonlight behind him. There it was. The sea. It made her feel terribly weary. There was nowhere left to go, no help at all. There were no houses. Only a sheer drop down the sudden granite cliffs into unknown depths of ocean. The fall alone would probably kill her. There was no hope, none. She stopped running and turned slowly to face the pursuers gathered around her.

  For a moment they were only children again, and she stared bewildered at the tattered rags and sackcloth, at the incredibly filthy faces, at the eyes bright with the chase, and the small tight bodies, and she thought that this could not possibly be happening, that no children could be this way. That she was lost in a dream of blood and agony. Then she saw their bodies crouch and tense, the birch switches poise and rise again, the eyes narrow and the lips press tight together. She closed her eyes against them.

  And then an instant later they were upon her. The foul claws tearing her clothing, the switches falling hard on her head and shoulders. She screamed. It only caused more laughter. She felt their drooling mouths press against her, and her flesh began to crawl with the feel of blood and saliva. She screamed again and felt a fear like none she had ever known well up and burst desperately against them. Suddenly she felt immense and strong compared to them, a huge wounded monster. She opened her eyes and struck out wildly, struck foreheads and mouths with her small fists and pushed hard against their vile, filthy bodies. For a moment she seemed to burst through them toward the big boy in front of her. Then they surged back at her again, and she pushed against them and whirled twice, spinning them off her, and then she was through, the way was clear, and the big boy saw her intent and stepped quickly out of her way.

  There was never anything to consider, no time to think or fear. She had no options. She ran past the boy into the thin night air. And her leap drew her far away over the rockface and breathlessly down into the wild, churning waves, into immense and frigid darkness, and washed her blood in the cold salt sea.

  1:15 A.M.

  There wasn’t much in the small blue suitcase to interest them. Three cotton blouses, slightly soiled. A green pullover sweater. Otherwise only bras, panties, stockings, and a tweed skirt. In the front seat was a sweater that buttoned down the front, white cashmere. The girl put that on over her tattered army shirt and ran her rough hands over the soft material, rubbing dirt into the sleeves, vaguely distracted by the two ten-year-olds attacking the glove compartment with their penknives. The car smelled of the woman’s perfume and cigarette smoke.

  Except for some papers—maps, a license and registration—the glove compartment was empty. The boy with the bad skin emptied the pocketbook on the front seat and ran his long bony hands through its contents: plastic comb and brush, hairpins, a red silk scarf, lipstick, rouge, eyebrow pencil and a bottle of eyeliner, an old cloudy pocket mirror, address book, sunglasses, passport, pocket calculator, a paperback thriller, emery board, another lipstick, a wallet. Inside the wallet was a total of eighty-five dollars in tens, fives, and singles, a Bloomingdale’s charge card and credit cards from Master Charge and American Express. He flipped through the pictures in the plastic frames—a man and a woman in bathing suits, smiling into the camera; a small, strange-looking dog; an old woman cleaning a chicken in a porcelain sink, her hair in curlers. There was nothing here he wanted.

  He moved his gawky adolescent body out of the car and motioned to the little boy and girl who waited behind him. The children crawled up on the seat. The boy child selected the darker of the two shades of lipstick and began scrawling circles on the rearview mirror. The girl liked the snapshot of the slightly ratlike dog and the pocket mirror and slipped them inside the grimy leather bag she wore around her neck. Meantime the big boy found a can of de-icer wedged under the seat. He shook it. Nearly empty.

  He could not open the trunk because he had no crowbar. That the keys to the trunk still dangled from the ignition meant nothing to him. He did not understand keys. Only that there might be something good in there.

  On their way back through the woods, they spotted an owl and waited silently while it made its kill, a large bullfrog barely visible to them above the waterline. They watched the owl return to its tree with the frog and begin to tear it apart. Then the boy with the bad skin pelted it with a rock. The rock caught the bird square in the chest and tumbled it into a patch of blackberries. The smaller children cried out in pleasure. But the boy did not bother with its carcass. The thorns were too much trouble. Some animal would come along who would not mind the thorns. At night everything hunted.

  11:30 A.M.

  The kitchen was beginning to please her. It would be a great kitchen, once she got it clean again. Long double-leaf table; plenty of counter space; plenty of light from the big window over the sink facing east down the mountain over the field of dying goldenrod that passed for a backyard now, and two smaller windows west and south. Best of all, a big old potbellied stove near the center of the room, big enough to heat it and probably both bedrooms as well.

  The kitchen was the largest room in the house and obviously intended to be the focal point of life there. Both doors led directly into it: the back door just to the left of the sink and the front door just beyond the table, next to a huge leather sofa. It was going to be very comfortable. Carla stood back from the sink for a moment and took a look around. It looked good now. She picked up the brown paper bag filled with toweling and ashes from the stove and brought it out back to the garbage cans on the porch.

  A lovely day, she thought. The sun was bright and there was just enough of a nip in the air to give her an excuse to get the stove going. In the distance she could hear the waves against the shoreline. It was too bad you couldn’t see the ocean. Just an albatross drifting high a half-mile away.

  She opened the door to the woodshed and found it piled high with split oak and poplar. There was kindling in a box on the floor. Someone had done a pretty good job getting the place ready for her. Oh, it was dirty. But you had to expect that, and Carla didn’t mind a little cleaning. She appreciated the wood, though—chopping wood was not one of the things she had learned to do well in life. And she appreciated the little touches, like the emergency numbers over the telephone in case she should need a doctor or—miserable idea—the police, and like the extension cord for her typewriter left on the kitchen table and the fact that somebody had thought to plug in the refrigerator. Someone had even done a cursory job with a broom. Considering that the agent said the place hadn’t been rented in over a year now, it wasn’t even all that dirty. Bad
season last summer, he’d told her. Too many jellyfish on the beaches. She’d expected an awful mess, and it was nice to find that wasn’t the case at all. All told, they’d left her in pretty good shape. There was a good sharp axe in the woodshed should she need some more kindling. But from the look of the shed she was confident that unless it was a hell of an autumn, she wasn’t going to have to do any more splitting.

  She made a few trips to the stove and back and laid in some wood, enough to do for the time being. Then she poured herself a cup of coffee and sat down at the table to consider what still remained unfinished. The bathroom was clean, the bedrooms were clean, and now the kitchen was done, too. That left the living room and, if she wanted to bother, the attic. Were she not expecting Jim and Marjie and the others tomorrow she’d have let the living room go for a few days, but with six of them in the house she figured she’d need the space.

  Dumb idea, she thought, to have them here so soon, before I’m even settled in. But she had invited them on impulse and what was done was done. Jim’s shooting was over now and who could know when he’d have to run off to L.A. for another idiot TV commercial or something. So the timing was convenient for him at least. How in hell had she gotten involved with an actor, anyway? By and large they were not her favorite people. They tended to be very single-minded, very egocentric. But she knew how she’d gotten involved with him, all right. It was simple—she’d never seen anything prettier in her life. The admission made her smile.

  After Nick it had seemed so much simpler just to have a man around who was attractive, who made love to her and took her places and left it at that. Nick had been much too complex. She had put entirely too much energy into that one. Now it was work that interested her, not men. She had always given too much of her life over to relationships, and they’d never quite worked out. Now she was simplifying her life in favor of her career. It gave her a sense of control to watch herself succeeding, and a great deal of satisfaction. As for Jim, he was very handsome, and very nice to touch. And that was that.