Stranglehold Read online

  STRANGLEHOLD

  by Jack Ketchum

  First Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press & Macabre Ink Digital

  Copyright 2011 by Dallas Mayr

  Cover Design by David Dodd

  Partial Cover Image courtesy of: http://tiffanyy09.deviantart.com/

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  ALSO FROM JACK KETCHUM & CROSSROAD PRESS:

  NOVELS:

  Ladies' Night

  The Woman

  COLLECTIONS:

  Sleep Disorder – with Edward Lee

  ESSAYS / BIOGRAPHY:

  Book of Souls

  Prologue

  Legacy

  Ellsworth, New Hampshire

  Easter 1953

  Enough, she thought.

  Goddamn it, that's enough.

  The baby cried.

  The baby wanted the nipple. Or the baby wanted to be held. Or else the baby had shit or pissed itself or maybe it wanted to piss or shit on her, maybe it was holding it, storing it up inside, waiting for her to come check its diaper so it could blow its filth out into her face. It had done that before.

  She got out of bed and walked to the crib. The man slept on.

  She picked the baby up and felt its diaper. The diaper was dry. She bounced the baby up and down. It cried some more.

  Well, it wasn't getting the nipple.

  Her nipples were already sore.

  She was still a good-looking woman. She was going to stay that way.

  Tomorrow you go on the bottle, she thought. I don't care what the doctors say.

  I can do whatever I want with you, she thought.

  You know that? You're mine.

  She was still a little woozy from all the port wine after dinner. Her head hurt. She wasn't much of a drinker. Except lately. Right now she wanted nothing more than to get back into bed and sleep it off, but no, she had to deal with the baby again. Every night the same damn thing. Every night the baby. Her husband never woke. Once or twice maybe but then all he did was roll over and tell her that the baby was crying, as if she didn't know that already, as if she wasn't lying there waiting the baby out.

  Well, if the baby didn't have to pee, she did.

  She took the baby with her, thinking that maybe just carrying it back and forth would put it back to sleep. You never knew.

  She padded down the hall to the bathroom and pulled up her nightgown and squatted, the baby in her arms, its face splotched angry red, its mouth open wide and the noise coming at her filling the tiny room, nonstop, unrelenting. She smelled her own strong urine and the baby's warm peculiar fleshy smell and the smell of its crying.

  Some people liked a baby's smell.

  She didn't.

  To her the baby didn't even smell human.

  When she stood up and flushed, the baby screamed.

  Really screamed.

  She shook it. "Jesus Christ," she said. "Will you for god's sake shut up?" The baby cried. She felt a hot wind blow inside her. I'll shut you up, she thought.

  No more.

  She lifted the toilet seat and took hold of the baby's feet, turned it upside down and thought, am I really going to do this? Am I? And the answer was damn right I am, I'm up to here with screaming whining sucking drooling pissing shitting I'm up to goddamn here with all of it.

  She lowered its head into the water.

  And held it there.

  Bubbles.

  Squirming.

  Pathetic, puny.

  Coughing.

  Weakening.

  The baby dying.

  Her baby.

  Oh jesus oh jesus god oh jesus.

  She pulled it out dripping wet, its tiny eyes wide, astonished, its mouth open wide streaming water from the bowl and there was silence, for a horrible moment it simply wouldn't breathe, its mouth was open but nothing was happening and then she started patting it, slapping its back and it started coughing and then screaming like she'd never heard it or anything scream before, staring at her wide-eyed all the while like he was seeing her there in front of him for the first time, staring straight into the sick wild soul of her so that she had to hug him close if for no other reason than to get away from his eyes, from that astonished accusation, holding him tight to her, thinking what did I do? what in god's name did I do? and saying to him baby, baby baby.

  One

  Children

  Wolfeboro, New Hampshire

  June 1962

  The little girl had quit pounding at the door. It wasn't doing any good.

  She couldn't even hear them outside anymore.

  The cabin smelled of earth and old decaying wood heavy in the damp still air. It was nearing dark. The light through the cracks in the windowless walls grew dimmer and dimmer.

  They'd wedged something into the door frame, a piece of wood or something, and she couldn't budge it. She sat huddled against the sweating, slimy wall, smelling wet clay soil and the rich musky smell of her own tears and thought, nobody will find me.

  She imagined them out there in the swamp water somewhere, maybe half a mile away by now—it was possible—slogging through shallow black water and mud that could suck your galoshes off, stabbing at frogs with their two-pronged metal spears. Jimmy would have a few by now dead or dying in his bucket. Billy was not as quick as Jimmy and might have come up empty.

  You gotta see this, they'd said. This's cool.

  The old log hunter's cabin lay out there in the middle of nowhere, what her daddy called a misbegotten construction that for years had been slowly sinking into the bog. Nobody used it for hunting now.

  Liddy was only seven.

  She hadn't wanted to go inside.

  The boys, Jimmy and Billy, were nine and ten. So why should she have to go in first?

  Why was it always her?

  She was thinking that but stepping through the open door anyway because they were boys and she couldn't let them know she was scared, when Jimmy pushed her in and hooted with laughter and one of them held the door closed while the other wedged something between the door and its frame and trapped her.

  She pounded. Screamed. Cried.

  She heard them out there laughing at her and then heard them sloshing through the water.

  Then she heard nothing at all. Not for a long time.

  She sat huddled by the door, staring down at the earthen floor and wondered if snakes came out at night and if they did would they want to get in here.

  She bet it was supper time.

  Daddy'd be mad again.

  Her mom would worry.

  "Come on. Please," she said to nobody at all, "let me out. Pleeeese!"

  All that accomplished was to start her crying again.

  The guys all talked about what happened up here after nightfall. They talked about it all the time. Everybody knew.

  Murderers used this place. Escaped crazy people who liked to do things to kids.

  Especially little kids.

  Liddy hated Billy and Jimmy.

  She wished they were dead. Then she wished she were dead.

  Because she'd dis
obeyed again.

  She should never have come along.

  Her mom and her daddy both had warned her against the place. You're not to go there under any circumstances her mom had said.

  But there were not many kids around and no girls at all to play with and you had to have somebody. And sometimes Billy and Jimmy were nice to her. Sometimes she'd get through an entire day without getting pushed or pinched or hit.

  Like she was really somebody's sister.

  So she'd told them okay even though she knew it was probably going to turn out wrong someway, even though she had to trust the boys completely, depending on them to even get her up here because it was way off the trail and she'd never even seen this part of the woods before.

  She was actually kind of ... lost.

  Even if she got out of here.

  She thought that if she had to stay here all night she'd go crazy.

  There was a story Jimmy told about the swamp.

  He said his older brother Mike had been up here alone a long time ago and he'd seen something in the water, that it had looked like a log at first but when Mike came closer he saw it was a man, a dead man with half his face chopped off—cut absolutely, completely clean from head to chin so that one open eye was staring at him, the other eye gone, half the nose split right down the middle and half the mouth open in a great big O so that Mike said the guy looked sort of surprised more than anything else and in the back of the head he could see this mess of brain and blood and bone. He ran for the police and brought them an hour later to the very same spot, but by then the guy was gone. The guy had disappeared. They looked everywhere.

  Jimmy was a liar and so was his big brother Mike but Jimmy always said that now the guy haunted the place. That you could hear him at night moaning through half a mouth, breathing heavy through half a nose, dragging himself through the dirty snake-, frog-, and leech-infested water.

  It was only a story.

  But if she stayed here all night she'd go crazy. She was trembling all over.

  It was getting dark.

  "Mommy," she whispered.

  She heard footsteps. Sloshing through the mud. Coming toward her.

  "Mommy," she said.

  Thinking about the dead man.

  Not help but mommy.

  Her long brown pigtail caught on rough weathered wood as she slid away from the door, her scalp burning as a clutch of hair pulled free. She got to her feet and ran to the wall farthest away. She felt tiny splinters of the old rotten wood nip the palm of her hand. She pressed back against it anyway, facing the door.

  "That's right," said Jimmy. "Call your mommy."

  He flung open the door. The hinges screamed.

  "Sissy!"

  He ran. Billy was right behind him.

  "Wait!" she cried. She ran after them.

  Bog muck sucked at her galoshes, splattered her bare legs and her shorts. She plunged through it. But she was never as fast as they were. Never. Not even close.

  By the time she was out of the swamp they were up the hill and into the trees.

  By the time she made it up the hill she couldn't see them at all.

  She was alone again.

  It was full dusk. Just minutes from darkness. The thick trees and brush almost made it seem as though it were already dark.

  Which way?

  She thought that maybe . . .

  She walked the crest of one hill to another. Over that to another. She was scared and she was crying. Each hill looked the same as the one before it and none of them were familiar. Brush and evergreen and pale white birch and thick, nasty tangles of thorn. She moved as fast as she could. Against time and darkness.

  She stumbled, fell, scraped her knee on a rock and felt her funny bone tingle and go all numb and then start to hurt bad, throbbing, and felt the splinters lodge deeper into the palm of her hand. She stumbled again seconds later on a log half-buried under leaves and fell to her side.

  Onto the path.

  Well-trod, hard-packed earth.

  And now she knew and recognized that big rock over there, just ahead of her, peppered with fool's gold. Jimmy'd stood on it on the way here.

  Yes!

  She was not going to die out here after all, starved or killed by crazy people or bit by snakes, she was not even going to hear the sound of the breathing of the ghost of the split-skull man. She was going to make it home.

  Tears streamed down her muddy cheeks. It was hard to believe a person could feel this good and this bad both at the same time. Her heart pounded with relief.

  She made her way home.

  Her father was waiting for her on the porch. He had a beer and he was still in his shirtsleeves from the bank and he was sitting in his rocking chair listening while she tried to explain.

  She could see her mother in the doorway, watching from behind the screen, hands resting on her swollen belly. Her mom was eight months pregnant.

  When she was finished telling her story her father set the beer down and then stood up and walked over to her, standing at the very edge of the porch.

  "What is wrong with you?" he said. "Where is your intelligence? Where are your brains, Lydia? Don't you have any brains at all?"

  She could think of nothing to say. She picked at her splinters. Her hand hurt. Her knee hurt. The knee was even bleeding. Didn't he care?

  "Am I raising a stupid child, Lydia? I think I am." Her mother opened the screen door behind him.

  "Russell ..."

  It was as though her mother weren't even there.

  "Listen to me. You're not a boy, Liddy. Boys do things that are sometimes dangerous, sometimes foolish. You could say that's part of being a boy. Part of how boys grow up. But you are not supposed to be out doing the kinds of things that boys do. Do you understand that? Is this too difficult for you?"

  "No."

  She thought she was going to start to cry again. She wondered if the baby in mama's belly would be a boy.

  "No what?"

  "No, sir."

  His pale blue eyes bore into her.

  "All right. I don't know why I even have to tell you all this." He shook his head. "Honestly. Sometimes I don't know where the hell it is you came from." He turned and sat down in the rocker.

  "Your supper's cold," he said. "And it'll damn well stay cold. Now get upstairs and clean yourself up. You'll wash those clothes yourself, young lady. Understand me?"

  "Yes, sir."

  She took off her muddy galoshes and placed them to one side beside the porch. Daddy sipped his beer and didn't say anything and didn't look at her. At least he wasn't going to hit her this time. Her mother opened the door for her, then stood aside as she climbed the stairs to her room.

  She sat down on the bed and then remembered that she was dirty and that the bed was clean. She got up and brushed off the bed cover, limped down the hall to the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror.

  The face staring back at her was dirty and tear-streaked, sad-eyed and dopey-looking. Her pigtails were a mess and studded with burrs and twigs and hunks of leaves.

  She felt as lonely as she had in the cabin.

  Almost.

  A little less scared, that's all.

  Ellsworth, New Hampshire

  August 1962

  The boy lay listening in the dark steamy crawl space beneath the stairs. His mother was standing right above him, talking to Officer Duggan.

  He could hear them perfectly.

  "I'm not waiting any twenty-four hours, Ralph Duggan," his mother was saying. "No way I am. You're standin' right here, right now and I'm telling you."

  "Ruth ..."

  "Don't 'Ruth' me. I knew you when you were Arthur's age, didn't I? That's right. You're damn well right I did. Now you tell me—would your mama have waited any twenty-four hours? Answer me that."

  Arthur could hear Officer Duggan sigh. He knew what it was like to try to talk to his mother. He lay way back in the dark and didn't move an inch.

  He stared through t
he wooden latticework and then through the overgrown bushes and hardscrabble grass. Even though it was getting on to dusk he could see almost all the way over the hill to the bridge and the beaver pond from here. He'd sneak down there sometimes while they were asleep.

  The boy could see out but they couldn't see in. It was much too dark back here until your eyes adjusted and that took a while. His mother had already tried.

  "The problem is, Ruth, we got no men to spare just now. Damn brushfire's pinning us all down. We got people come all the way over from Compton to help us out. Troopers, volunteers. But with this breeze and the land being this dry ... hell, you can smell the smoke yourself from here. We'll be on this thing half the night as it is."

  "I don't care about any brushfire. What I care about's my boy."

  "You want your house to go up in flames, Ruth? It could, if we don't stop the damn thing."

  "That fire's half a mile away."

  "That's right. And the wind's blowing right in your direction. You got the Wingerter place and then you. Harry, talk to her, will you?"

  It was the first the boy was even aware his father was there. His father could move as quiet as an Apache if he wanted to.

  Unless he was drunk.

  A brown wood spider was moving across the back of the boy's left hand. Crawling up toward his wrist.

  He knew that the spider's bite could be nasty but he wasn't afraid of anything that small.

  Certain people, yes.

  Spiders, no.

  Though spiders disgusted him.

  He couldn't risk slapping it, though. They might hear. Instead he reached over slowly with his right hand and firmly crushed its body against his wrist. The spider went wet and sticky. He rubbed the spot until the wet was dry and only the sticky stuff remained.

  He'd done okay. The spider hadn't bitten.

  "It doesn't matter what my husband's got to say on the matter," his mother was saying. "That boy's never missed a single Sunday dinner in his life. Wouldn't dare to miss it. Nope. Something's wrong here. You and me, Ralph Duggan, we're going looking for that boy, and you'll walk right over to that car there and call in a proper missing persons report or else I'll step inside for a moment and you'll go looking with me at the point of a shotgun. How's that?"