The Girl Next Door (33 page)

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Authors: Jack Ketchum

Tags: #Horror, #Fiction

BOOK: The Girl Next Door
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Like all the other clippings this one had been stuffed in a shirt box and put on the attic stairs and the edges were dry and brown and crumbling. But I noticed something along the margin. I turned it and recognized my mother’s writing. She’d written in pencil, which had faded, but it was readable.
Just beside the headline and rising up along the side of the picture she’d written with fine irony
I wonder how Donny and Willie are doing?
 
And now, on the uncertain, unsettled eve of my third marriage, to a woman who would have been exactly Meg’s age had she lived, plagued with nightmares all of which seem to concern failing again, failing
somebody
, carelessly leaving them to the rough mercies of the world—and adding to those names she’d scrawled along the side of the clipping the names of Denise and Eddie Crocker, and my own name—I wonder too.
Author’s Note: On Writing the Girl Next Door
“Who loves ya, baby
?” says Kojak.
Well, with the world’s most trusted Greek selling Atlantic City gambling, who knows? But I do know who and what scares me.
The
what,
broadly speaking, is the unpredictable. Not that some chance encounter with a redhead has me racing back to my apartment for a crucifix and garlic. More along the lines of Alzheimer’s, AIDS, or geese in the jet props. I was walking down Broadway one day when an entire oak dresser came plummeting to the sidewalk two steps ahead of me.
That
scared me. Scared me and made me mad.
And I feel the same way about the people who frighten me. They piss me off. I resent sharing my planet with creeps like Bundy who look like me and talk like me and who are very charming except that they have this one funny thing about them, gee, they like to bite the nipples off people.
This is not just empathy with the victim. I mean, I have nipples too.
Sociopaths scare me and make me mad. Not just the big-league sociopaths—the Mansons and Gary Tisons—but also the guys who rip off old ladies with land scams in Florida. All these types without a conscience. I know a woman whose husband got thrown off his seat at the Stock Exchange and to cover his debts forged her name to loans totalling over a quarter million dollars, not to mention IRS forms, and now all hell is breaking loose with liens against the house and back taxes and she—with a kid to support who, tragically, still loves the guy the way an eight-year-old almost has to love his father—hasn’t seen or heard from him since March of 1989. Neither has anybody else. He skipped. Nobody can touch him. While the world descends on wife and son like swarms of flies.
I’d wanted to write about one of these bastards for a long time. Their otherness. And what happens to us real people when we believe them to be human.
I found one in Jay Robert Nash’s
Bloodletters and Badmen.
Her crime was unusual and wholly repellent.
Over the course of months and with the help of her teenage son and daughters—and eventually, the neighborhood kids as well—she had tortured a sixteen-year-old girl to death, a boarder, in view of her little sister, ostensibly to “teach her a lesson” about what it was like to be a woman in the world.
Her kids reminded me of something out of
Lord
of the Flies. But forget the kids—because here’s this
woman
, this adult, giving them permission, orchestrating things and leading them every step of the way in some sick game of
instruction
that had something to do with a fundamental loathing of her sex and inability to see any suffering but her own. Then transmitting that to a bunch of teenagers. The girl’s
friends.
There was a picture of her in the book. Her crime took place in 1965, when she was thirty-six years old. But the face in the book was sixty. Sagging blotchy skin—deeply lined—thin bitter mouth, a receding hairline and dingy hair worn in the style of a full decade earlier.
Deep-set big dark eyes that managed to look both haunted and empty at once. Scary. Right away I was mad at her.
She stayed with me.
Then some years later my mother died, well-loved, in the same New Jersey home I’d grown up in and had known since infancy. In almost every way that counted it was still home base for me. I dealt with both losses gradually, leaving my apartment at intervals and spending a lot of time out there going through her effects, getting to know the neighbors again, remembering.
At the time I was reworking
She Wakes
, my only supernatural novel to date. I’d shelved it for a while. And it was good to go back to it then because I was in no condition to start something new—or something real—for the moment. A reincamated goddess on a sunny Greek isle felt just about right to me.
But gradually that woman started to insinuate again.
Maybe it was the 1950s hairdo. I dunno.
But when I was growing up, my street was a dead-end street and every house was filled with war-babies. I could imagine her
doing
it there. And then, if you lived through the 1950s you know its dark side. All those nice soft comfy little buboes of secrecy and repression black and ripe and ready to burst. There was the perfect kind of isolation and built-in cast of characters I could shapeshift after the real ones.
So I thought, kick it back to 1958, when you were twelve. Instead of the midwest, where it really happened, use New Jersey.
And being there, especially through the summer, things kept coming back to me. The smell of the woods, the bleeding damp walls of the basement. Things I’d been too busy to remember for years were keeping me awake nights now. There was too much detail surfacing to resist and I didn’t try. I could even give a nod now and then to what I liked about the time. We had brooks and orchards and unlocked doors. We had Elvis.
But I wasn’t doing
Happy Days
either. Not since
Off Season
, my first book, had I worked on a subject this grim. And
Off Season was
about cannibals on the coast of Maine for godsakes. Nobody was going to take it too seriously no matter now gut-churning I made the thing. Whereas this was about child abuse. Abuse so extreme that writing it I eventually made the decision to soften some of what happened and leave some out altogether.
It’s still pretty extreme.
There wasn’t any getting around that, not that I could see. The problem in fact was to keep it extreme without ripping off all those real live kids who are abused every day in the process.
Posing technical problems helped. I used a first-person voice for one thing, with the boy next door as narrator. He’s a troubled but not insensitive kid who vacillates between his fascination at the very
license
involved and what his empathy’s telling him. He sees plenty. But not everything. Which allowed me to sketch a few things rather than go at them close-up and full-throttle.
He’s also speaking some thirty years later. He’s an adult now so he can edit. So at one point when the going gets roughest I have him say,
Sorry, I’m just not going to show you this. Imagine it for yourself if you care and dare to. Me, I’m not helping.
The first-person voice in a suspense book can automatically shift the reader’s sympathy directly to the object of violence. I’d used it in
Hide and Seek
to that effect. You know whoever’s talking to you is going to survive so you don’t tend to worry much about his physical safety. (Though you can worry about his moral safety and hopefully that’s what happens here.) But if it’s done right, you’ll worry about the safety of the people he cares about. In this case,
The Girl Next Door
and her sister.
It’s tricky. Because if the people he cares about are insufficiently drawn or sympathetic or you as a reader just don’t like lawyers or dogs the way he does, you’ll wind up just watching the bad guys, the violence, or both. Or closing the book forever.
But I’m not too worried about that (he says, quaffing deep his cup of hubris.) If the book has a moral ambiguity to it, a moral tension, it’s supposed to. That’s the problem this kid has to solve throughout, a problem with his view of things. And I’m not too worried because I like these girls and I think that’s clear. They’re not just victims. In some ways—especially as they relate to each other—I think they’re pretty heroic.
And because, by contrast, these other types scare me.
Scare me and yes, for being in my face every time I open a paper or turn on the evening news or talk to some woman whose drunken husband’s slugged her again, royally piss me off.
DO YOU LOVE YOUR WIFE?
“Sometimes I feel like you’re ... I don’t know, not really
there
anymore,” she said. “Like no matter what I do, it wouldn’t make any difference, would it. Know what I mean?”
They were lying in bed. He was tired and a little buzzed from the scotches after work. Greene’s The Power
and the Glory
lay open on her lap. He was halfway through Stone’s
Bay of Souls.
She was right. Stone could obviously rouse himself. He could not.
She was heading to California in a few days, leaving behind the chill of New York and his own chill for a week or so. Her ex-lover beckoned. Perhaps he’d become her lover all over again. Bass hadn’t asked.
“I’m not complaining,” she said. “I’m not criticizing. You know that.”
“I know.”
“And it’s not just you and me. Seems like it’s everything. You used to write. Hell, you used to paint. It’s not like you.”
“It’s like
part
of me obviously.”
“Not the best part.”
“Well. Maybe not.”
She didn’t say the rest of it.
Even after three whole years it’s still her isn’t
it. She hadn’t the slightest urge to hurt him with it. She was simply observing and leaving him an opening should he wish to talk. He didn’t. It wasn’t precisely the loss of Annabel that was bothering him these days anyhow. It was what was left of him in her absence. Which seemed to amount to less and less—a subtle yet distinct difference. He continued to feel himself rolling far beneath the whitewater wake of their parting. Way down where the water was still and deep and very thin.
 
“Confront her,” Gary said.
“Annabel?”
“Yes, Annabel. Who else?”
“After all this time?”
“My point exactly. You’re not getting any younger.”
“It’s easier said than done. She’s married now, remember?”
“So are you and Laura. In your very odd way.”
He was referring to Laura seeing her old lover again. Gary didn’t approve and didn’t mind saying so. It was four in the morning. They were closing
The Gates of Hell.
It was a hot summer night and the thirtysomething crew had come at them fast and furious despite the nine-dollar well-drinks.
“Confront both of them then, what the hell.”
“I don’t even know him. We met once when she was bartending for all of about five minutes. I’m not sure I’d recognize him if he were sitting right in front of me.”
“So maybe that’s part of the problem. You don’t know the guy. So you don’t know what he offers her. You don’t know
why him.
I mean, sometimes you meet the other guy and he’s not all that much, you know? Brings her down a notch. Sometimes that’s just what you need.
“You miss her and you think you’re missing this ... enormous personality. But you’re only seeing her in the context of the two of you. You’ve got no perspective. You’re in there yourself, churning things up. Messing with the perspective. You think you know somebody but you don’t—not until you either live with them or see them in some whole new situation, like with somebody else. That’s my take on it, anyway. And I still think you’re fucking crazy letting Laura fly away to some clown in California.”
He ignored the last bit. He couldn’t tell Laura what to do and wouldn’t want to anyway. He had to figure that she knew what she was doing.
But he thought it possible that Gary might be on to something regarding Annabel. When she left she’d insisted on cutting him off completely. No phone calls, no e-mails, no letters. A clean break she called it. He remembered wincing at the raw cliche.
At first he didn’t believe she was capable of such draconian thinking—not when it came to them—so he tried anyway. But it became apparent that no confrontation, no follow-up of any sort short of appearing at her apartment was about to happen.
He knew where that little visit would lead. Access to her home was by invitation only. It would only earn him the humiliation of having a door once wide open to him slammed shut in his face.
The very last e-mail she’d sent him was calm and deliberate—informing him that she’d thrown out all her photos of them and suggesting he do the same. That it would speed up the healing process. Yet another cliche but he let it pass. Three months later she’d married a guy she’d known and dated off and on for a long time before they met and that was the last he’d heard of her.
He’d been angry, hurt and surprised over both developments. First the cutoff and then the marriage. But there was to be no court of appeals nor any use howling in the wind. It had seemed intolerable to simply stop, to surrender all communication. For a while Bass damn near hated her.

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