Offspring (11 page)

It wasn’t her doing. It was Steven’s. When she was sane, she knew that. She was working hard here, doing her damnedest to hold things together.

But it wasn’t Luke’s fault either. And Luke was suffering.

The way he walked, a little hunched over, looking down at the ground half the time. The much-too-frequent scowl. The urge to be so damned ingratiating even to the creepiest kids at school, the ones who had real problems. Violent problems, some of them.

It all added up to a kid who didn’t think much of himself these days.

It added up to a victim.

And we’re not much different there
, she thought.

Victim
.

She’d thought hard on that word.

She’d gone so far as to look it up once, found that it came from the word
weik
, having to do with magic and casting spells—with wizards and witches—and then to do with tricksters, with guile and cunning.

She remembered smiling at the time. Because in its odd way the older word fit what Steven had done to them as perfectly as the meaning that had evolved from it
.

She thought she knew what she would do in regard to Steven.

A boy did not need to be twisted like that. Not even by his father. Lastly by his father.

She didn’t need it, either.

She turned off the bedroom light and went down to join David and Amy.

Like normal people, to watch a movie.

In the dim light from the hall Dick Tracy flattened Pruneface with his nightstick and the game was over, even though Pruneface was armed to the teeth with machine gun, pistol, knife and bludgeon, proving once again that the law was the law and bad guys didn’t get away with crossing it.

Unless you were Freddy Krueger or somebody.

His mother couldn’t stand Freddy Krueger.

She’d yelled at him again tonight. She yelled at him a lot lately.

He supposed that a lot of times he deserved it because he was being bratty and mean to her but it wasn’t his fault, sometimes he just had to do something he knew she wouldn’t like. He didn’t know why he had to. But he did. And then he’d be afraid she wouldn’t love him,
couldn’t
love him he was such a creep, and even though he guessed he knew she did love him he’d be scared anyway, like somebody was going to take her away too and he wished he had the power to make that not happen but he didn’t, there was nothing he or anybody could do about it.

And that would make him mad. So he’d do things to her, say things to her. Mean things. Make believe he was going to punch her or sometimes, even,
really
punch her or be noisy when she was on the telephone or get right up into her face when she was trying to write something or keep on calling her when she was in the shower and could hardly even hear him and had to turn it off all the time.

He did stuff like that a lot. Stuff to annoy her.

He couldn’t help it.

I love you. I hate you
. He didn’t know why he said that. It almost scared him.

He kind of liked this room
.

He wasn’t aware of liking it or not liking it when he was playing with the guys, but he was now. It was smaller than his room at home and there wasn’t much in it. Just a chest of drawers and a table with a chair by it and another small table beside the bed. But he liked the smell. It smelled like wood. Probably because the shop was downstairs under him, or that’s what they said.

But it didn’t smell perfumy, like his mother’s room. It smelled like a guy’s room. Like what his father’s room probably smelled like.

Who knew?

Who knew anything about his father?

It didn’t matter. He was the man now, not his father, and he was lying in a man’s room that smelled like wood. When he was older he’d have one just like it. It would be his, but he could invite his mother over. She’d spend a lot of time there, and she’d like being in his room, she’d like the smell. Even if it wasn’t perfumy. She’d like it because it was his.

He rolled over. The crickets were loud outside. He was suddenly very tired. On the table by the bed lay
the little pile of bones from the treehouse. He looked at them, eyes growing heavy.

The crickets stopped for a long moment and he listened, feeling a little spooky, wondering why they did that sometimes. It was almost as though his heart stopped too.

Then they started up again.

When he was pretty sure they weren’t going to do that a second time, he slept.

They moved silently through the field, washed in moonlight, their bodies the pale color of the tall grass, as though the field itself were rising, moving slowly toward the flickering colored lights inside the house.

When they reached the trees they separated, First Stolen to disable the car and telephone wires, Second Stolen to wait naked and bloody in the shadows by the door that led to the kitchen until the Woman signaled to her that it was begun.

The children climbed up into the trees, climbing swiftly, moving quietly as lizards out across the branches that swayed above the deck. Then they, too, waited, watching the people inside through the sliding glass doors.

The people never moved. They sat in chairs watching the flickering colored lights. The man would speak or one of the women would speak. And that was all.

The Woman waited beneath the house by the stilts that pegged it to the hillside until First Stolen joined her a few moments later. He nodded, grinning, his work accomplished.

His teeth had recently been sharpened—the Woman had not noticed when.

The ax he carried was strapped at head and handle to a long leather thong. He slipped his arm through and drew it over his head, slinging the ax across his back, preparing to climb the weathered stilts with her to the deck.

First Stolen and the Woman were too heavy for the limbs of trees.

But the climb was easy.

The Woman looked into the trees and saw that the children were ready. She cupped her hands to her mouth and hissed like a cat. At the door that led to the kitchen she heard Second Stolen crying out as though wounded, whimpering, sounding frightened, heard her beat upon the door, and heard from inside the sounds of sudden movement, the people rising, alarmed, going to the door.

Into her trap.

Above her the children moved farther on the branches, ready to drop.

The Woman and First Stolen began to climb.

Steven finally found the turnoff onto Scrub Point Road the third time he passed it. It was hard as hell reading maps in the dark—he wasn’t lying to the hitchhiker about that, he wasn’t much good at maps in the first place. All the same he knew he’d overshot it when he wasn’t in Dead River anymore, he was in Lubec, and then he turned around and overshot it again and hadn’t known he’d screwed up till Trescott.

Anyway, here it was. Puking little sign you could miss in the fucking daylight.

At first the road was macadam but that didn’t last long—it turned to dirt in a matter of minutes and he had to go slowly, worrying about how the Mercedes was taking the bumps. There were a lot of bumps.

You paid this much money for a car, you wanted to take care of it.

So it was slow. But Claire wasn’t going anywhere. Claire could wait.

He thought about Claire—about screwing Claire, specifically—and felt the beginnings of a hard-on poke around in his tailored pants.

It had been a while.

It was funny how knowing that she’d divorced him made him want her all of a sudden. He hadn’t wanted her much the entire year before she threw him out. Of course part of that was the drinking. You’d drink a little and get a hard-on and want some, and then you’d drink some more and it wasn’t worth the trouble. You always paid for screwing your own wife anyway. Long ago he’d decided that. A woman thinks she’s loved, needed, she takes advantage. It was better to hang out with the boys at the Plaza bar and pick up a stray now and then.

It wasn’t that Claire wasn’t desirable. Hell, most of the women he did pick up over the years weren’t nearly in her class. But they had the advantage of being easy. You could fuck them and then forget it. While Claire came with all her baggage packed and ready. You fucked her one night, you’re expected to take care of the kid the next—while she enrolls in some asshole night school or something. And then it’s one night a week, and then two. And pretty soon your life isn’t yours anymore.

Even Marion was easier, and Marion had made demands of her own. He laughed. He still had some of the scars to prove it.

He remembered Claire’s goddamn body, though. A sleek, long-limbed body.

The woman was a racehorse. Tits and ass exactly
the right size—even after Luke was born—and skin so smooth and soft you could just curl up and die.

She wouldn’t want to fuck him at first, he knew. She was probably still mad at him. That was all right. She’d come around. She always had. And if she didn’t come around he’d fuck her anyway.

Screw the restraining order. What was she going to do?
Call the police on Luke’s dad?

It might even be better if she resisted. He pictured pinning her to the bed, ripping off her clothes, holding her wrists down and sticking it to her. She was strong but he was a whole lot stronger, six foot two and not flabby—the handball saw to that—and he out-weighed the bitch by a hundred pounds
.

He could use his teeth on her.

Claire had never liked biting.

His hard-on was serious now and he wondered if he shouldn’t have fucked the hitchhiker after all as he cruised the narrow dirt road, his shocks taking a beating, his high-beams on, looking for the house that lay somewhere ahead of him in the gray shades of night.

David was the first one out of his chair but Amy was right behind him, going to the door, the sound of someone in terrible trouble out there—a woman’s voice, scared, hurting—and he’d already reached the door and was pulling it open before she remembered that just hours ago the sheriff’s office had warned them to hold anyone off at gunpoint if they had to, not just Steven but anybody who was new to them, but by then it was too late, because the shock of the girl’s condition wiped away every impulse but the one to help her and get help fast.

She was just a teenage girl.

The door opened and she collapsed across the threshold—or would have if David hadn’t grabbed her and held on. Together they helped her inside.

You hardly knew where to touch her.

She looked as though she’d been horsewhipped, beaten for days.

Some of her wounds were scabbing but many more were fresh and deep.

She felt a sudden fear at who or what lay out there in the dark beyond that open door.

She was immediately aware of Claire beside her.

“Claire. The door,” she said.

Claire closed it, locked it. “I’ll phone the police,” she said.

“The number’s on a card over the telephone.”

“Jesus,” said David. He was easing her into a chair.

There were marks on her breasts, her tender inner thighs—everywhere.

“You’re all right now,” Amy said. “I’ll get a blanket for you and a pan and some water and we’ll clean you up, all right?”

The girl nodded, gasping for breath as though she’d been running a long way for a long time and couldn’t speak.

Amy passed Claire in the kitchen, dialing, reading the card. She hurried past the staircase to her bedroom and pulled the blanket off the foot of the bed.

She checked Melissa in her crib.
Sleeping
. She returned to the study.

“Can you talk? Can you tell me what happened?” David was kneeling, asking her.

The girl just shook her head. She looked like she was about to cry
.

“I can’t get them,” said Claire. Then suddenly her eyes went wide.

“My god,” she said. “There’s no dial tone.”

Amy looked from Claire to David. Their eyes met
and she knew he was frightened too as the girl leaned forward, her pale arms rising.
Embracing him
.

Like ripe fruit the children dropped silently from the trees around them as the Woman and First Stolen pulled themselves over the rail to the deck and moved toward the sliding glass doors, watching the people inside—all their attention focused on Second Stolen huddled trembling in the chair and none on the doors, even as the Woman reached out to touch the cool smooth panel of glass and then its metal edge, the door hissing like a blacksnake as she slid it open.

“Mom?”

Luke stood at the top of the stairs, looking somehow thinner and more vulnerable in his pajamas than she’d seen him in years, and Claire suddenly thought,
There’s a baby in this house
, though she didn’t know why she should think that. She cradled the receiver that she was still holding for some reason and took one step toward him up the stairs, because he had started down.

She didn’t want that. She felt some deep insistent knowledge that told her to keep him right where he was.

She heard Amy gasp and David’s startled cry, and Luke did too—the sounds stopped him openmouthed on the stairs, and Claire’s first thought was for Luke and her second was for the baby who had tugged on her finger this afternoon. She ran to Amy’s bedroom and scooped her up, the baby instantly awake, startled and staring up at her, while behind her Amy screamed and things were bumping, breaking, falling, some stop-time wind of destruction swirling at her heels as she ran to Luke and shoved him in his room.

Second Stolen reached for the man and drew herself up, her breasts pressed flat against him. She almost laughed. The man did not know what to do with his hands. They fluttered over her back like frightened birds.

The man was afraid of hurting her. He did not know what to make of her embrace.

She listened for the door, heard it slide open and knew the others were inside.

She felt a wild communion with them compounded of blood and hate, not knowing that in part the hatred was for them—for the whippings, for First Stolen’s use of her, for a life stolen which she could never truly miss but which lingered dimly still somewhere far beyond her waking consciousness—and not caring, because this was life now, this hunger, this blood beating in the veins of the man who held her
.