Read Ketchum 'girl Next Door' Online Free
Table of Contents
Praise
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
Championship Page
Copyright Page
Epigraph
I
Chapter I
Affiliate Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Affiliate 5
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
II
Affiliate Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Affiliate Xi
Chapter Twelve
Affiliate Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter 15
Three
Chapter Sixteen
Affiliate Seventeen
Affiliate Eighteen
Chapter Xix
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Affiliate Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Affiliate 20-Four
IV
Chapter 20-5
Chapter Twenty-Six
Affiliate Twenty-Seven
Affiliate Twenty-8
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Chapter Thirty-I
Chapter Thirty-Two
Chapter Thirty-Three
5
Chapter Thirty-4
Chapter Thirty-V
Chapter Thirty-Six
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Affiliate Thirty-8
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Chapter Twoscore
Chapter Forty-I
Chapter 40-2
Affiliate Xl-Three
Chapter 40-Four
Chapter Forty-Five
Chapter Forty-Six
EPILOGUE
Chapter Forty-Seven
Writer's Note: On Writing the Daughter Side by side Door
Teaser affiliate
High PRAISE FOR JACK KETCHUP AND THE GIRL Next DOOR!
"The Girl Side by side Door is alive. Information technology does not simply promise terror, but really delivers it."
—Stephen King
"Ketchum [is] one of America'due south best and most consistent writers of contemporary horror fiction."
—Bentley Little
"Just when you think the worst has already happened…Jack Ketchum goes notwithstanding another shock further."
—Fangoria
"This is the real stuff, an uncomfortable dip into the pitch blackness."
—Locus
"The reader, even though repulsed past the story, cannot look away. Definitely Non for the faint of center."
—Cemetery Dance
"Realism is what makes this novel so terrifying. The monsters are man, and all the more horrifying for it."
—Agape Magazine
"For 2 decades now, Jack Ketchum has been ane of our best, brightest, and most reliable."
—Hellnotes
"A major vocalism in gimmicky suspense."
—Ed Gorman
"Jack Ketchum is a chief of suspense and horror of the human variety."
—Midwest Book Review
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
SHE WAKES
PEACEABLE KINGDOM
Ruby-red
THE LOST
A LEISURE Book®
June 2005
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
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New York, NY 10016
If y'all purchased this volume without a cover yous should exist aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported equally "unsold and destroyed" to the publisher and neither the writer nor the publisher has received whatsoever payment for this "stripped book."
The Girl Next Door copyright © 1989 by Dallas Mayr "Returns" copyright © 2002 by Dallas Mayr "Do Y'all Love Your Wife?" copyright © 2005 by Dallas Mayr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may exist reproduced or transmitted in whatever course or by whatever electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval organisation, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-8439-5543-0
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Printed in the U.s..
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.
"You got to tell me the dauntless captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How exercise the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?"
—Tom Waits
"I never desire to hear the screams
Of the teenage girls in other people's dreams."
—The Specials
"The soul under the brunt of sin cannot flee."
—Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
Chapter One
You think you know about hurting?
Talk to my 2d married woman. She does. Or she thinks she does.
She says that in one case when she was 19 or twenty she got between a couple of cats fighting—her own cat and a neighbor'south—and one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and abdomen that you nonetheless can come across today, scared her and so badly she fell back against her female parent'southward turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of peel off her ribs while the true cat made its way back downwardly her again, all tooth and claw and spitting fury. Thirty-six stitches I think she said she got. And a fever that lasted days.
My 2nd wife says that's pain.
She doesn't know shit, that woman.
Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.
In that location's an paradigm that haunts her.
She is driving downwardly a rain-slick highway on a hot summertime morning in a rented Volvo, her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully considering she knows how treacherous new rain on hot streets tin be, when a Volkswagen passes her and fishtails into her lane. Its rear bumper with the "Live Free or Die" plates slides over and kisses her grille. Well-nigh gently. The rain does the rest. The Volvo reels, swerves, glides over an embankment and suddenly she and her lover are tumbling through space, they are weightless and turning, and up is down and then up and and then downwards again. At some point the steering bike breaks her shoulder. The rearview mirror cracks her wrist.
Then the rolling stops and she's staring up at the gas pedal overhead. She looks for her lover merely he isn't there anymore; he'south disappeared, it's magic. She finds the door on the driver'southward side and opens information technology, crawls out onto moisture grass, stands and peers through the rain. And this is the prototype that haunts her—a man similar a sack of blood, flayed, skinned alive, lying in front of the motorcar in a spray of glass spackled red.
This sack is her lover.
And this is why she's closer. Fifty-fifty though she blocks what she knows—even though she sleeps nights.
She knows that pain is not just a thing of hurting, of her own startled body complaining at some invasion of the mankind.
Pain tin can work from the outside in.
I mean that sometimes what you encounter is pain. Hurting in its cruelest, purest form. Without drugs or sleep or even shock or blackout to boring information technology for you lot.
You encounter it and you take it in. So information technology'southward you lot.
You're host to a long white worm that gnaws and eats, growing, filling your intestines until finally you cough 1 morning and upwardly comes the blind pale head of the thing sliding from your oral cavity like a second tongue.
No, my wives don't know virtually that. Not exactly. Though Evelyn is close.
Simply I exercise.
You'll have to trust me on that for starters.
I have for a very long t
ime.
I try to remember that we were all kids when these things happened, just kids, barely out of our Davy Crockett coonskin caps for God's sake, non fully formed. Information technology's much too hard to believe that what I am today is what I was then except hidden now and disguised. Kids get second chances. I similar to recollect I'grand using mine.
Though after two divorces, bad ones, the worm is apt to gnaw a footling.
Withal I like to recall that it was the Fifties, a menses of strange repressions, secrets, hysteria. I think near Joe McCarthy, though I barely remember thinking of him at all back then except to wonder what it was that would brand my father race domicile from work every solar day to catch the commission hearings on TV I think virtually the Common cold State of war. Virtually air-raid drills in the school basement and films nosotros saw of atomic testing—department-store mannequins imploding, blown across mockup living rooms, disintegrating, called-for. About copies of Playboy and Homo's Action hidden in wax paper back by the brook, then moldy after a while that you hated to touch them. I retrieve about Elvis existence denounced by the Reverend Deitz at Grace Lutheran Church when I was x and the rock 'n' roll riots at Alan Freed'south shows at the Paramount.
I say to myself something weird was happening, some great American eddy about to burst. That it was happening all over, not just at Ruth's house only everywhere.
And sometimes that makes it easier.
What we did.
I'1000 40-one now. Born in 1946, seventeen months to the day later on nosotros dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima.
Matisse had merely turned 80.
I make a hundred fifty grand a year, working the floor on Wall Street. Two marriages, no kids. A home in Rye and a company apartment in the city. Most places I go I utilize limousines, though in Rye I bulldoze a blue Mercedes.
It may exist that I'g about to marry again. The woman I love knows nothing of what I'm writing hither—nor did my other wives—and I don't actually know if I always mean to tell her. Why should I? I'1000 successful, even-tempered, generous, a careful and considerate lover.
And null in my life has been right since the summer of 1958, when Ruth and Donny and Willie and all the rest of united states of america met Meg Loughlin and her sister Susan.
Affiliate Ii
I was solitary back by the beck, lying on my stomach across the Big Rock with a tin can tin in my hand. I was scooping upwardly crayfish. I had two of them already in a larger can beside me. Little ones. I was looking for their mama.
The brook ran fast along either side of me. I could feel the spray on my blank feet dangling near the h2o. The h2o was cold, the sun warm.
I heard a sound in the bushes and looked up. The prettiest daughter I'd ever seen was grin at me over the embankment.
She had long tanned legs and long cherry-red hair tied back in a ponytail, wore shorts and a pale-colored blouse open at the neck. I was twelve and a half. She was older.
I remember smiling back at her, though I was rarely agreeable to strangers.
"Crayfish," I said. I dumped out a tin of h2o.
"Actually?"
I nodded.
"Large ones?"
"Not these. Yous can discover them, though."
"Can I meet?"
She dropped downwardly off the bank only like a boy would, non sitting kickoff, simply putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-human foot drop to the first big rock in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I fabricated room for her. In that location was suddenly this fine clean odour sitting next to me.
Her eyes were green. She looked around.
To all of the states back then the Rock was something special. Information technology saturday smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it. You had room for four kids sitting or six continuing up. It had been a pirate ship, Nemo's Nautilus, and a canoe for the Lenni Lennape among other things. Today the water was perhaps three and a one-half feet deep. She seemed happy to be there, non scared at all.
"We call this the Big Rock," I said. "We used to, I mean. When we were kids."
"I like it," she said. "Tin I see the crayfish? I'm One thousand thousand."
"I'grand David. Sure."
She peered down into the can. Fourth dimension went by and nosotros said nothing. She studied them. Then she straightened up again.
"Not bad."
"I just catch 'em and look at 'em awhile and then allow them go."
"Practise they bite?"
"The big ones do. They can't hurt you lot, though. And the picayune ones just endeavour to run."
"They await similar lobsters."
"Yous never saw a crayfish before?"
"Don't think they accept them in New York City." She laughed. I didn't mind. "Nosotros get lobsters, though. They can hurt yous."
"Can you continue one? I mean, y'all can't keep a lobster like a pet or anything, right?"
She laughed over again. "No. You eat them."
"You can't keep a crayfish either. They die. One solar day or maybe two, tops. I hear people eat them likewise, though."
"Really?"
"Yeah. Some do. In Louisiana or Florida or someplace."
We looked down into the can.
"I don't know," she said, smiling. "At that place's not a whole lot to eat downwards there."
"Allow's get some big ones."
Nosotros lay across the Stone next. I took the tin and slipped both artillery down into the beck. The trick was to turn the stones i at a time, slowly then as not to muddy the water, then have the tin can there ready for whatever scooted out from under. The h2o was so deep I had my shortsleeve shirt rolled all the style upwards to my shoulders. I was aware of how long and skinny my arms must look to her. I know they looked that way to me.
I felt pretty foreign beside her, actually. Uncomfortable just excited. She was dissimilar from the other girls I knew, from Denise or Cheryl on the block or even the girls at school. For ane affair she was maybe a hundred times prettier. As far as I was concerned she was prettier than Natalie Woods. Probably she was smarter than the girls I knew too, more sophisticated. She lived in New York Urban center after all and had eaten lobsters. And she moved just like a boy. She had this stiff hard body and easy grace virtually her.
All that fabricated me nervous and I missed the first one. Not an enormous crayfish just bigger than what we had. It scudded astern beneath the Rock.
She asked if she could try. I gave her the can.
"New York Metropolis, huh?"
"Yup."
She rolled up her sleeves and dipped downward into the water. And that was when I noticed the scar.
"Jeez. What's that?"
It started simply inside her left elbow and ran downwards to the wrist like a long pink twisted worm. She saw where I was looking.
"Accident," she said. "We were in a car." Then she looked back into the water where you lot could see her reflection shimmering.
"Jeez."
Merely so she didn't seem to want to talk much after that.
"Got any more of 'em?"
I don't know why scars are always and then fascinating to boys, but they are, information technology's a fact of life, and I just couldn't aid information technology. I couldn't shut up virtually information technology all the same. Fifty-fifty though I knew she wanted me to, even though nosotros'd just met. I watched her turn over a stone. In that location was nada under it. She did information technology correctly though; she didn't muddy the water. I thought she was terrific.
She shrugged.
"A few. That's the worst."
"Tin I see 'em?"
"No. I don't retrieve and so."
She laughed and looked at me a certain way and I got the bulletin. And then I did close up for a while.
She turned some other rock. Aught.
"I guess it was a bad one, huh? The accident?"
She didn't answer that at all and I didn't blame her. I knew how stupid and awkward it sounded, how insensitive, the moment I said it. I blushed and was glad she wasn't looking.
Then she got one.
Th
e rock slid over and the crayfish backed correct out into the can and all she had to do was bring it upwards.
She poured off some water and tilted the can toward the sunlight. You could see that prissy gold color they have. Its tail was up and its pincers waving and it was stalking the bottom of the can, looking for somebody to fight.
"You got her!"
"Starting time endeavour!"
"Keen! She'southward really great."
"Let'south put her in with the others."
She poured the water out slowly so as not to disturb her or lose her exactly the way you lot were supposed to, though nobody had told her, and then when there was but an inch or so left in the can, plunked her into the bigger can. The two that were already in there gave her enough of room. That was good because crayfish would impale each other sometimes, they'd kill their own kind, and these two others were just piffling guys.
In a while the new one calmed down and we saturday there watching her. She looked primitive, efficient, deadly, beautiful. Very pretty colour and very sleek of pattern.
I stuck my finger in the tin to stir her up over again.
"Don't."
Her hand was on my arm. It was absurd and soft.
I took my finger out again.
I offered her a stick of Wrigley's and took one myself. So all you could hear for a while was the wind whooshing through the tall thin grass beyond the embankment and rustling the castor along the brook and the sound of the brook running fast from terminal nighttime's pelting, and us chewing.
"You'll put them dorsum, right? You promise?"
"Certain. I always do."
"Good."
She sighed and then stood upward.
"I've got to go back I estimate. We've got shopping to do. Just I wanted to look around first thing. I mean, we've never had a forest before. Thank you, David. It was fun."
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