Table of Contents
HIGH PRAISE FOR JACK KETCHUP AND THE GIRL NEXT DOOR!
" The Girl Next Door is alive. It does not just promise terror, but actually delivers it.
Stephen King
Ketchum [is] one of Americas 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
This is the real stuff, an uncomfortable dip into the pitch blackness.
Locus
The reader, even though repulsed by the story, cannot look away. Definitely NOT for the faint of heart.
Cemetery Dance
Realism is what makes this novel so terrifying. The monsters are human, and all the more horrifying for it.
Afraid Magazine
For two decades now, Jack Ketchum has been one of our best, brightest, and most reliable.
Hellnotes
A major voice in contemporary suspense.
Ed Gorman
Jack Ketchum is a master of suspense and horror of the human variety.
Midwest Book Review
Other Leisure books by Jack Ketchum:
SHE WAKES
PEACEABLE KINGDOM
RED
THE LOST
A LEISURE BOOK
June 2005
Published by
Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
200 Madison Avenue
New York, NY 10016
If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.
The Girl Next Door copyright 1989 by Dallas Mayr Returns copyright 2002 by Dallas Mayr Do You Love Your Wife? copyright 2005 by Dallas Mayr
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
ISBN 0-8439-5543-0
The name Leisure Books and the stylized L with design are trademarks of Dorchester Publishing Co., Inc.
Printed in the United States of America.
Visit us on the web at www.dorchesterpub.com.
You got to tell me the brave captain
Why are the wicked so strong?
How do the angels get to sleep
When the devil leaves the porch light on?
Tom Waits
I never want to hear the screams
Of the teenage girls in other peoples dreams.
The Specials
The soul under the burden of sin cannot flee.
Iris Murdoch, The Unicorn
Chapter One
You think you know about pain?
Talk to my second wife. She does. Or she thinks she does.
She says that once when she was nineteen or twenty she got between a couple of cats fightingher own cat and a neighborsand one of them went at her, climbed her like a tree, tore gashes out of her thighs and breasts and belly that you still can see today, scared her so badly she fell back against her mothers turn-of-the-century Hoosier, breaking her best ceramic pie plate and scraping six inches of skin off her ribs while the cat made its way back down 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 second wife says thats pain.
She doesnt know shit, that woman.
Evelyn, my first wife, has maybe gotten closer.
Theres an image that haunts her.
She is driving down a rain-slick highway on a hot summer morning in a rented Volvo, her lover by her side, driving slowly and carefully because she knows how treacherous new rain on hot streets can 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. Almost 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 then down again. At some point the steering wheel breaks her shoulder. The rearview mirror cracks her wrist.
Then the rolling stops and shes staring up at the gas pedal overhead. She looks for her lover but he isnt there anymore; hes disappeared, its magic. She finds the door on the drivers side and opens it, crawls out onto wet grass, stands and peers through the rain. And this is the image that haunts hera man like a sack of blood, flayed, skinned alive, lying in front of the car in a spray of glass spackled red.
This sack is her lover.
And this is why shes closer. Even though she blocks what she knowseven though she sleeps nights.
She knows that pain is not just a matter of hurting, of her own startled body complaining at some invasion of the flesh.
Pain can work from the outside in.
I mean that sometimes what you see is pain. Pain in its cruelest, purest form. Without drugs or sleep or even shock or coma to dull it for you.
You see it and you take it in. And then its you.
Youre host to a long white worm that gnaws and eats, growing, filling your intestines until finally you cough one morning and up comes the blind pale head of the thing sliding from your mouth like a second tongue.
No, my wives dont know about that. Not exactly. Though Evelyn is close.
But I do.
Youll have to trust me on that for starters.
I have for a very long time.
I try to remember that we were all kids when these things happened, just kids, barely out of our Davy Crockett coonskin caps for Gods sake, not fully formed. Its 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 like to think Im using mine.
Though after two divorces, bad ones, the worm is apt to gnaw a little.
Still I like to remember that it was the Fifties, a period of strange repressions, secrets, hysteria. I think about Joe McCarthy, though I barely remember thinking of him at all back then except to wonder what it was that would make my father race home from work every day to catch the committee hearings on TV I think about the Cold War. About air-raid drills in the school basement and films we saw of atomic testingdepartment-store mannequins imploding, blown across mockup living rooms, disintegrating, burning. About copies of Playboy and Mans Action hidden in wax paper back by the brook, so moldy after a while that you hated to touch them. I think about Elvis being denounced by the Reverend Deitz at Grace Lutheran Church when I was ten and the rock n roll riots at Alan Freeds shows at the Paramount.
I say to myself something weird was happening, some great American boil about to burst. That it was happening all over, not just at Ruths house but everywhere.
And sometimes that makes it easier.
What we did.
Im forty-one now. Born in 1946, seventeen months to the day after we dropped the Bomb on Hiroshima.
Matisse had just turned eighty.
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 use limousines, though in Rye I drive a blue Mercedes.
