Offspring by Jack Ketchum Page A

all of these things carefully, as though door and refrigerator and bottle were all extremely fragile, as though they might break out of sheer molecular tension.
    “What about the restraining order?” he said.
    “He seems to be choosing to ignore it,” said Amy.
    “Oh yeah? The hell he is.”
    He went to the phone and started dialing.
    “Who are you calling?”
    “Vic Manetti. The police.”
    “Wait. Wait a minute,” said Claire.
    David looked at her.
He’s a very nice man
, thought Claire,
and he cares. But I’m not at all sure about this
. He replaced the phone on the receiver and looked at her.
    “What,” he said.
    “Luke,” she said. “I’m thinking about Luke.”
    He walked to the table. She could feel his anger and indignation held tightly in check.
    “What about Luke, Claire? Luke saw you backed against the kitchen wall one night while Steven worked off his drunk by slapping you around. Isn’t that what the restraining order was about in the first place?”
    “Yes.”
    “So what
about
Luke?”
    “Steven’s his father. It’s been six months.”
    “So?”
    “Luke misses him. He doesn’t even talk about it anymore but that’s just protective. He misses him anyway. I wish he didn’t but he does. And I just don’t know if I have the right to—”
    “Of course you have the right. You have
every
right to—”
    “Steven was drunk that night.”
    “He could be drunk right now,” said Amy.
    She felt suddenly exhausted. There was no denying it. The voice on the phone was a drinker’s voice, alternately slurred and too crisply under control. She remembered the night in the kitchen, screaming for Luke to get out of the room, to get back into bed, and Luke running, terrified into total unnatural silence. She remembered feeling Steven’s physical presence loom over her like the threat of bloody death or worse, like a kind of rape, while he slapped her face and punched her in the ribs and stomach and breasts,
targeting
the breasts as though they had some sick special meaning to him, knowing the meaning because for months he had not wanted to make love to her, he had wanted to drink instead, and she had asked him why that night, pleading for their marriage, not knowing he was drunk at first, and he was telling her why, with each blow to her breasts he was telling her why, that it was her womanness he loathed, he hated, her unspeakable flesh.
    “I’ll call,” she said.
    “Let me,” said David gently. He put his hand on her shoulder. “I know some of these people.”
    He went back to the phone and dialed. Claire looked at Amy, and Amy nodded to her, saying, it’s the right thing. It’s the only thing. And squeezed her hand again.
    “Hello? Gloria? Is Vic there? It’s David Halbard up on River Road.”
    The air seemed suddenly stiller, the house quieter, now that it was happening. Now that he was actually calling the police to keep Steven away from them.
    She remembered her dream last night. He was some sort of vampire or dog or snake. He was lying across her body and had pinned her to her bed. His teeth were in her neck. He was a dog and he started to pull back his head with her flesh in his teeth and shake
.
    The dog dream, in variations, went all the way back to her childhood. She would wake having peed the bed.
    It was the first time the dog was Steven.
    “Uh-huh? Okay. Well, we’ve got a kind of situation here as well. What it amounts to is we’ve got houseguests, a woman and her eight-year-old son. The woman’s an old friend and she’s involved in a very messy divorce right now. There’s a restraining order against her husband.
    “Yes, physical violence involved. He’s not supposed to see them under any circumstances. None whatsoever. But now we’ve had a call from him saying he’s on his way up here from Connecticut. He says he’ll arrive tonight sometime. We don’t know when or what the hell to do once he gets here.”
    He looked puzzled.
    “What do you mean have I got a