The Woman. Part 1

THE WOMAN.

A novel.

by Jack Ketchum and Lucky McKee.

From Ketchum:

Thanks to Andrew, Bill, and my partner Lucky. To Brauna for the dream. To Paula for d.a.m.n near everything. To Kristy - she knows perfectly well why. And to Pollyanna for direct and terrible inspiration.

From McKee:

To Ma and Pa for rearin' me right, my sisters Boog, Jaye, and Angie for being great women, my brothers Kevin and Chris for not being like Cleek, and my partners in crime, Andrew, Bill, and Polly. And to you, Dallas, for showing a kid how it's done.

PART ONE.

ONE.

The Woman has no concept of beauty.

She herself is not beautiful. Not unless power is beauty, because she is powerful, over six feet tall, with long arms and legs, almost simian in their lean strength. But her wide grey eyes are empty when they are not watchful and she is pale from lack of light, filthy, parasite and insect bitten and smelling of blood like a vulture. A wide smooth scar runs from just below her full right breast to just above her hip where eleven summers ago a shotgun blast has peeled her flesh away. Over her left eye and extending beyond her ear a second blast has left another scar. Neither her eyebrow nor her hair from forehead to the back of her ear has ever grown again.

She looks as though struck by lightning.

The Woman is not beautiful, and has no concept of beauty...

It is nearly dawn, the darkest hour behind her now and she has left the deep forest and the hardpack rocky trails she has walked for hours, for days perhaps, the fever bright within her, night to day and back again perhaps, all these trails so well known to her, for the beach at last. She is exposed here in the dawning but she has stopped and listened along the way and doubled back time and again so she is certain she is not pursued. They have given up.

If they have ever followed her at all in the dark. She has moved only in the dark.

Her wounds are graced with fortune - so close together this time at her left side. The knife and the bullet. The crescent moon and the full moon mere inches apart. She has staunched them with mud and wrapped them tightly with her belt. There will be little blood trail for them to follow.

Still, she must heal.

There is pain. Pain that pulses through her body from shoulder to knee. That beats at her body as the waves beat the sh.o.r.e. But pain is to be borne. This is nothing to the pain of birthing. Pain says one thing only.

Alive.

Still, she must heal.

She scans the rocky tideline and sees it right away. The exact shape and color. Yellow-green, long flat blades torn from forests beneath the sea and now cast ash.o.r.e. Glistening wet, alive and healthy. She wades into the waves, the cool tide drawing back and forth along her calves. The push, the pull. The glint off the waves. The high reek of the sea, the long smell of death. The sh.o.r.eline birthing, dying.

She is immune to none of these.

The sea has always been her ally.

On a quiet night at low tide she can hear the world breathing.

She loosens her belt and drops it to her hips, careful not to lose the knife.

She goes to her knees and gently bathes her wounds until the mud is gone and her blood weeps down across her loincloth into the water. Then stands and walks to sh.o.r.e. She stoops and pulls some of the leaves free of their rocky trap, washes them of sand and crabsh.e.l.l and presses them to her wounds.

They sting. And this too is the sea.

The sea sails through her like a poison now, like a gift. Slowly the pain subsides. She gathers more leaves thick as leather and washes them and presses them to her side, lifts and rebuckles her belt around them to hold them in place.

She walks the shingle beach, eyeing tidepools for food and the cliffs above for shelter. It isn't long before she finds both. A small cache of mussels. A pair of tiny crabs. And perhaps forty feet above her fifteen yards away a narrow slit in the granite rockface, barely visible, draped in sphagnum moss - the opening to a cave. The crabs she crunches with her teeth and swallows nearly whole. The mussels she palms in her hand two at a time and pummels against the rocks, flicks away the sh.e.l.ls with her fingertips and laps the meat inside.

When she's finished she heads across the beach and climbs a narrow path to the cave.

Some ten feet from the entrance she stops. She scents the air. Pulls the knife from her belt. The knife still bears the dark brown stains of her own blood from the night before - the Cow, in an unexpected bit of treachery from the last of her lost family, has stabbed her just above the hip. And paid for that with his life.

But she has caught the scent of another life.

A familiar one.

Of urine. Of wolf. The cave is marked with wolf-scent. And recent.

She knows the wolf is not normally the enemy. That most will run from her, from any human, rather than confront such an unpredictable opponent. But wolves do not tend to seek a cave unless to whelp and whelping season is over so that with this one care is necessary. She steps softly, stops, listens. Steps closer, the knife poised beside her at shoulder height, her grip firm and ready.

She stops again when she hears the scrabble of paw on rock. The wolf rising. It is less than ten feet away.

Then she hears the growling. Low and raw with intent.

This one is the enemy.

She can picture the wolf clearly. It stands facing her. Its ears are erect. The fur bristles along its ma.s.sive arched back, its long legs bent for the leap. In its powerful muzzle the lips are curled into a snarl, pulled back away from the six sharp incisors used for cutting and two fangs curved inward for the ripping kill.

It tenses. She can feel it in the dark.

Knows that it can feel her too. Can smell her blood on the knife.

Inside the cave, a sudden rough movement and then the flash of yellow eyes and a hurtling grey-brown body and she leans into its rush, its dive for her throat, leans down and into and off to one side and plunges the knife down and under in a single liquid arc so that the wolf falls crashing back on its spine into the mouth of the cave, thrashing on the blade of the knife thrust up through its neck, paws uselessly tearing through emptiness while she presses her advantage, takes the knife in both her hands and heaves with shoulders, back and forearms, rips upward through muscled neck and bone into the very skull of the wolf, who whimpers once like a small kicked dog and dies.

She inspects her kill.

The wolf is old. White hair along the muzzle, eyes and lower chin. He is male. And large, the height of a deer at the shoulder. His right front paw is mangled. So are his lips, the scarring recent. She opens his mouth. The upper palate is torn too. The wolf has been trapped and somehow he has gnawed his way out of it. She admires his strength and ferocity. But that accounts for his aloneness too and the cave. His wounds, his age.

The wolf is without family.

A blight upon the pack.

She stands away from him, steps forward and peers into the cave. In a few moments her eyes adjust. The cave is not deep, perhaps four times the length of her. Its walls are so narrow in front and back that she can press the palms of her hands to either side - its middle slightly wider. Its walls are high enough for her to stand in comfort though.

No humans have used this cave. No strewn debris or signs of fire. A rare thing. The cave will do.

She takes hold of the wolf's forelegs and drags him inside. At his neck wound she kneels and begins slowly to drink him dry.

In a little over two hours she has created a browse-bed in back of the cave. Fresh soft boughs of pine. In another hour she has collected enough bark, fallen branches, driftwood and stones for a fire. She sparks the fire alight, feeds it bark and twigs and then the more substantial wood crossed in stacks of three.

It is time for the wolf.

She unsheathes the knife. Tomorrow she will need to hone the knife but for now it remains up to the task. She turns the wolf on his back and saws through his neck until the huge head detaches from the body. She hacks off the feet.

Slipping the knife inside his skin, pulling it slightly away from the flesh, she cuts a single line from neck to groin and makes a small circular cut around the a.n.u.s. She hauls the pelt back off the shoulders - her own shoulders straining - hauls it down over the forelegs, adjusts her position to straddle the wolf and pulls the skin further over back and chest, haunches and hind legs until finally the pelt is free.

Then another cut down the middle, again from neck to groin, intersecting the cut around the a.n.u.s, careful shallow cutting now so as not to burst the organs inside. She parts the ribcage and reaches into the body of the wolf with both hands and pulls his insides out in a single ma.s.s and lets them spill across the floor.

She separates the liver, heart and kidneys from the rest and sets them aside. These she will roast immediately. On another day in greater hunger or to feed her family she might have cleaned and consumed the other organs as well but there is plenty of meat for now.

She feeds the flames.

She lifts the pelt and drapes it across an outcropping of rock to dry. Her wounds are throbbing.

She sharpens a long greenwood bough and skewers liver, heart and kidneys and holds them low in the fire to sear, turns them once, then lays them across the rocks to cook more slowly.

There is still the wolf's carca.s.s to butcher but that can wait. Her body needs food badly. The wolf's blood is not enough.

She gathers up the organs and throws them down the rockface to the screaming wheeling gulls outside.

Later, night descending, lying on her browse-bed and listening to the crackling fire and the far-off pounding of the waves she feels an uneasy sense of something she can not quite name. Perhaps it is the cave, the emptiness of it. No sounds but these reach her - the fire and the waves. No restlessness of children. No sleep-sounds from First or Second Stolen. No groaning from the Cow.

It has happened so quickly. Though life can often happen quickly in her world. But two nights ago they were eleven. First and Second Stolen, the Cow, the Girl, the Boy with his clouded eye, the Twins, Rabbit, Eartheater, the baby. All of them together in a much larger cave than this one scattered with their belongings, scavenged for and hunted over many hunts. She is alone now.

Except for the spirit of the wolf she is alone. But the wolf died well. As she herself would die. It is not his spirit which disturbs her.

And she has known aloneness before.

What then?

She hears a descending whistling trill outside. Repeated again and again.

An owl, perched somewhere, calling to his mate.

Stilled by the crash of waves.

TWO.

"Knock it off, Roger!"

It was the second time he'd splashed her and the third was the charm. One more time and she'd wade into the pool and drown the little s.h.i.t.

Teenage boys. Good G.o.d.

"Aw, h.e.l.l, Peg. Come on in. It's blazin' hot out there."

He was right of course. It was was hot. And she'd probably rather be anywhere than at this stupid franks-and-burgers lawn party where she was going to get lemonade instead of beer while her mom and dad, their neighbors and so-called friends guzzled the afternoon away. She felt trapped here. Seemed like she always felt trapped these days. And it was hotter than h.e.l.l inside the hoodie. But she was not taking it off and she was not going into the d.a.m.n water. hot. And she'd probably rather be anywhere than at this stupid franks-and-burgers lawn party where she was going to get lemonade instead of beer while her mom and dad, their neighbors and so-called friends guzzled the afternoon away. She felt trapped here. Seemed like she always felt trapped these days. And it was hotter than h.e.l.l inside the hoodie. But she was not taking it off and she was not going into the d.a.m.n water.

Certainly not at the urgings of Roger Kaltsas, hanging on the edge of the pool next to her dangling long tanned legs with a b.o.n.e.r in his eyes.

"I'm fine, Roger, thank you."

Roger was fourteen to her sixteen, had probably never read a book in his life that wasn't a.s.signed in cla.s.s - if then - and had not yet learned the words sotto voce. sotto voce.

"b.i.t.c.h," he muttered and kicked off poolside.

"Heard that, a.s.shole," she said. But by then his ears were probably filled with chlorinated water.

It did feel good on her legs though.

At least her mom and dad weren't pressing her to go in anymore. It wasn't that long ago in the scheme of things that she was thirteen and just starting to fill out fill out as her mom said - as her mom said - why the h.e.l.l were adults so fond of euphemisms? - why the h.e.l.l were adults so fond of euphemisms? - and Belle had insisted she do so. That one turned out to be a pretty good row. Belle said she shouldn't be ashamed of and Belle had insisted she do so. That one turned out to be a pretty good row. Belle said she shouldn't be ashamed of becoming a lady. becoming a lady. Peggy said she wasn't ashamed, but her nipples were bigger than her b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the moment and she was going to wait until they caught up a bit, Peggy said she wasn't ashamed, but her nipples were bigger than her b.r.e.a.s.t.s at the moment and she was going to wait until they caught up a bit, is that okay with you? is that okay with you?

Her father had sided with her mother at first. But back then, he always came around for Peggy. She could count on it. So that summer and the summer after, no swimming pool. Then at fifteen she was completely ready and quite happy to slip into her black low-cut one-piece spandex.

Now that had changed too.

She wiped a thin line of sweat off her upper lip. Time for that lemonade, she thought.

She pulled her legs out of the water and hoisted herself up. She saw that across the yard beyond Mr. and Mrs. Sims working the hibachi and the grill her mother was walking toward her father, her father smoking a Winston beneath a birch tree, with two beers in her hand, one for herself and one for him.