Countdown: The Top 20 Jack Ketchum Works of Short Fiction--#1

[For the previous entry on the Countdown, click here.]

#1. "Gone"

What happens when the writer whom Stephen King hailed as "the scariest guy in America" turns his attention to Halloween?  Answer: the top spot in the countdown of Jack Ketchum works of short fiction is secured.

"Gone" (2000; collected in Peaceable Kingdom) reworks the tropes of the classic Halloween spook story, as it features a shunned house (which "seemed to have PLAGUE painted on the door") and its lone occupant ("the lady down the block," who parents warn their kids about).  The woman--who at the start of the story wonders, "What am I? The wicked old witch from Hansel and Gretel?"--is eager to lure children to her doorstep with the promise of candy, but she's no wicked crone, just a deeply wounded individual.  Helen Teal (a shade of blue, appropriately) is still grieving, still wallowing in despair five years after "the less than three minutes that changed everything."  It should have been "a simple event, an incon-sequential event" when Helen ran back into the 7-11 for the newspaper she forgot to purchase.  But when comes back out, she discovers that her three-year-old daughter has been snatched from the parked car where she'd been left waiting.  And with that devastating disappearance, "Helen Teal, nee Mazik, went from pre-school teacher, homemaker, wife and mother to the three p's--psychoanalysis, Prozac, and paralysis."

Growing steadily drunker and more depressed, Helen is about to shut off her porch light when her doorbell rings.  The sight of the trick-or-treaters she has anxiously awaited (in her yearning for contact with children) immediately lifts Helen's spirits: "the night's thrill--its enchantment even--was suddenly there for her."  Yet the story also takes pain to remind us that Halloween has since lost its innocence ("Nobody came in[side] anymore.  The days for bobbing for apples were long over."), and Helen is about to get more than she bargained for in the candy-begging transaction.  One of the trio of masked young siblings tears open Helen's internal wounds when he bluntly asks if she's her: "The lady who lost her baby?  The little girl?"  The boy's question, though, is not simply the product of a child's clumsy curiosity.  Ketchum has another trick up his Halloween sleeve, as revealed in one of his patented single-sentence paragraphs that leaves readers as breathless as a sucker punch to the gut:

They turned away and headed slowly down the stairs and she almost asked them to wait, to stay a moment, for what reason and to what end she didn't know but that would be silly and awful too, no reason to put them through her pain, they were just kids, children, they were just asking a question the way children did sometimes, oblivious to its consequences and it would be wrong to say anything further, so she began to close the door and almost didn't hear him turn to his sister and say, too bad they wouldn't let her out tonight, hunh? too bad they never do in a low voice but loud enough to register but at first it didn't register, not quite, as though the words held no meaning, as though the words were some strange rebus she could not immediately master, not until after she'd closed the door and then finally when they impacted her like grapeshot, she flung open the door and ran screaming down the stairs into the empty street.

Apparently Alice is alive and being held somewhere nearby, but the trio of trick-or-treaters who might lead Helen to her have already
"vanished back into nowhere," carrying off not just a load of candy bars but whatever "was left of" Helen.  The narrative spotlights Ketchum's gifts for probing everyday human evil (in this case, child abduction/abuse) and dramatizing the personal anguish suffered by a lifelike character.  Short but haunting, "Gone" absolutely cannot be forgotten.