Ghouls

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lenny Stokes paused at the post of the access gate. He was struck clean by the night’s impossible stillness. Even with his Chevelle rumbling intrusively behind him, he couldn’t help but stop and feel the moment. Was it beauty he sensed? His eyes opened for the first time in his life to a wonder of nature? It seemed wrong for him to feel such things.

The night was alive. Swarms of fireflies drifted shiftingly through the woods like luminous smoke, a legion of green flecks of light. A possum crossing the lane looked up at him against the headlamps, then waddled clumsily into the brush. A night thrush lifted off in the air, silent and serene and silhouetted by a moon so bright and heavy with light he thought it might detach itself from its hold in the sky and fall to earth.

“Hurry up, Lenny,” Joanne called out from the car. “Let’s get going. Or are you gonna stand there all fuckin’ night?”

Lenny frowned. The sensation cracked and slipped away, but he’d never understood it to begin with.

He wedged the cutter over a random link, feeling for bite. Soft, he thought. Like pewter. He gripped the long HKP No. 3 bolt cutters as if they were a pair of handlebars on a motorcycle. His muscles tightened, arms shaking but under control, and there was a quick snap of metal. The chain fell away like a severed tightrope.

He got back into the car and pushed in the headlight knob. Darkness seemed to scoop them up. Joanne popped open two cans of beer, spraying the windshield, giggling.

Lenny stared ahead.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Lenny sipped his beer—it tasted like water. “Feel a little funny,” he confessed. Something sour coated his stomach, and his eyes hurt. Fatigue bogged him down like heavy winter clothes. He considered calling it off, trying again another time when he felt better. “Guess I’m just run down er somethin’.”

Joanne arched her head back and emptied half her beer down her throat.

Lenny let off the parking brake; the car rolled forward into the access road. Branches scraped along the fenders, like nails against slate; the tires popped gravel. Lenny was breaking out into a light sweat.

“Maybe we should go back,” Joanne slurred. “You look like you’re about to heave-ho.”

Feel like it, too. “Musta drank too much, shoulda ate first. No point comin’ out here fer nothin. ’Sides, I need the bread.”

Half a mile into the woods they came to the first clearing, Lenny’s favorite. He turned off the engine, and they embarked. Joanne carried the remains of the six-pack by one of the plastic rings, like a little girl with a doll. She started to say something, but Lenny silenced her with a quick “Shhh!” and led the way into the rise, his spotlight gripped limply in one hand. He had a .22 target pistol stuck in his belt. It was ideal for poaching, so long as you hit them in the neck or head, and it made about as much noise as a loud clap.

They sat up on the bank, facing the clearing.

“What now?” Joanne asked.

“We wait. And keep yer voice down. Bucks got ears, too, ya know.”

“Maybe that security guy’ll come.”

“Fuck him. Anyway, we won’t be here long. Best deerspot in the county, rat here at Belleau Wood. All I need is one good shot, an’ we’ll be on our way.” He placed the pistol and light on either side. The truth was they might be here for hours before a decent-sized buck came along. Over the past week or so it seemed the flourish of deer had all but vanished.

Joanne pulled another beer off the six-pack. Her stomach was making noises like an aquarium, from so much beer. She drank a lot for a girl, an awful lot, but she never got fat. She didn’t seem to have any fat on her at all. Dances it off, he thought. And fucks it off. She’ll neva go ta fat. Neva.

Joanne leaned back lazily and wiggled her toes. “Do you miss your wife?”

“What kinda question is that?”

“I don’t know, I just wondered.”

“Why the hell would Ah miss that frigid mousy bitch? Ah need her lak a hole in the head. Jus’ as soon as the divorce papers come—” but Lenny stopped. Something wasn’t right. He sat up, concentrating without direction. “Listen,” he whispered.

Joanne burped. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Tha’s jus’ it. Ah don’t hear anythin’ neither. Not even a cricket.”

The clearing looked sleeted in the moonlight, frozen for eons. There was no sound at all.

“Must’ve been the sound of the engine when we came in,” Joanne suggested. Her beer can dripped condensation onto her thigh, darkening her jeans. “We might as well go.”

“Jus’ sit tight an’ be quite.” He looked at his watch but saw that it had stopped a few minutes short of midnight. “We’ll give it an hour.”

Fine against the night, Belleau Wood mansion sat sentient at the top of the highest hill, throwing a cold, crisp shadow down the vast inclination of land. Its windows were alight.

As they waited, Lenny’s self-awareness began to dissolve around the edges; soon, he caught himself dozing off. An intoxicating exhaustion seeped into him, slowing his heart and brain—it dragged him down as if into a pit. He lay back and watched Joanne through sleep-dulled eyes. Shifting in and out of focus, she began to move in cool, grainy slow-motion, like a fever dream. The moonlight seemed crystalline now; it traced her in sharp, mercurial lines. She drew her top off over her head, soundless, then leaned back and offered her breasts to the moon. Her eyes were glinting slits, her face slyly wanton and radiating warped desire. It was a familiar look.

Hell with the deer.

Flushed, intent, Joanne saw his hands float up like rough, disembodied things homing on the heat of her heart. His hands—they were more than hands, they were transmitters of a strange chemical energy, catalytic prods which ignited in her all the unallayed lust she’d ever known; she concentrated on his hands. They induced her to move closer; she loved to be felt, she loved his hands on her. His touch was potent, primitive. His touch made her shiver with knifelike flashes of heat.

“Right here under the moon,” she whispered.

“Rat here unda the moon,” he said.

He stripped off her jeans, and she straddled him.

“Not yet,” she said, a famished pant. “Not…yet.” Her skin glowed, her nipples rose from the sudden charge of blood. His fingertips kneaded a lovely pleasant ache into her breasts. She took his big wrists and pushed, hissing, sliding his touch over her tingling belly and down, and her nerves disgorged a flood of restless, quivering pleasure. She felt suddenly very wet inside, and slick with heat. She held his hand there for a long time, as if to push it into her completely. The wet heat trickled upward. She felt her blood turn to glitter, and her mind swam away with the moon.

“Turn me inside out with it,” she whispered. Her small hands fumbled with his belt. “I want you to fuck me till I can’t see straight. Fuck me right into the ground.”

A pair of tall, lean shadows arched over them, like trees.

Lenny’s wonderful rough hands cupped her buttocks. He positioned her over him, then pushed down. Joanne whined once very sharply at the thrill of being pierced.

There was a rustling of motion, insanely fast. The shadows converged. Joanne opened her mouth to scream but was gagged by a squirming hand; some of her teeth cracked when she bit down on the invading fingers. Lenny was lifted up and thrown a considerable distance—he collided head-long into a stout tree trunk, then thudded to the ground. The impact sent a tremor through his bones; he fought to keep conscious, fought to breathe. The pistol was out of reach, lost in the grass and tangling shadows. His gashed scalp poured blood into his eyes. Floundering, his face dulled by the white of shock, he looked out across the clearing.

Joanne was being dragged nude through the field, hauled along by a hand hooked into the roof of her mouth; her body flip-flopped like a weasel with its head in a snare. In her struggle, she made no details of her attackers—they were just two lurching shapes dragging her along. The second figure wrestled with her, grappling for her feet as she kicked and bucked her arms and legs in a mad, futile dance. Intolerant, the first figure finally let go of her, and she fell. Her scream wheeled out into the dark like flying glass. On her back, she scrambled to get away, but at once a cold, thin foot plopped onto her chest and slammed her down again, pinning her shoulders to the ground. She squealed in little bursts when the figure took her wrist and held her arm out straight. The drawing pressure increased; her shoulder lifted. A grisled popping sound crackled in her ears, and her squeal climbed to the sharpness of a razor as she felt her arm being twisted cleanly out of its socket. Her other arm was jerked out, much more quickly.

Stupefied by pain, Joanne looked up and tried to focus her eyes. The shapes gazed back at her, their faces unfathomable in the moonlight. She recognized only that the figures were grinning.

Her life ebbed away in a dark-scarlet pulse, and very slowly the figures each grabbed an ankle and began to step apart.

««—»»

Lenny ran.

He crashed through the trees and away from the clearing, forearms crossed to shield his face. At first, Joanne’s electric screams had seemed to chase him through the woods, but now there was only silence, which was somehow far worse.

There was nothing he could do; she had to be dead, she had to be, though the thought of trying to save her had never truly occurred to him. Judging by the tenor of her screams, he had himself narrowly escaped an incomprehensible death.

The basest motives took over now, engaging the sole focus of his existence toward self-preservation. Moments ago he was half drunk, but madness purged the alcohol. His feet carried him as those of a long-distance runner.

The Chevelle’s 427 turned over explosively. Cutting the wheel, Lenny gunned the gas and let up the clutch. Almost eloquently, the car fanned around on its axis, turning a near-perfect one-eighty, then lurched forward and shot back down the access road, straight as a round through a piece of artillery. Lenny changed gears mindlessly and without error. Trees shivered in the vacuum of the car’s passing, gravel flew like shrapnel. The front end began to shudder as he gained even more speed.

In his headlights, he saw the gateposts at the lane’s end; they seemed to fly toward him out of the dark. Awareness returned, his terror jaggedly receding like a crash come-down from amphetamines—for the first time, he felt the reality of what he’d done.

He’d left Joanne to die, to save himself.

Bile frothed in his belly, corrosive and hot. He was a coward and he knew it now, and worse was knowing that if he had to do it over again, nothing would be different.

Psychos, he thought. Murderers. He’d heard the rumors of families in the hills which were inbred for generations, human animals. “Dirt-eaters,” they were called, and “creek people.” But it didn’t matter who they were. He’d seen what they were doing to Joanne just before he’d run away; the image burned in his mind like pornography. If he notified the police in time, there was a chance they’d catch them. The county would send an army of men…

His thoughts had blinded him; suddenly his heart was screaming. He hadn’t sufficiently decelerated, and he took the right turn onto 154 too hard. Like a rifle shot, the left front tire blew out and collapsed. The car veered uncontrollably into the oncoming lane, and before he could react, the chassis was riding up and over the guardrail. When the car finally tore to a halt, it was balanced precariously on the rail; its nose tilted down into an entangled gully. Lenny moved to get out, but the quick shift in weight caused the car to tip and slide. He could feel the metal grinding underneath, shrieking, the Chevelle now poised to drop into the gully. Helpless, he held his breath, his face twisted into a web of furrows.

Miraculously, the back wheel caught on the rail post. The car didn’t fall.

Lenny found himself quite in control. This situation was easy for him to evaluate. He’d simply lost control of his car, had wrecked into the guardrail, and was now on the verge of plummeting into a ravine. His life could be at stake; one careless move and the car could slip off the post. The impact might leave him crushed within the car’s hull, he might be vaulted through the windshield and lose his head on the way, or the slightest trickle of gasoline on the manifold could burn back to the tank and blow him and the car clear into the next voting district. But Lenny didn’t panic. He kept his cool. This was a crisis he could understand, unlike the crisis he’d just fled from.

He moved very slowly, as though mindful of tripwires, and let the door creak open. The bashed radiator hissed steam into the air, spurtling pale green antifreeze through the grill. The engine had stalled, and the headlights were already dimming from the weakened battery. When he looked into the ravine, he saw only black. The car seemed suspended before it, as if over an open mouth.

He climbed out, holding on to a stray seat belt, but his feet never touched ground. He was hanging in the air.

The car groaned above him; his weight was levering the wheel against the post. If the wheel popped off, the car would fall on him. There was no other choice. He released the seat belt and let himself drop.

The slope was rough and treacherously steep. Lenny tumbled down end over end like a tossed sack, rolling over rocks and litter and fallen branches. He expected to hit bottom with bone-cracking force; instead, he seemed to slop to a halt.

The fall scrambled his equilibrium. Green and black spots broke before his eyes, and he felt sopping wet. He kicked his legs, a sluggish churning sensation, like wading in wet plaster. When his senses returned, he realized he was up to the belt in quicksand.

It began to drag him down at once. Wallowing, he reached out for a convenient vine as in all the movies he’d seen, but there was nothing. He was in it, and he was going down.

He felt the impression of being swallowed. Inch by sucking inch, he sank into the slowly shifting mass. Soon he was up to his armpits in it, engulfed, paralyzed. He needed more time; if only he could hang on—perhaps a motorist would see his car on the rail—but thoughts of rescue this late seemed only to make him sink faster.

It came up to his neck, his chin, his lower lip. He had time only to fill his lungs before his head was completely submerged. He viewed death as an infinity of drenching, sucking blackness. It was a surprisingly unexciting vision. Perhaps his hell would be to remain alive in this for all time.

His hand was the only thing above surface now. He spread his fingers in the air, made a fist …

At a sudden lurch, his lungs emptied.

He was jerked out of the quicksand by the wrist, as if on a tow line. New life exploded in his chest; he could move again, he could think, could see. Lenny let out a great shout of thanks, to a god he’d never believed in.

An instant later, though, he wished he could be back in the quicksand again, when he was able to look fully into the face of the thing that was pulling him out.

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