Ghouls (13 page)

“Sorry,” he said, and closed the door. “Just curious. Seemed odd to have a closet in a study.”

Her eyes widened, concentrating speculatively on his face as she spoke. “It’s not a closet; it’s the stairwell to the cellar. I keep telling Charles to nail it shut, since we never use it. One of these days
someone’ll
go down there and wind up with a cracked skull.”

He couldn’t stand it when she made him guess. She was doing it on purpose, he knew she was. Her sadistic streak ran deep. He went closer to her, and elevated himself an inch off his heels to look past her shoulder into the hall.

She smiled and handed him an envelope. “Here’s your paycheck.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Willard,” he said, projecting his voice. He tilted his head to get a better look behind her. “Hope I didn’t disturb you, coming so early.”

“Cut,” she said, and laughed. “We can stop with the ‘Mrs. Willard’ for now. I get such a kick out of watching you peek around to see if it’s safe.”

Glen released a hard, allaying breath. He noticed now that her eyes were fixed on his crotch, and that her robe had come
unsashed
. It seemed her breasts were keeping the robe open, luring his gaze to her exposed flesh. She wore her nakedness obscenely and without a thought. One foot parted; he thought again of that sadistic streak.

They embraced immediately. Kissing, he reached into the gap of the robe, sliding his hand to her shoulder blades, then slowly down the length of her back. His palms pressed against her rump, squeezing their hips together. Her head lolled back at a soft angle; he tracked a damp, warm line along her throat in kisses.

“Charles went to the library in Bethesda,” she said. She closed her eyes. Around his waist her arms tightened, drawing slack. “He won’t be home for hours.”

“Good,” he managed to say, and his kisses went back to her mouth, long, hot, penetrating kisses. He breathed in the soapy fragrance of her hair; it roused him, made him feel light in the head. His hands continued feeling her beneath the robe.

“I thought about you…” he whispered, “…all night. I couldn’t wait to see you, couldn’t stop thinking about how much I love you.”

“Show me,” she said back. “Show me how much.”

“I’ll show you. I’ll…” His hands were already out from behind her, his fingers delicately touching her breasts. Then he watched her eyes and touched her lower.

She gave a little hiss, his touch sending up a spike of pleasure. Her words grew heavy with heat and love. “Not here, darling. Oh. We have lots of time. We can go upstairs.”

“Here,” he said. He could feel a warm current moving in his gut, and he could feel her heat. Urgency pulled them slowly and carefully to the floor like a sudden swell of gravity. Now she lay before him on her back, soft and
spraddled
and legs trustingly open. Shadows emphasized her shape; her skin shone darkly in the
downreaching
light. Their eyes locked—he was looking at her. Searching. Kneeling up between her white, open legs. He loved her so much, another man’s wife. Her abdomen seemed to be quivering, her flesh tense in wait, and he was kissing circles lightly around her navel, while his hands smoothed over her breasts and down to her warm, bare hips. She breathed jaggedly through her teeth, as if exerted. His kisses roamed harder, lower, more direct. So close now, he began kissing the inside of her thighs, inching up, and was at last working on the vital spot. Her mouth opened. Her eyes reduced to slits. She stared off into dim space, sighing her bliss.

She tasted sharp and lovely. Glen felt her body under him squirm. Though the room was deadened with silence, he could hear her sounds as though they had been excessively amplified. He could hear her lungs working, her heart, her pulse. He could hear the tiny whimpers that came with every breath she let out. He could hear her lips part, her hands in his hair, and the wet sounds of her throat as she swallowed. But he was so lost in his love for her that he didn’t hear the strange, faint shuffling from the cellar.

««—»»

The voice rocketed through his sleep.

“Kurt! Kurt! There’s something
awful
in the backyard! Kurt! Wake up, wake up!”

Small hands attached to his shoulders and shook him around, roughly, violently, lifting his head off the bed, shaking
shaking
shaking
.

“Oh, wake up, you poop!”

Kurt thought he was being shocked out of a coma. His eyes peeled open, and they took a long time focusing on Melissa’s terrified face, which seemed to hover over him like a demon spirit. She continued shaking him, continued shouting in his ear.

His eyes bored into her. “Damn it, Melissa. If you weren’t a girl, I’d punch the stuffing out of you. Now just what the f— What are you doing waking me up at—” a hard glance to the clock—“at eight-thirty in the morning when you know I didn’t get to bed till after four?”

She spoke, panting, as some sheer terror made gibberish of her words. “I went outside to put water in the birdbath out back, you know where the birdbath is—something between the trees like guts or hair or something in a pile. Kurt, you’ve got to
do
something, it’s
awful
—”

He tried to be mad at her, but found he couldn’t. She was a menace, yes, a gadfly, a prank, and pain in the ass, but still, she was only a little girl. “If this is another one of your jokes—”

“It’s not, Kurt. I swear, it’s not,” she assured him, rhythmically shaking her head. “I wouldn’t kid about something like this.”

Like the time she’d said she’d heard someone in the attic. Kurt had grabbed his revolver and pulled down the attic stairs. A bucket containing cold three-day-old barbecue sauce had tipped over on his head. “Go downstairs and make me coffee,” he told her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

Melissa’s face was stark. She nodded and dashed out of the room. Kurt couldn’t remember ever seeing her this unstrung.

He pulled on old clothes, every movement of his body sluggish from being cheated out of sufficient sleep. When he went down the steps, his feet thumped like blocks of concrete. Instinct made him fumble in his top pocket for a cigarette; he groaned audibly when he found none. The sunlight in the kitchen seemed like an energy field designed to repel. Melissa had her back to him; she was staring intently out the sliding-glass door into the backyard, her fingertips pressed against the glass. She wore red sneakers, striped socks, a bright yellow T-shirt, and brand-new denim overalls.
Looks like a children’s wear mannequin,
he thought. The pack of cigarettes in her back pocket was shamefully obvious. He stiffened, sneaked up on her then, and had slipped the cigarettes out just as she began to spin around.

“Thief!” she shouted, grabbing. “
Gimme
’
em
back!”

eld Not a chance,” he replied. He held the pack up, just out of her reach. “I told you the other day, you’re forbidden to smoke. Period. I’m only doing this for your own good. You’ll thank me ten years from now.”

“Sit on it,” she said. “Homo.”

Kurt lit a cigarette immediately, savoring the first-puff rush. “Ah, see, it all works for the best, since I just happen to be all out of cigarettes. Ironic that you should buy my brand.”

Melissa grinned now, triumphantly. “They ought to be
your
brand. I took ’
em
out of
your
car.”

“You little
klepto
,” he said when he realized it was true. “If you were my kid, I’d paddle your backside.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not your kid, and instead of worrying about my backside, what are you going to do about that
thing
in the backyard?”

The quick switch to seriousness in her expression jogged his memory. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot the reason you so rudely got me out of bed. So what’s so terrible in the backyard?”

“I can’t tell what it is, just that it’s dead. It’s…it’s big and it’s
gross.”

Occupational conditioning forced him to muse the very worst possibility. “Melissa, let’s be serious for just one minute. This thing in the backyard—it’s not a, uh, you know… It’s not a human being, is it?”

“No, but it’s big and it’s
gross.”

“So you’ve told me.” He opened the sliding door. “Well, come on.”

“Uh
uh
,” she said. “Not me. One look per customer. Just go to the birdbath. You’ll see.”

He stepped out onto the patio and walked diagonally across the yard. The air revitalized him, a mainline to his brain. He noticed the birdbath at the edge of the yard, and noticed also an indistinguishable heap at its base. As he neared, a bird squalled at him from above. He looked up and saw a large crow hiding behind a splay of leaves in the tallest oak. It reminded him of a vulture waiting to scavenge.

He came to a stop at the birdbath and just stared. The heap before him was the remains of a large buck. He knew it was a deer only by the head, which had been twisted around several times on the neck, producing a corkscrew effect. The tongue lolled slackly from the frozen mouth, a bloodless tubule that seemed much longer than it should’ve been. The animal had been ripped apart. The antlers weren’t to be seen, just cracked knots where they’d been snapped off the skull. Its belly lay torn open, the rib cage pried apart, spilled entrails gleaming. He looked once more to the head; the visible eye looked back at him like a shiny black button.

Mutilated,
he thought. He walked back toward the house in a hot daze. This wasn’t the work of a poacher or a predator. He sensed instead pure malice, as though the animal had been ripped apart for sport.

“What is it?” Melissa asked when he’d come back in.

“A deer. And you’re right, it is awful.”

“How did it get so…torn up?”

“Dogs, probably. It’s not uncommon for a pack of wild curs to do something like that.” Kurt sat down at the kitchen counter and yawned.

Melissa was gaping at him. “You’re not just gonna sit there and let that thing rot in the backyard, are you?”

He picked up the phone. “No, I’ll call the county. They’ll send someone out to take it away. In the meantime, you can fix my breakfast.”

Melissa’s eyes now shined with hilarity. “Don’t hold your breath. You can fix your own damn breakfast.”

“Nothing fancy. Orange juice, couple of strips of bacon, couple of eggs over hard.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Hell, why not? Fry up some hash browns, too.”

Melissa put her hands on her hips and laughed openly at him. “You really think I’m gonna cook
your
breakfast.”

“I know you will, Melissa,” he said. He started to dial the county animal control office. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Uncle Roy you’ve been smoking. He’ll ground you till the end of the
next
school year.”

“You’re bluffing. You would never do that… Would you?”

Kurt grinned at her and brought the phone to his ear. Melissa stood aside, scowling, hesitant. Then she yanked open the refrigerator door and reached in for the eggs.

««—»»

“Still no word on Cody Drucker,” Bard was saying fatly from behind his desk. “Still no word on the Fitzwater girl. And still no word on Swaggert.”

It was 4:00
p.m.
now, the beginning of Kurt’s shift. He’d relieved Higgins only to find Chief Bard still hanging around the station drinking coffee and faking paperwork.

Kurt slouched in his seat. “Last night somebody dug up Vicky Stokes’s dog.”

Bard stared at him. “Huh?”