Ghouls (50 page)

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.

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Was it a scream?

Kurt propped quickly up on his elbows, eyes wide and alert. The den was still with delusive darkness, and he felt a crawling chill course through his bones. Like a catapult, it shot him back to eerie childhood memory fragments, the shapes in the closet you
knew
were men with meat cleavers, the shoe on the floor which sufficed for a rat, midnight visits from the bogeyman, the
fizzywink
, and an entourage of campfire phantoms who all, the scout masters swore, had really truly escaped from insane asylums in Baltimore. Thump-thump-drag, the Hook Man of Lover’s Lane, and “Close the windows, lock the doors, don’t let anyone in unless it’s me.” They were fine old stories, but perhaps too fine now. Kurt wondered what he would do if someone else were really in the room with him.
Shit a brick and wave good-bye. Be careful with that hook, Eugene.
Paranoid, he scanned the room. The window stood open, drapes tied back and admitting the strange, pale light of a Lovecraft moon. He couldn’t remember opening it, and he could’ve sworn he’d heard a scream.

Screwed out of another night’s sleep,
he thought. Disgusted, he leaned up from the couch and turned on the light. The room was free of phantoms.

Vaguely he recalled a dream of waking up in the back of a bus. There are no other passengers. The bus is swerving, out of control, and heading for the edge of a cliff. Is the driver drunk? Perhaps he is sick and needs help. Kurt stumbles up the aisle, tossed back and forth into the empty seats. The engine’s drone deafens him; the bus plows on. But when Kurt finally makes it to the front, he sees that there is no driver. There is no steering wheel, no brakes. And with that final recognition, the bus accelerates off the edge of the cliff.

Another classic Morris nightmare. Subconscious distrust of mass transit? Freud would shit.

The scream had been far off and brief, but a scream just the same. He must’ve dreamed it. He supposed it could’ve been himself, as the dream-bus had plummeted off the cliff.

In his old blue robe, he padded out of the den, inordinately pleased with the particulate darkness about him. It soothed him somehow, wiped his senses clear. Perhaps the sound he’d heard was Melissa crying out in her sleep. It wouldn’t have been the first time, with all that horror junk she watched on TV. One foot into the foyer, he saw a figure stop on the stairs.

His heart seemed to wrench completely around.

Vicky gasped. “God, you scared the—”

“Shit out of me,” Kurt said, and then his heart began going again. “It’s close to two.”

“I know. We really should stop meeting like this. What would the neighbors say?” She came the rest of the way down the steps, bringing with her the scent of soap. “I thought I heard a scream.”

“Me, too.”
So much for the dream theory.
“It might have been Melissa having a nightmare. I was just on my way to check.”

They went through the TV room and down the hall. Kurt clicked open Melissa’s door. The room was frozen as a soft painting. Melissa lay burrowed beneath a mound of blankets, one arm slung over her head. Her fingers twitched. “But,
Ben,
” she murmured in her sleep, “Johnny’s got the keys.” Then she jabbered something else about a gasoline pump and fell silent.

Kurt closed the door. “How do you like that? The little horror talks in her sleep.”

“You
talk in your sleep,” Vicky said.

“How would you know?”

“I’ve heard you a bunch of times. Your voice travels right up through my heat duct.”

“You’re not serious,” he insisted.

“I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a sleeping chatterbox.”

He started back down the hall, still not sure if she was joking or not. “Okay then. What do I say?”

“Nothing incriminating. Too bad I don’t take notes. A couple of hours ago, though, I do seem to recall hearing you blabber something about a bus. Yeah, that’s right, you kept saying, ‘There’s no one driving,’ or something like that.”

Shit, I’m mouthing off in my sleep. What next? Somnambulistic handstands?

“Signs of a soul in torment,” she said.

In the kitchen, Kurt poured orange juice into coffee cups. They faced each other in the dark, Kurt leaning against the counter, Vicky against the dishwasher.

“So what did we hear?” she queried. “Murder in the wee hours?”

“It was probably Melissa, like I said. Or maybe a couple of catbirds raising hell, someone laying wheel on the route. Who knows.”

“Lenny loves to do that. Sometimes I think that’s the only reason he bought that pig of a car, to burn rubber.”

The juice turned sour in Kurt’s mouth at the thought of Lenny Stokes, and made him only more aware of his imbecilic jealousy. “I wrote him up for it many times,” he said.

Vicky lit a cigarette over the snap of a match. Her face flared, soft and beautiful in a brief glow of orange. “Did Melissa tell you the good news?” she asked.

“What good news?”

“I have an aunt in Carbondale—”