Ghouljaw and Other Stories (3 page)

She took her back off the staircase’s railing and leaned in toward Max. “Do you like surrealism?” she asked.

Max frowned, edging in on her a little closer. He could smell patchouli and cloves. “What did you say?”

She spoke up over the music. “Do you like surrealist games?” she asked.

Max nodded. “Yeah—absolutely.” He cleared his throat. “I knew lots of people who did collage projects in school.” The girl’s smile remained as it had, impassive and cruelly coquettish, and she nodded slowly, as if satisfied by the answer or by Max’s obvious ignorance.

After a moment of silently scanning the hippie girl’s collage, Max leaned in again. “I’m Max.”

“Gina,” the girl said, taking another methodic drag from her cigarette. The tips of her silky pinup-girl bangs teased her dark eyebrows.

Max twisted the cap from the extra bottle of beer and offered it to Gina, who gripped it with her slender fingers, glancing at the label briefly. She said
thanks
by cocking her chin down and blinking slowly. She kept her glazy eyes on Max for a few seconds before speaking. “I haven’t seen you around before. How’d you hear about the party?”

“Me and this other guy were invited—Winston Kolb invited us. You know Winston?”

Glancing back and forth between the collage-girl and Max, she said, “Never heard of him.”

Presently, the girl on the landing was carefully gluing a Humboldt squid over the face of a briefcase-toting businessman. Max paused on the animal’s gray-and-red mottled flesh, on the orbs of its yellow-ringed black eyes. The tentacles.

Gina extinguished her cigarette on the banister. “That’s Nancy,” Gina said, gesturing toward the girl on the landing. “She’s rolling.”

Oh,
Max bobbed his head, hoping to mask his obliviousness.

After a moment of scouring Max’s face with silky precision, Gina said, “You don’t know what that means, do you.”

Max winced and shook his head.
You got me: guilty
.

Gina didn’t seem surprised, but she didn’t seem any less interested. “She’s on Ecstasy.”

Max lifted his chin in sudden understanding. “Oh. Cool.” The surrounding pulse of music filled the space between them.

Gina leaned in again, slowly. “I’ve been watching you walk around by yourself.”

Max made a
yeah-it’s-tough-being-a-loner
face. “I don’t mind. It’s a decent party.”

Again, Gina moved closer to the side of Max’s face, her lips almost clipping his earlobe as she spoke. “Do you want to roll, Max?” He watched her pull away. Her eyes had gone to half-dreamy slits.

She’s already on something
. “Roll? With you?” he asked.

Gina’s grin was mellow, content. She shrugged her shoulders, raising her eyebrows. “Maybe,” she said, then bit her lower lip. The music continued to pulse wildly, and now Gina’s shoulders were beginning to sway.

Max took a chance. “Can we go somewhere quiet?”

“Why,” Gina said—it wasn’t really a question.

Max cleared his throat. “I just want to go somewhere more private. We can come back to the party after we get . . . going. Okay?”

Gina’s body continued to sway side-to-side, in sync with the thrum of music. She nibbled her lower lip again and nodded,
Okay,
and took Max by the hand, leading him up the staircase. They stepped around Nancy and her scattered scraps of paper. Nancy—her face still hidden by her kelpy tangle of hair—began to giggle.

Max peeled off Gina’s shirt as he edged her toward the bed. He was kissing her face, her ear lobe, her clavicle. Gina, breathing heavy and moaning in tiny bursts, shuffled backward, fumbling to unclasp her bra.

The room was dark, save for a phosphorescent glow streaming in through an uncurtained window; light from a mercury-vapor streetlamp outside washed the room—the water-stained ceiling, the bare white walls—in a weak, bluish-green tint.

After reaching the second floor, it had taken little time for them to find a vacant room. Gina had locked the door behind her and produced two round pills. She taunted Max for several minutes by holding out her hand, and as he reached out she pulled back. “Ah, ah,” she teased him. “You don’t think this ride’s for free, do you?” Max smirked.
My move,
he thought. He inched closer to Gina, whose stony-black eyes glistened in the dim light. He leaned in, pressing her up against an oblong-mirrored vanity and kissed her. After a moment, Gina pulled back just long enough to feed the pills to Max, who washed them down by polishing off his beer and dropping it to the hardwood floor. Max moved in on Gina again—on her lips, on her nape, on her chest—and she acquiesced with seasoned fluency.

Now, as they neared the bed, Gina unclasped and slipped free from her bra—her breasts dropping and swaying loosely as she fingered the button and zipper on Max’s jeans.

Gina suddenly pivoted, spinning Max around and shoving him back onto the bed. She crawled in on top of him, straddling him. At some point, Max produced a condom, allowing Gina to slip it on to him. For several sensual minutes, things proceeded the usual way.

Lying beneath her, he watched Gina’s body arc and bounce over his—he cupped her breasts and in the anemic seafoam glow, watched her face contort with pleasure. The smell of her body was a mixture of smoke, peaches, and something acrid and mossy—like the mineral smell of cave water.

With flashbulb brevity, Max contemplated his luck this evening and, with equal brevity, thought of Amy. Compelled to keeping that mental door locked, Max gripped Gina’s hips, savoring the sensation as they rotated with locomotive smoothness.

Max’s world flickered. The room, for a moment, dimmed, and he was briefly pleased with the culmination of sensations. But this was different now—new. Max felt the dull twinge of his headache re-emerge and change into something insistent and serious. The long fissure of pain, which began as a distraction, quickly transformed into a blurring throb. Gina slipped Max out of her and dropped down to her side, rolling on her back and pulling him over on top of her. Gina moaned coarsely as she reinserted his sex, grasping his buttocks and roughly urging him to resume.

And now—through the fog of alcohol, smoke, and Ecstasy—he actually felt something, faintly tectonic, shift along his left temple. This time the pain was assertive and so significant that his thrusting ceased for a moment. Gina opened her eyes, scowling. “What?” she hissed, her chest rising and falling as she spoke. “Why’d you stop?—you didn’t come, did you?”

Max shook his head, resuming his steady, but weak, plunges into the musky nexus between Gina’s thighs. The room wobbled again, and Max blinked back the pulsing pain coursing across his skull. His stomach hurt, and he was again struck with the image of that livid inky eel, writhing as it squirmed in the black coral of his midsection—keen only on freeing itself from his insides.

Max looked down at Gina, who was suddenly no longer a beautiful girl but an emaciated hag, whose wiry frightwig hair fell over the pillow in a seaweedy mass. Her saggy breasts hung loose on her chest, under which the shadowy ridges of her ribcage her visible. Max flinched but the gaunt thing pulled him closer. He shuddered and closed his eyes; but when he looked again, she was an attractive, exotic girl again. “Don’t stop,” she breathed, “keep fucking.”

Max fell forward, his spine was quaking, losing its shape—he convulsed, feeling muscles and bones begin to tremble, as if his entire body had suddenly become blackly obedient to the resonance of some unseen tuning fork.

The room was rippling, the gyrating shapes and shadows flickered and spun on all sides like an aquatic cyclorama. The electric ache was close to unbearable, and Max sank down on top of Gina, whose raspy moans turned into a boggy wheezing in his pain-lashed mind. Max made one last effort to right himself. Darkness closed in as something inside—something ink-smeared and slick—tore itself free.

Max woke to the sound of screaming and applauding. Lying on his stomach—cold, naked—he pried his eyes open and was met with a pervasive of numbness. The ache in his head had not subsided but had dulled a bit, as if it had spread itself evenly through his body. The room had, mercifully, ceased its watery wobble.

“I’d get the fuck out of here if I were you,” Gina said from somewhere in the room.

Max jerked up toward the voice, instantly regretting the movement. It took a moment for his eyes to adjust. She had the sheet from the bed wrapped around her abdomen and was sitting cross-legged on the waist-high vanity, her back pressed directly against the oblong mirror, creating the illusion of two girls sitting back-to-back, like spinal Siamese twins. Her face briefly glowed orange as she took an agitated drag from a cigarette, her eyes glittering with nocturnal listlessness. The shouting and pounding music from downstairs continued to rattle the floor.

Max wanted to ask what had happened. Instead, Gina spoke through an exhalation of smoke. “The condom broke.”

Max, momentarily paralyzed, hesitated before reaching down and searching his groin. His fingers stopped, sensing the damage. “Jesus . . . Christ,” he mumbled, quickly shedding the torn piece of latex and flinging it, like a diseased piece of skin, to the floor.

Through the inexplicable numbness and restless soreness coursing through his body, Max, sickly galvanized, scrambled, as best he could from the bed, searching the floor for his clothes and shoes. He heard cheering. “What’s happening down there?” he asked hoarsely, tugging on his jeans.

“Sounds like Winston’s pissed off about something.”

Max, struggling to pry on his sneaker, stopped suddenly. “You know Winston?”

Gina snorted—the ember of her cigarette glowed for a moment before she answered. “Yeah, I know Winston.”

Max let that sink in. Everything in the room was at once crystallized and distorted. He found his flannel shirt and fumbled with the buttons. As he stood, he tripped and fell. Gina let loose a small chain of giggles. “Amateur,” she said and clicked her tongue. “Winston was right about you,
prettyboy
.”

Wavering, Max got to his feet again, but now he was moving quick—panic propelling him forward. The light in the hallway stung his eyes with antiseptic starkness, and he teetered as he slid his hands along the wall, stumbling toward the stairs. The other girl, Nancy, who’d been at the bottom of the stairwell, was gone; but her collage still lay scattered on the landing.

People, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, were gathered down in the main hall. With his hand clutching the railing, Max craned his head above the top of the crowd, which seemed to be congregated in the living room near the front door. And now he could see what they were watching.

Winston Kolb had Jerry pinned-up against the wall near the front door. Jerry’s face—having obviously suffered some trauma—was horribly florid; his lip was split and a rill of blood ran from his nose. He struggled against Winston, who threw a vicious, under-arcing punch into the smaller boy’s stomach. Jerry slid down the wall, hitting the floor with both knees before doubling up in a fetal position. Max noticed the whisker-patchy hippie he’d seen when they’d arrived; he was drinking a beer and blocking the front door.

“You stupid, thieving motherfucker,” Winston said, breathing in wheezy bursts. “You thought you could steal from
my
buddy and get away with it?” Winston gritted his teeth as he kicked Jerry in the lower back.

For the first time in hours—in weeks, in months—things appeared clear to Max. Jerry, of course, had stolen the drugs. Max shouldn’t have been here tonight—tonight was a trap for Jerry. Winston was grinning, showing a bit of blood around his teeth.
Maybe Jerry tried to fight back
. The obstinate glee of the thought was remote and fleeting. As close as they were to the front door, it occurred to Max that maybe Jerry had tried to make a break for it.

“You poseur piece of shit,” Winston said, readying himself to deliver another kick, when he glanced up toward the back of the crowd—Winston’s face contorted, locking eyes with Max.
“That guy!”
he shouted, raising one of his meaty hands and pointing. “That guy came with McWilliams!”

Max’s mind seemed to be catching up with his body, and it took him a moment to register that he’d wheeled past a few of the hallway gawkers and was now rushing toward the back door. Someone made a lazy attempt to stop him as he ran through the kitchen, but Max shoved the guy aside and burst through the back screen door.

The cold rain and night air steeled Max and steadied him as he darted across the unkempt back yard, ducking under a clothesline before slamming against a wooden fence. Max grabbed the top of the fence, his sneakers skidding against the damp planks as he hauled his body up and over, falling sideways into a row of trashcans.

There were people in the yard now. Frantically, Max pushed himself up and ran for cover in a small belt of trees that lined a junk-cluttered backstreet. Just as one of the pursuing partiers had edged over the top of the fence, Max clawed through a few branches and lost his footing, slipping and tumbling down a steep hill and landing in a soggy, leaf-choked creek. Covered in septic-smelling muck, Max stumbled forward, slinking up the other side of the ravine without looking back. Soon he reached a chest-high chain-link fence, lifting his leg up awkwardly and vaulting himself over, his body jarring as he landed on the puddle-pocketed gravel of a sidestreet. The shouting was still echoeing out there in the woods behind him, but seemed disorganized and eventually began to fade. He waited, caught his breath and, again, struggled to his feet.

For over an hour Max stayed close to the back alleys, weaving through poorly lit sidestreets as he headed north toward the city—the twinkling skyline visible from time to time between rows of outdated houses in these outlying neighborhoods. Max guided himself toward the beacon of big buildings, knowing that if he could get close, he could make it to Amy’s apartment. The rain was light and constant, helping to rinse some of the muck from his clothes. He only stopped once, overtaken by a savage wave of nausea. Max steered into an alley, vomiting intermittently for nearly a minute before absently wiping his mouth. His eyes—which had been blurred by retch-induced tears—quickly widened as he concentrated on the inky strands of bile on his hand and wrist. His eyes flicked to the ground, trying to comprehend what had spilled out of him—a great glistening pool of black, viscous liquid. Repelled, Max wiped his hand on his jeans, and through rain and pain and panic, he hurried on.