Ghouljaw and Other Stories (37 page)

Suddenly there was dull pain in his hand. Luther looked down—his dad’s dog tags were wound around the knuckles of his clenched fist, a small rill of blood dripping between the seams of his fingers and freckling the unflawed sidewalk.

His car was parked down the street around the corner, and Luther started off in that direction, his sneakers squelching with moisture. But once the urge to run had ebbed, what flowed in to replace it was the simple need to tell someone—to ask for help, to confide in a companion. Luther shuffled to a stop and turned to examine the house from a distance, and considered the icy emergence of the sobering realization:
Who the hell do I have to tell?

Later that afternoon Luther will work up the courage to return to the house. Of course he won’t enter it—he watches the house with the dread of a self-conscious matador eyeing an unblinking, red-eye rabid bull—but will simply clean up the mess of spilled chemicals, finally retrieving and disposing of the discarded condom just before the scheduled house showing. Before he leaves, he steels himself to check on the screen door, which is still rickety but sturdy along its hinges, and locks the French doors from the outside.

That same evening at his own house, Luther walks down the hall, cranes his neck into his dad’s den, and clears his throat. “Hey.”

Curt Hume is at his desk, his back to Luther, his broad shoulders blocking the monitor that throws a blue glow against the wall and ceiling. He doesn’t miss a beat with whatever he’s working on and continues pecking at the keyboard without turning around. “Hm?”

“I . . .” Luther edges across the threshold, “I . . . was just curious how the showing went today.”

Curt stops typing now and rotates his head a degree or two. After an uncertain moment, he says, “I don’t think they’re going to make an offer. Said they were looking for something with more warmth, can you believe that?” The steady typing resumes. “Why the sudden interest?”

Luther makes a clueless gesture. “Like I said, just curious.”

His dad slowly swivels partway around to look at Luther, giving his son a crooked smirk. “Looks like you still have a job.”

Luther blurts a nervous laugh. “Yeah.” He turns to leave but hesitates. He licks his lips. “Thanks, Dad.”

Luther walks down the hall, the quiet corridor catching the clack-clack echo of his father’s fingers on the keyboard.
Clack-click . . . clack-clack-clack . . .

A few nights after the incident at the Crawley house, Luther is in his bedroom at home. Driven by a complicated urge of remorse and motivation—the latter having gone into almost absolute atrophy over the past few years—and with the snaky haze of chemical influence beginning to dissipate, Luther finally grows ambitious enough to investigate the source of the scrawled line that had been haunting him for a dozen months—
for dappled things . . .

At his computer, Luther types the phrase into the search engine, seconds later retrieving several responses that connect to the initials GMH. It’s a poem, something titled “Pied Beauty” by a guy with the last name Hopkins. Luther opens up another tab to look up what the hell
pied
means before reading the poem in its entirety.

Glory be to God for dappled things—

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:

Praise him.

It doesn’t mean a damn thing to him. Though he has the sense, an uneasy tickle—
am I a dappled thing?
—that there is a riddle in here. But more than anything, he feels as if it were a final, forgiving embrace from his grandma. Hesitating, the next thing he types is “earwig.” After a long time he shuts down the computer. He thinks he’ll read more about this Hopkins guy and earwigs tomorrow. He has to start somewhere.

Yet outside Luther’s immediate perception—on a similar, overlapping frequency in which this narrative is being transmitted—and yet not so far away from the double-exposure reality in what Luther has so often imagined a life that may have been—staticky snatches of voices briefly emerge: moments of formal clarity: fleeting threads of thought ( . . .
I was drowning in the ocean under a bone-toned moon . . .
), conversation—a broadcasted news report, perhaps . . . it’s difficult to hone in on the context . . . but there are words, voices . . . or rather a mystical concatenation—fleeting as it may be—of conveyance . . . of
mechanisms by which these parasites are commanding . . . hosts . . . remain unsolved mysteries . . . it’s co-opting pre-existing behavior . . . modified organisms are more complex than we had previously believed . . . Ampluex Compressa . . . in at least some of the cases . . . these parasites produce neurotransmitters or hormones that mimic host hormones . . . example of external control . . . Plesiometa Argyra . . . a different species . . . able to control . . . Hymenoepimecis Argyraphaga . . . via injection into its brain . . . and force it to enter its nest to become food and shelter . . . Leucochloridium Paradoxum . . . for insect’s larvae . . .

And in that dark concert on the black plane of all-inclusive consciousness, the transmission fades, ebbs from perception, deteriorates into the mandible-chatter of insectile clicking and clacking, where the white static of this hissing transmission transitions into the seething sustention of white, inkless space . . .

Clint Smith is a winner of the annual
Scare the Dickens Out of Us
ghost story contest (for “Dirt on Vicky,” in this collection). His fiction has appeared in numerous journals and anthologies, including the
Weird Fiction Review
and the
British Fantasy Society Journal
. Clint lives in the Midwest, along with his wife and two children.

Ghouljaw: The Soundtrack
, by Allen Kell of Shadeland, is available for purchase on iTunes, cdbaby, Spotify, and other sites.