Ghouljaw and Other Stories (7 page)

It had been Vicky’s suggestion to explore the second floor.

Once upstairs they split up, giddily searching rooms. Bill was leaving an empty bedroom when he heard Vicky hiss. “Hey, Bill.” He spun around. She was down the corridor a bit, peeking around a corner; she jerked her head. “Check it out.” Bill pursued, rounding the elbow of wall. Vicky was now at the far end of the hall, standing in front of a door, palming its brass knob. Her face held the expression of a magician’s assistant preparing to reveal some sort of wicked trick. Vicky was wearing cut-off jeans, clipped so high that her pockets showed from under the frayed lips of her shorts, and a black Def Leppard T-shirt, the logo from the
Hysteria
album. Bill approached but said nothing. She turned the knob and the door yawned open. A staircase. The attic. “Come on,” she purred. “You’ve got the guts to go up with me, don’t you?” Bill fidgeted, suddenly aware of the possibilities. It was humid up there, her cinnamon-tinted skin looked sweat-filmed. For only a moment, Bill was crippled by hesitation. But a moment was all it took.

The other kids were curiously converging now. The attic windows let in some meager light up there, a dust-and-shadow diffuseness. Silence wore on for stretch as Vicky scanned the group, her unnerving gaze settling on Bill for a second or two before rolling her eyes. “Jesus, you guys. Who’s coming with me?” The teenage gang murmured noncommittally. “Fine,” she said with no hint of disappointment. She dashed through the threshold, bounding up those scuffed and creaking stairs as the group watched her ascension until she was at the head of the narrow passage, supplying an impromptu victory dance. “Come on, guys, take a look,” she said. “It’s spooky as hell up here.”

And then Vicky Sanford tugged up her T-shirt and peeled down her bra, providing the group with an improvised peepshow. With something very much like awe or admiration, one of the girls, Darlene Zukowski, said, “What a crazy bitch.” Vicky laughed, an abrasive, teasing noise that Bill would become acquainted with in the years ahead. “Hey, fellas—I’ll give you another peek if you come up and join me.” Blood rushed into Bill’s face, his pulse already hammering in his throat as Vicky—this time swiveling her hips with slow, sensual finesse—lifted her T-shirt again, this time cupping her heavy breasts. Bill’s mouth went dry at the sight of her chest, the inverted-heart-shaped curve lining her cleavage and tracing the lower crescent of each breast, the firm indention between her sternum and belly button.

The small crowd of teenagers chortled, and Bill remembered one of the guys—Luke or Davey—whistling, egging her on, making a joke—“Better get it while the getting’s good”—before stepping into the corridor. Most of the others followed, including a couple of girls. Only a few kids remained on the second floor, Bill being one of them, milling around while footfalls, muffled laughter, and other noises issued from the attic.

Bill never heard the story of what actually happened up there. He never asked.

Even though Vicky was in most of his classes that autumn semester, he never asked. In the years ahead he reluctantly listened to rumors—the pregnancy rumors that, as far as Bill knew, never turned out to be true; while other stories, the parties where Vicky got drunk, got out of control, were unshakably accurate. During those four years of high school, Bill watched Vicky pass herself around their small group of friends, and still Bill didn’t ask. And despite their chance meeting at the nearby college—“
So, Bill . . . when are you going to get sick of acting shy and ask me out for a drink?
”—and the dates that followed, the quiet out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the hasty and tumultuous marriage, Bill never worked up the courage to ask.

Bill only had the courage to
tell
—he told Vicky what her problems were. After completing a few college courses, he started using words like histrionic, latent, borderline, disorder, and promiscuous. For Bill, her agreeing to marry him became an opportunity to fix—to teach—that wild girl exposing herself at the top of the stairs.

Now, standing next to his son in the untamed yard in front of this decaying house, Bill shuddered and clenched his teeth, forcibly pulling his gaze away from the high attic dormers.

It was little more than a whisper, but Bill nearly screamed at the abrupt emergence of Casey’s voice. “Dad—Dad, do you see it?”

Bill bristled. “See what?”

Casey lifted a finger, “It’s right there,” indicating a spot within the house. “See it? See it? It’s moving.”

Bill winced, growing impatient, not understanding. “Son, I—”

And then Casey squeezed his father’s hand. “Dad, look—it’s right
there
.”

Squinting, Bill scoured the fractured ribcage-interior of the house. A breath carrying a question was strangled in his throat, his mouth hung open. Something was . . .
there
.

The harder Bill gazed the more vivid the thing became. Vaporous at first, it gathered itself up from the overlapping gloom, squirming shapes contracting into a gauzy figure. It was drifting across the parlor now, a slender shrouded thing.

Bill’s breath caught as a face swam out of that ragged blackness—an angular, expressionless face, like a dirt-smudged cameo carved from bone. A gray hand slid from within the undulating cloak, its fingers hooked and reaching up, revealing a cadaver-pale throat, sliding further down now, exposing a gray slash of collarbone. Bill clasped his free hand to his mouth, his other hand still gripped with Casey’s.

“Do you see it?” Casey said.

Bill spoke, but it was little more than a whimper. “Yes.”

Casey tore his hand away and raced forward, running up to the open cavity where a window had once been and, as if to hoist himself inside, clutched hold of the lower lip of the sill. Casey cried out, spinning around and thrusting his hand at Bill.

“Daddy—I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.”

In the moonlight Bill saw blood glistening in Casey’s palm. Bill remembered the shards of glass in the casings of the empty window frames. He cradled Casey, calming him, guiding him back to the car, doing his best to disregard the rag-and-shadow figure hovering in the parlor.

Bill settled Casey into the passenger seat and rummaged through the glove compartment, locating a stack of napkins to stanch the bleeding.

Casey was sniffling, still apologizing. “I just wanted to get a closer look.”

Bill was nodding. “I know it, I know it. It’s my own fault for coming out here.” He dabbed the napkins against the small laceration, seeing now that stitches would be unnecessary. “You’re a curious kid . . . it happens. Keep pressure on it . . . like this.” Casey winced and nodded.

Bill used his knuckles to gently swipe at the channels of tears on his son’s cheeks. He was moving to close the glove compartment when his hand froze, his fingers a few inches away from a tiny box of Ohio Blue Tip Matches. He picked it up. Bill inadvertently flicked his eyes at the house and heard a witch’s whisper.
Burned down by hoods
. The matches gave a bone-dry rattle as he gave the box an experimental shake.

“Dad.”

Bill trembled, shifting his gaze to Casey’s tear-swollen face. He dropped the matches back in the glove compartment and slapped it shut.

The headlights quaked as the car shook over ruts on the overgrown driveway. Bill checked the clock on the dash before giving a glance in the rearview mirror. He stared at the vibrating, rearview reflection of the house on the hill. With moonlight glowing from behind, the house’s silhouette appeared sharp-edged, as if crookedly cut from black paper. Something separated itself from the dwelling, a shroud shape floating into the yard, lingering in the knee-high grass. “Casey?”

His son had been facing the passenger window; now he turned, his expression and the set of his small body at ease. “Yes?”

“Will you tell me what you saw back there?”

Hitching in a breath, Casey told his story, and Bill listened. But with each bump along the narrow country road, Bill heard the box of matches shuffling around in the glove compartment, the brittle rattle of bones.

Sundays have become unbearable. But before this Sunday—that is to say before
this morning
—the only thing I seriously needed to worry about was nursing a hangover. Now things have become . . . complicated. Now what I need to focus on is neglect, and maybe consequence. Either way, this Sunday was different. Worse.

I should probably explain what you’re about to read—not a confession, I have no doubt what happened will affect others. But this is also a custodial exercise—an attempt to keep things as clean as possible, as sane as possible.

I’ll start here: this morning. I live in the country, in an old house. Not quite a farmhouse, although I am surrounded by fields and farmland. I woke early, feeling achy and lousy, my mouth still soured from last night’s beer. The light seeping in from the windows was dim and blue. I lay there for a while, drifting in and out of sleep, listening to the wind make the windows chatter as it rushed up along the eaves. The wind—making a low-moan sound, like blowing over the lip of a beer bottle—had picked up overnight, and I didn’t have to look outside to know it brought more snow with it. I listened to other noises too, old house sounds—the pinging and popping of joists up in the attic. From time to time, I could hear scuttling up there. Coveys of field mice, no doubt, taking refuge for the winter. I imagined other things up there in the attic, in the walls. Web-nests of spiders; wing-wrapped bats nestled in clusters. Twitching termites munching on wood.

I tried not thinking about the cemetery. About Julie.

So I continued distracting myself with the winter-sounds I was hearing all over the house. Okay, right: the bugs. That got me thinking about that urban legend (although I guess out here it’d be consider a “rural” legend), the claim that dozens of bugs and spiders crawl in your mouth at night while you sleep.

I asked Uncle Jasper about this the first time I’d heard it. I was probably in middle school. (I always asked Uncle Jasper about that sort of stuff. My dad was pretty useless for advice, especially back then. Now he’s just useless. Uncle Jasper sort of adopted me by default. I never had a problem with that.) Uncle Jasper, sitting at the table in front of his typewriter, crinkled his already wrinkled forehead (because of his prematurely gray hair, most kids thought he was my grandpa) and said it was nonsense. “Besides,” he’d said, waving off the story, “somebody would have to do a DNA test on a person’s stomach to find out if there really was an abundance of bugs that had been digested. And that can’t be cheap, Dennis.” Uncle Jasper always did have a reliable built-in bullshit detector.

Anyway—like I was saying: It was the noises in the attic that got me thinking about the bugs in the first place, and it’s the bugs that got me writing this now.

Trust me: I’m not a writer. Sure, what you’re reading here might be serviceable, maybe even competent, but it’s nothing more than the result of private practice. (For the last few years I’ve been maintaining a journal, which I keep fiercely private.) Now Uncle Jasper on the other hand—he’s a writer. I’ve read the stuff he’s written (poems, essays), and he’s good, smart. He says he started writing after Aunt Susan died (cancer). I always admired that: Uncle Jasper’s resolve after Aunt Susan passed. He was . . . honorable. And even though I’m not as good a writer as Uncle Jasper—or as good a widower, for that matter—I like to think I’m like him in other ways.

We were both born and raised here—here being Deacon’s Creek, what I used to think of as a blue-collar-nowhere place when I was younger. But I’ve grown to appreciate it, or at least what it used to be. So Uncle Jasper’s been here sixty-seven years; me: thirty-six.

And just as Sundays weren’t always this way, Deacon’s Creek wasn’t always a town on the verge of financial and social emaciation. Now Main Street’s just a slow-beating heart with withering arteries stretching out to other more bucolic towns. Oh sure, a few years ago some civic groups got the bright idea to transform Main Street into something more contemporary—something to draw in tourists on their shopping trips between Chicago, St. Louis, and Cincinnati. A popular fast-food chain replaced the flower shop; Harlan’s barber shop was taken over by a commercial shoe company; and the grocery store (where I was hired for my first job) was converted into a high-end antique boutique. But none of them succeeded, and the outsiders just left. Now we’re stuck with empty stores, empty houses.

Even the farmers are having trouble maintaining their small-town roots. A lot of the small-scale growers have had to sell their farms, or at least their fields. After some of the big-time companies came in, the families’ business models collapsed and they had to sell out. For the last few seasons, outside parties have been using that land. Uncle Jasper says these commercial guys have been using weird chemicals on those fields—DDT, anhydrous ammonia, stuff like that. He said the seeds they’ve using have been genetically altered, and that the corn can survive massive amounts of herbicides. Here, in my clumsy explanation to you, I wish I’d have listened better to Uncle Jasper. About a lot of things.

One of those cornfields skirts the edge of my backyard. They’ve been using those chemicals for several seasons. It gets me wondering about what the chemicals have done to the insects around here. Honestly, in the past few years, I’ve seen what I thought were rabbits and other animals skittering about within those stalks of corn. Now I wonder if they were rabbits at all.

But I was talking about Sunday mornings, and about Julie.

I met Julie in college, and that was the only time I lived outside of Deacon’s Creek. I dropped out after a year, came back here, and got hired with the landscaping company (where I still work); but Julie and I kept in touch. Eventually, I talked her into letting me take her to dinner; we dated for about six months before I proposed and convinced her to move to Deacon’s Creek. She found a teaching job at an elementary school.