Ghouljaw and Other Stories (9 page)

Drunk or not, I smirked at him. “Why are you telling me this?”

“Because skin, my dear nephew,” Uncle Jasper reached out and grasped his black bishop, “isn’t the only thing you’re losing at this moment. Check—and if I’m not mistaken—mate.”

As I said, that conversation with Uncle Jasper took place months ago. I wish I’d remembered it sooner. But I’m not sure it would have done any good anyway.

I was thinking about that dust-discussion when the vacuum began making an awful noise: a low, weepy moan. It occurred to me—too late, of course—that I had neglected to replace the dustbag. The whimpering din continued as I clicked the power button, which was stuck. So I grabbed the cord and yanked the plug. Now the mechanical noise from the machine died away, but was replaced by something else. Something worse. At first it sounded as if a cat or some other animal had been stitched up inside. The mewling grew louder. I pried off the plastic cover and stopped short of detaching the bag. Something was shifting and squirming inside—as if filled with writhing knots of irate snakes. I’m sure anyone witnessing my reaction would have described it as something preposterous—something from a movie: me, wide-eyed, slowly lifting my hand to cover my mouth and inching away.

As the mewling grew louder and the squirming became more frantic, another sound emerged. And although I write this to maintain some sharpness in my sanity and to bring keener clarity to the thing I saw—the thing
I know
I experienced—there’s one thing of which I’m incontrovertibly certain: the voice. The voice that suddenly shaped itself from a ragged, nonsensical whisper. And that whisper-hiss said my name.
“Den—niiiisssss . . .”

A thin laceration appeared on the dustbag. From the slit emerged the tip of what looked like an ink-dipped porcupine’s quill. But now I have a more accurate description: a black widow’s leg, slender, segmented, shiny. Seven more slits appeared and seven more legs poked out of the bag, which was rattling to pieces like a dried-out beehive. I could see an oblong smoothness inside, and think now of the bloated tissue of a satiated tick, the grayish flesh covered with dark, hairy bristles. There were other things imbedded in its skin—calcium-colored pieces of teeth and bone, like half-formed elements growing within the soft, timorous tissue. Then I saw an eye—a black, glistening eye, as large and a smooth as an obsidian billiard ball.

I was unable to move. What I was seeing was impossible. But it was
real.
And in that awful dissonance between the impossibility and reality, a single sustained howl broke free in my mind—a sound that made me feel both alive and nauseous. Maybe you’ll see and feel something like that someday.

I summoned enough of my threadbare faculties to shake out of my paralysis, making a staggering twist toward the fireplace, reaching out and grabbing the bronze tongs on the hearth and spinning back around. Despite myself, I made a few confident strides toward the kitchen. The bag was completely detached from the vacuum now, and the spider-tick thing was on its back, its legs making desperate, wriggling swirls in the air. In what may have been panic, the thing started excreting a viscous web on the floor, made of thick strands of dark silk.

Just as I opened the tongs, the thing righted itself, flopped over, and grappled the floor. In a foul-smelling burst of dust, the tick-thing vomited a pool of spiders and beetles. Small black scuttling things spilled over the floor, darting in different directions. I felt the first sick tickle of something crawling up my shin, and by the time I swatted at it, I felt something working its way up my stomach, my chest, my collarbone. I slapped at something on my chin, feeling a wetness smear greasily near my lower lip.

Holding my breath, I stepped forward, my boots crunching the black carpet of bugs on the hardwood floor, and made a wincing grab for the spider-tick with the tongs, pinching it around the bloated abdomen and shuffling toward the back door, holding the bag with the tongs and reaching for the doorknob with my free hand. The black-widow quills were wriggling, gyrating in eight directions, slashing at the air. I twisted the knob, took one step onto the porch, and pitched the thing out into the snow. It rolled and tumbled for a moment before balancing, those black legs quickly making a mincing retreat toward the barren field, trailing a cloud of dust behind it.

I shuffled off the porch and took a few steps into the snowdrift-thick yard.

Through the visible puffs of my rapid breathing, and through the low-lying cloud of vacuum dust, I caught a glimpse of black bristles on the thing’s back, and of dozens of multi-colored, arachnid-dotted eyes glittering in the weak gray light as those ink-dipped legs carried the thing across the snow.

I stood there for a moment, trying to catch my breath, watching the knee-high weeds part as the thing scurried into the forest that fringes my property. I heard—as if coming from numerous mocking mouths or mandibles—the distant echo of tinny giggles.
“’Night, ’night,”
it said,
“’night, ’night—’night, ’night . . .”

Suddenly imagining the sensation of dozens of delicate legs crawling inside my clothes, I began swatting at my body, panic-slapping the back of my neck, my arms, shaking my hair and scratching my scalp.

Eventually, stillness returned. I was still. Dust from the shredded vacuum bag dissipated in thin wisps toward the sky, mingling with the pencil-scratch trail of smoke and ash drifting from my cobblestone chimney. Somewhere over in the woods, a bird gave up a jerky sounding squawk.

That was this morning. It’s evening now. When I came back inside I didn’t see any of the bugs on the floor. But I could hear them. In the cabinets, in the walls. Rustling under the carpet.

I thought about calling Uncle Jasper. He might know what to do. I still might call him, but right now I need to clean up the mess around here. I thought about leaving this document for him. Maybe if he finds it (and can’t find me) he could clean it up a little bit, turn it into something that makes more sense to someone who reads it.

I’ve locked the door to the bedroom upstairs. The sounds are the worst in there. I have no doubt they’re in the mattress. But before I do anything else, there’s one more chore I have to accomplish. One more promise to keep. After I write this I’m going out to the cemetery. Do me a favor. If you happen to drive by the cemetery, check in on Julie’s grave. If there’s a cluster of fresh flowers in front of her tombstone, then everything’s okay. If not, and you’re reading this, then something’s happened here. And I probably deserve it.

As the weatherman on the eleven o’clock news begins delivering his forecast, Wayne Webber, stretched out on his side in bed, stares at the television and contemplates two things—one: how magnificent and unpredictable sex with Bridgette used to be; and two: how fortunate and grateful he is that his wife, Nancy, never discovered his indiscretion.
Indiscretions
—the plural, he corrects himself, opting to inculpate himself for each illicit instance rather than the affair in its brief entirety.

Wayne vacantly listens to her now, Nancy, in the bathroom getting ready for bed—the steady hiss of running water hypnotically braiding itself with noise from the television. According to the cheery meteorologist, a low-pressure system has stalled out and is circulating over the region, the cold front’s retrogressive condition will apparently trigger a week-long stretch of rain. Thinking his wife might like to know, Wayne says, “It doesn’t sound like you’ll—”

“It doesn’t sound like I’ll have to water the plants for the next few days,” says Nancy, her toneless, almost vacant voice reverberating inside the white-tiled walls of the bathroom. Wayne shuts his mouth, the side of his face remains nestled the pillow’s cushy indentation. She’d been doing that a lot lately—cutting him off, interrupting him mid-thought to unapologetically complete his sentences. Synchronistic things like that, Wayne reminds himself, should be a noble inevitability after over twenty years together.
Which one was it?—familiarity or proximity that bred contempt?
Wayne couldn’t recall, but acknowledged the bygone sentiment.

Wayne hears Nancy turn off the running water and waits for the predictable pill-rattle of her medication as she shakes it from the bottle. Then comes the brief, closing squeak of the mirrored medicine cabinet.

There’s a lengthy, perhaps thoughtful, stretch of silence before the rectangle of light from the bathroom door is extinguished with a snap, and save for the mercury coruscation from the television, the room is dark now.

The bed frame creaks as Nancy crawls in next to Wayne, mattress springs yawning as the slim figure slides in toward her husband. Wayne doesn’t budge and continues facing the TV as Nancy slips her fingers into his gray-threaded hair, her slender fingers massaging his scalp. He feels her breath on the nape of his neck, the gentle pressure of her breasts against his upper back. Nancy places her lips next to his whisker-stubbled cheek and whispers, “I love you, sweetheart.” Wayne closes his eyes, ignoring the forecast, wondering if they might try tonight—wondering if she might summon the inspiration to instigate physical affection toward him—wondering if she might reach over his shoulder, her hand moving across his chest, down his sternum, her lithe fingers finding him, slowly stroking him.

On nights like this Wayne sometimes wonders how different things might have been—how different their marriage might have been—if Nancy had just maintained this sort of sensuality. And though part of him acknowledges the success and emotional equalization elicited by the medication, Wayne wants to believe her tenderness is genuine, natural, spontaneous, not some synthetic affection thanks to an amber tube of bi-colored pills in the medicine cabinet. Their therapist had explained that Nancy’s new medication would likely change her perception—not only about herself but about he dualistic dynamic of their marriage.

How much of Nancy’s depression is biology? How much of it is me?
Wayne had posed this Janus-mask pair of questions to himself well before betraying Nancy, and had maintained the detrimental nature-nurture riddle—sometimes insouciantly, often times sincerely—throughout his illicit liaisons with Bridgette.

He fears tonight will be no different from those in recent months, where he finds himself waking sometime in the dead hours, only to stare at the frail, emotionally emaciated shape of his sleeping wife: the soft, cyclic breathing acting as a reminder of Bridgette.

On one of those torment-troubled nights, Wayne had slipped from the bed and wandered the dark house—their home echoing with metronomic ticking of the grandfather clock—for a period before surreptitiously removing his wife’s Ouija board (a ridiculous gift from her ridiculously credulous sister) from the hall closet and padding away to his den. Under the small green dome light on his desk, Wayne, feeling foolish and admonishing himself for yielding to this desperate impulse in his self-conscious quest for answers, asked this preposterous device several questions—
Will we ever see each other again? Did she truly care for me?
—and watched or willed the ivory planchette to reveal its nonsensical responses. In the end, the embarrassment was too much, and he solemnly returned the preposterous toy to its place on the top shelf of the closet before taking to the couch in the study, covering himself with a quilt, and ceding to warm waves of sleep, surrounding himself with vivid images of a young woman sitting in the back of the lecture hall.

On nights like this Wayne Webber’s mind compels itself to return, again and again, to Bridgette.

He’d initially noticed Bridgette Harless (difficult not to notice)—a grad student in one of his evening lecture sessions at the university—last August. It was at the conclusion of a class in October, as Wayne was gathering his notes and a few reference paperbacks, when the attentive, ballerina-bodied girl from the back row cautiously approached the podium. As her peers shuffled from the lecture hall, she—the
she
was in her mid-twenties, Wayne guessed—cleared her throat and spoke. “Excuse me, Professor Webber?”

Despite having had similar interactions with attractive, ostensibly innocent students, Wayne—in tone, expression, and overall academic affectation—had made his lack of interest in succumbing to cheap charms very clear. Even so, Wayne found that he could not muster the humility to correct the young lady’s presumptive distinction between professor (which he was not) and painfully average lecturer.

But of course he had noticed her these past few weeks, hadn’t he? This young woman—
What was her name . . . Miss Harless?
—bore a startling resemblance to his wife as she, Nancy—the poised posture, the delicate fluidity of her gesticulations—had appeared when they had first met two decades earlier. But there was something about the girl that was different, the way she smirked, the almost deceptive gliding gait. Something compelling impish and fundamentally naughty, perhaps.

Wayne felt an errant, adolescent flutter in his midsection, and had done his very best to honor a level of professional indifference. Their conversation had been awkward. This young lady had submitted two papers thus far—both sincere but pathetically executed—but now Bridgette’s small-town banter moved from class, to art, to her interest in Native American history, due in great part to her grandmother’s heritage. Wayne stopped short of mentioning his wife’s own Cherokee lineage. Wayne stopped short of mentioning his wife at all.

And these after-class chats continued: Bridgette waiting as Wayne patiently entertained lingering, marble-mouthed questions from a slew of slouching students. Back then—before Wayne had agreed to meet her for coffee, and before those meetings progressed to glasses of wine, eventually ending at her apartment—Bridgette had been reserved, almost woefully shy, self-consciously stroking long ribbons of raven-pitched hair as she addressed her instructor. Later, Bridgette would simply stride past or through her dawdling classmates gathered near the podium, meeting up at a discreet location for a drink before taking him to her apartment.