Ghouls (12 page)

“What are you doing up?” Kurt demanded, trying to sound harsh. He felt obligated to scold her with her father away. His only chance to play big brother.

Her face looked tiny in the half-light, her hair more like black silk draped over her head. “I think I figured it out,” she said, lips barely moving as though she spoke through a mask.

“Figured out what?”

“Vampires.”

Kurt stared a moment, then wearily rubbed his eyes. “Damn it, Melissa. You’ve been into your father’s liquor cabinet again, haven’t you?”

“I’m
serious,
Kurt. That’s how come Swaggert disappeared. Vampires got him.”

“Sure, vampires. I suppose they dug up Cody
Drucker’s
body, too, right? Just what every vampire needs.”

“Dummy,” she said. “They didn’t want his body; they wanted his coffin. Vampires sleep in coffins—everybody knows that. If I were you, I’d get some protection fast.” From under the top of her nightgown she slipped out a small, chained crucifix and let it swing from her fingers. “See? I got nothing to worry about, ’cause vampires can’t face the sign of the cross.”

“What did I tell you about those horror movies you watch?” he said. “They’re making you retarded.”

“You think I’m joking, but just you wait. This time tomorrow I’ll bet you have yourself a mouthful of fangs.”

He turned for the stairs, waving her away like a bad joke. “Go to bed before you become a battered child.”

“Not so fast, you have a visitor. In the den.”

At this hour?
“Who?”

An impish grin suddenly darkened Melissa’s face. “That girl you have a crush on. She’s been here almost two hours, said she’d wait. She seemed kind of uptight about something.”

Kurt stood on the first step, puzzled. “It’s four in the morning. I wonder what she wants.”

“You’re never going to find out unless you ask her,
putz
.”

Kurt stepped for the door to the den, but Melissa grabbed his arm first, tugging him back. “Be careful,” she said.

“Why?”

Melissa lowered her voice to an exasperated whisper. “She might be one of the
vampires,
stupid.”

“I’ll vampire you if you don’t get your butt in bed,” he had to restrain from shouting. “And I mean now.”

In the den, dark yellow incandescence filled most of the room from a single shaded lamp in the corner. Uncle Roy’s Carpathian Elm grandfather clock ticked softly opposite. Vicky was sitting in the recliner beside the lamp, a book opened in her lap, and her head nodding forward. She was asleep.

Kurt gently prodded her shoulder, certain he would see new bruises on her face, but when she opened her eyes and looked up, he found none.

“Kurt,” she said. “I must’ve dozed off.” She winced and tried to blink the sleep from her eyes.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes…well, no. Something…”

He took the book out of her lap and put it aside. “Lenny didn’t—”

“No, no,” she said, now finally coming awake. “It’s not Lenny. I haven’t seen him in a day and a half, thank God.”

“What then?”

“I really shouldn’t even be bothering you about something dumb,” she said, and nervously pushed a strand of hair behind her ear.

“Never mind about bothering me. What happened?”

Vicky took a heavy breath, her eyes fixed bleakly on the window. “It must’ve happened last night… After I’d gone to bed, I heard noises in the backyard, so I got up and looked out—and I saw someone back there standing just in front of the trees. I was really scared at first, but whoever it was left a second later, and I figured it was just some kids or something.” She was tying her jacket cord into useless knots; she scarcely blinked. “Remember I told you Brutus died the other day? Well, I buried him in the backyard, about the same place I saw this person.”

“Yeah?”

“Kurt, somebody dug up my dog.”

— | — | —

CHAPTER SEVEN

By 7:00
a.m.
the sun radiated as a huge orb of molten light; it nudged its way into the sky, tinting the fringes of the horizon with what seemed like layers of orange and pink liquid. Glen downshifted a gear, then took the security truck up the narrow gravel lane toward the mansion. He could feel the gearbox straining against the deceptive incline. From the bottom, the hill didn’t seem very steep, but then it was a funny hill; it reminded him of a bald spot, a vast risen clearing in the center of Belleau Wood’s surrounding forest belt. Atop, the house sat sentinel-like in the new morning light, as if put there to watch over the property.

Nearing the top, the hill’s cant leveled. Through the bug-spotted windshield, he watched the mansion grow to ominous size. It seemed to defy the morning’s calm, its front shadowed by the blaze of sun which crept up from behind. It wasn’t really a mansion—though townspeople often called it that—but an ugly oversized farmhouse with a bare wood wraparound porch, two protruding bay windows on the lower level that clashed achingly with its design, and a roof which seemed to slope unevenly. Dr. Willard’s restoration was no more impressive than a bad facelift; its oldness strained beneath new paint and trim. The house looked fake, atrophied. Glen decided that if he had Willard’s money, he’d have the whole thing knocked down and replaced with a
real
mansion.

The road joined to a circular drive which fronted the house. Left of the circle was a separate four-car garage; Willard had had it built when he’d come to Belleau Wood, since the mansion originally had no garage of its own. Glen parked the truck in its space beside the garage and got out, suddenly realizing a joyous fatigue. Like a god, he gazed down at the reposing woodland—its beauty lay out before him, unflawed, the steady expanse of lush dark green and quiet which rolled all the way back to the
ridgerise
, where the old mining site was. The land must be worth millions. He turned then and approached the house.

At the front door, his hand locked in midair. That doorknocker always rasped his eye, like junk on the road. It was a small oval of old dull brass which took the shape of a face. But the face was bereft of features, save for two wide, empty eyes. There was no mouth, no nose, no jawline really—just the eyes, like a work of sculpture abandoned by its creator. The knocker was one of many things that made him feel wrong about the house. He wondered why Willard would adorn his front door with something so tasteless.

And he wondered, seriously now, when Willard would catch on.

He rapped three times with the knocker’s brass ring. It made a weak, tinny sound; he doubted that anyone had even heard it. From the
jackplate
beside the door, a tiny red light blinked at him three times per second. He glanced at it distrustfully; the new Arrowhead alarm system made him feel obsolete, a walking half-measure. Was Willard getting ready to lay him off? As he raised his fist again to knock, a voice came out of the intercom.

“Glen, is that you?”

It was Mrs. Willard; at least someone was up. Aside, the red light continued to blip insolently. He pressed the talk button and said, “Yeah. I’ve come to pick up my paycheck.”

“Wait till I turn off the system, then come on in.”

Rigmarole,
he thought. So far there’d already been several false alarms, and the system was only days old.
At least my contacts don’t rust.
The old light slowed to one blip per second. He unlocked the door with his own key and went in.

It was dark enough inside to have been nighttime, and the lack of daylight only made the cramped interior seem more cramped. Past the foyer, the hall followed down like a tunnel. He stood at the bottom of the stairs, waiting for Willard or his wife to acknowledge him. It was stuffy where he stood; violating odors of tobacco and old wood exuded from the walls. The paneling looked like sheets of paraffin in the hall’s dimness. He strained his vision to examine the foyer paintings but made out only dark blotches and streaks.

“Be down in a sec,” Mrs. Willard’s voice called from upstairs. The darkness soaked it up. “I’m just getting out of the shower.”

Her voice startled him and made his heart pick up. He wondered where Willard was, expecting to catch a glimpse of him crossing the landing. Perhaps he was standing down the hall, hidden by grainy dark, face set in an unseen scowl of hate. But that was silly—he and Willard were friends, and that fact made him feel gritty with guilt.
With friends like me,
he thought,
who needs
…

He wandered dreamily down the hall and back, calling his own bluff. Come, young man, step into my parlor. Next, obliviously, he found himself standing in the middle of the darkened study.

It was a small, oblong room, walled around by bookshelves all different heights and styles. More evidence of Willard’s decorative ineptitude—some of the shelves were obviously high-priced antiques, while others looked like the do-it-yourself kind they sold in Dart Drug. Carpet tiles vapidly covered the floor in what seemed the worst possible choice of colors—green and brown. Sunlight strained through heavy drapes; he flicked on a lamp and slid his finger through a layer of dust on the shade. The room felt unbalanced, desk and chairs and bar table all in the wrong places. He went to the shelves nearest the light: mostly medical texts arranged in no particular order, alphabetically or otherwise. Fine gray lines of dust had settled vertically between some of the spines, and crammed at the end were several faded manila folders. Glen took the liberty of sliding one out. He leafed through it, dust pouring off the edges like sand. The folder held medical papers, which he stared at through a vertigo of incomprehension. One of the titles read:

Proposed Mechanisms Detailing Dopaminergic Inhibition of Prolactin-Releasing Hormone (PRH) Production in Cultured Rat Hypothalamic Neurons

And another:

Purified Nerve-Growth-Factor Effect on Membrane-Receptor Aggregation in
in vitro
Chick
Neuroblasts
Pretreated with
Triiodothyronine
(T
₃
)

The titles warped his vision; he couldn’t even pronounce the words.
What is this shit?
he thought. The last title came from the
American Journal of Neuropharmacology.
It read:

Role of Vasoactive-Intestinal-Peptide (VIP)
Andrenergic
Release of Norepinephrine by Cat Dorsal-Root-Ganglia (DRG) Cells

Now it made sense. The byline was: S. Howard, Andrew M. Freeman, and Nancy King.

King was Nancy Willard’s maiden name. These must be research papers she’d done while working at N.I.H. before she got married.
Must’ve been a lot of fun,
he thought.
Jesus.
He jammed the folder back into its slot.

Then he noticed the door in the darkest corner.

It caught his attention only because it added to the room’s imbalance. He supposed it was a closet, but why would there be a closet in here? He opened the door to face a rectangle of absolute darkness, which seemed long yet somehow devoid of depth. Warm air rushed his face, and a faintly unsettling redolence, like tar.

“Don’t go in there.”

Glen whirled at the sound of Nancy Willard’s command. Her voice rang with a thin underpinning of panic. She was standing just inside the study doorway, cloaked in a robe of dark gold terry. Her hair glistened slickly from the shower, and she had combed it out in straight, shiny lines. Her looks had always deceived him; she was plain and
bookwormish
, yet he found something opaquely sensuous about that, more so now without her glasses. The lamplight drew a line on her, shadowing one half of her body and bringing out the other half to a fresh, wet crispness. Droplets of water clung to her neck and bare calves, as though she’d dried herself in haste.