Ghouls (32 page)

Moonlight flooded the room; it was dark, yet he could see everything in the cool, phosphoric glow. The room had been emptied out, save for a bed which he noticed only through the corner of his eye. The floor and walls were stripped. Dust lay stoutly, in clumps, along the baseboards. Opposite him, a single bare window framed the moon.

Kurt’s eyelids felt sewn open.

Melissa sat cross-legged on the floor, in a limp, white nightdress. An ashtray clogged with butts rested beside her knee. She seemed very thin. A cigarette tilted out of her mouth, its tip glowing orange like a fox’s eye. She hadn’t even noticed that he’d entered, but instead seemed fixed on something across the room.

“Melissa, what’s going on?”
He stood off balance in the doorway, paralyzed. “What happened to your things? Where’s your furniture? How come your posters aren’t on the wall?”

“Get out!”
she shouted, but it sounded more like an animal’s bark. She still had not bothered to look his way. “Little goodie-two-shoes runt. Faggot. Pussy… Get out. Go find a clam hole to fuck.”

Kurt reeled in his own furor, blood thumping at his temples. “How’d you like to chow down on a box of Tide? Sounds to me like your mouth needs a good cleaning.”

She laughed, cackled at him. “Put your cock in a rat trap, faggot. And trip it with your balls, if you got any.”

“That’s telling him, baby,” a third voice oozed. “Ask him to take it out. Let’s see how big it is.”

Kurt’s senses sank—he recognized the third voice at once. Of its own volition, his head turned slowly toward the other side of the room.

“Not you,” he heard his own voice rattle. “Anyone but you.”

Joanne Sulley was sitting on the edge of a coverless bed. All she wore was a moth-eaten black satin blouse open down the front. It revealed nearly all of her. Like Melissa, she seemed much thinner than usual, as though she’d not eaten in weeks. Her hipbones jutted, and he could see the slats of her ribs. Shadows pooled in her body’s hollows. She looked like a whore from the death camp joy divisions.

He tried to sound infuriated, but the sight of her like this made his voice quaver. “What the goddamned hell are you doing? What are you doing in my house?”

Joanne leaned her upper body back on her arms. “Melissa invited me,” she said, and parted her legs obscenely wide. “She’s my friend. We both like each other a lot. Isn’t that right, baby?”

“Uh huh,” Melissa said.

Kurt squeezed his eyes closed till his entire head throbbed.
This can’t be happening,
he thought.
It’s impossible, none of this can be real. It must be a
—

“Well, what did you think?” Joanne said. She flexed her cadaverous calves, black-nailed toes pointing to the wall. She spread her legs wide. “This is all a dream.”

He blinked. His mouth went dry from being open so long.

Joanne smiled like a waxen mask, her face little more than a skull thinly covered by sheet-white flesh. “Watch, Kurt,” she said. “Watch this,” and from nowhere she produced a foot-long vibrator. It hummed softly and glimmered in the moonlight; it looked like a bullet. She inserted it into herself, let her head loll and her jaw sag. Kurt stared as the humming object disappeared further. Her hips shifted, her legs tensed to cords. She pushed it in some more and moaned.

“Stop!” he yelled.

“Doesn’t turn you on?” the stripper said. “Maybe this will then.” She took the vibrator out, and jammed it into her mouth. Her lips stretched blue and thin against the girth of the shining, white cylinder. Soon its pressure at the back of her throat caused her eyes to swell forward in their sockets, as if they might eject altogether.

“Stop it!” he shouted. “Please, stop it! You’re crazy to do this in front of a little girl! You’re crazy!”

Suddenly the vibrator was gone. He supposed she had swallowed it.

“How can I be crazy, Kurt?” Joanne said. “It’s
your
dream.”

“Yeah,” he agreed, “and since it’s my dream, I guess that means I can do anything I want. It wouldn’t matter because it wouldn’t be real. Why, I could even—”

“Kill me?” Joanne finished. “You don’t want to kill me, Kurt. You want to fuck me.”

A heavy tingling, like a rash, crawled over his face. He seethed. He hated this girl—not that he could kill her, even in a dream. But, still, the thoughts which filled his mind turned utterly black.

Joanne was drooling now, profusely. Saliva glazed her chin like glycerin. “Come on, admit it. You want to fuck me, don’t you?”

“No.”

“Don’t you?”

“No!”

She bent forward, her ribs moving beneath her skin. She breathed expansively as she fondled her own tiny, emaciated breasts. He noticed a fierce glimmer between her legs. It revolted him. Then, with both hands, she cupped the lean, grooved pubis and rubbed it desperately.

Dream or not, this would have to cease. It was time for a little wagon fixing—he hoped she wouldn’t mind being thrown out the window.

But when he lurched forward, nothing happened. He felt instantly encased in cement, with only a hole left for his face to peer through. He couldn’t move. He could only look as the nausea pulsed up his throat.

He heard lewd, slick sounds, like clicking.

“Come on, Kurt,” Joanne whined, and her tongue traced her upper lip. The tongue was black. “Let’s give our little friend here a lesson in biology.”

Melissa’s cheeks drew in to black pits when she sucked her cigarette; the tip burned furiously for a second, increasing the orange tint on her tiny, starving face. Then she said, “Fuck her, Kurt. Fuck her.”

“Shut up!” he shouted.

“Fuck her, fuck her, fuck her! I
wanna
watch!”

Joanne’s grin seemed on the verge of splitting her face. She slithered off the bed and began to crawl toward Melissa.

“Stop! No, please!” he bellowed. “I’m begging you to stop!”

Joanne continued to grovel forward, the insides of her thighs slick with shine. She had something in her hand. “Forget him, honey,” she said to the girl. “Let’s do like we did before. Remember what we did before?”

“Uh huh,” Melissa answered.

“You liked that, didn’t you?”

“Uh huh.”

“It felt
good,
didn’t it?”

“Uh huh.”

Joanne knelt upright, looking down. Her eyes were black now, and the irises white. The thing in her hand was a massive black rubber phallus with hip straps.

The black eyes glittered; she fastened on the straps. The mock penis stuck out at an angle, hideously veined.

She continued toward Melissa.

Kurt’s shouting brought blood to his face, and heat. His throat felt scorched raw. In the dream, he wished he could die, anything to avoid witnessing this.

Melissa lay back then, frail and shiny-eyed. She began to lift her nightdress!

“And it won’t hurt at first this time,” Joanne promised. But as she spoke, her voice lowered to an unearthly
suboctave
, phlegm rattling deep in her chest. “Now we can see how far it’ll go in.”

Kurt’s bones bent against the wall of his paralysis. He felt a tendon pop.

But next his feet came off the floor, as some abrupt, snapping force yanked him out of the room and into the hall. The sudden inertia made him shriek. He landed on the floor.

Melissa’s door slammed shut on its own. Squeals rose and fell from within the room, like a tape on fast forward. Then the final scream burst forth.

And the door was gone.

Kurt struggled to stand, every muscle in his body fat with pain. He walked back down the black hall, toward the light.

“It’s only a dream,” he said to himself. “Why should I care? It’s only a dream.”

Cold air whipped circles through the hall. It hadn’t been there before. Sparked, he dashed to the foyer and saw that the front door had been smashed apart from the outside.

Footsteps padded quickly along the upstairs carpet. Kurt turned, slowly, grimly. Looked up. And saw a gaunt, sticklike figure walk across the landing. It moved stiffly but with great speed. It seemed to be carrying something in its arms.

The house lights dimmed, turning red. The figure went into Kurt’s bedroom.

“Wake up, you son of a bitch,” Kurt muttered to himself. “This dream’s got to end soon.”

A second later the figure came back out, its stick feet hushing over the rug. A hinge keened, the door snapped shut. Then, arms straight at its side, the thing on the landing walked rigidly to the top step. It stood very still and looked down at him with no face.

“Up yours,” Kurt said to it. “You’re wasting your time. I’m not afraid of a dream.”

“What if it’s not a dream?” the figure croaked. Its voice was shredded and bubbly, yet strangely familiar. “What if you’re wrong? What if this is real?”

“Fuck you.”

“See? You are afraid. You’re afraid to even go and see what I’ve left. It’s very important, but you’re too afraid.”

“Why should I be afraid? Whatever it is, it can’t be any uglier than you.”

The figure began to shiver, then convulse. It laughed
fadingly
and dissolved amidst the red, dark light.

The nerve of some people,
Kurt thought.
I guess this won’t end till I see what the fucker put in my room.
He resigned to it. He walked up the stairs and opened his bedroom door.

A damp, meaty smell blew into his face. He traced his hand up the wall to find the light switch but found instead a worm-filled hole where the light switch used to be. He gagged, wanting to vomit. But even in the pale moonlight, he could see the long, bulky object lying on his bed.

It looked like—

“Oh, Christ.”

Behind the window, clouds lowered. More moonlight spilled into the room, and Kurt’s vision became acute. The object on the bed was a body bag, obviously complete with a body.

Kurt knew what the dream meant for him to do. “I’m not opening it!” he yelled aloud. “I’m not!”

The phone on the nightstand rang, as loud as a blast from his siren. It rang again, and again.

He knew he would not wake up until he had at least answered it. But when he went infuriated to the nightstand, he noticed that the phone was dusted over by some faint, white powder. It reminded him of chalk. Or talc.

He picked up the phone. “Pizza Wheel. May I help you?”

There was no answer at first, just layers of muttering. But then a voice said: “Who were they? I didn’t know them. Why did they do those things to me?” The voice was a young woman’s. She was sobbing.

“Who is this?” Kurt demanded.

“They did…awful things.”

“Who are you?”

The muttering rose, enlaced by moans and a sound like people marching through dense woods. Then the young woman’s voice answered, “You know me, I know you do. I’m…”

“Who are you!”

“I’m dead.”

Kurt’s blood lost all its heat at once; he couldn’t move. Why did the voice, or what it stood for, affect him so gravely? He felt sure he didn’t know the person. Had he forgotten that this was still just a dream?