Ghoul (7 page)

“But--”

“None of your lip.” A vein throbbed on his father's forehead. "I said we're leaving.

Now."

“Sorry.”

“Shut up.”

They went home. Barry's mother had fixed pork chops, green beans, and mashed potatoes.

Barry did his best to eat, but he had no appetite. When his mother asked him what was wrong, he didn't reply. The look on his father's face halted further discussion.

After dinner, Barry tried to watch television. He couldn't focus on the show.

Later on, his father got very drunk, split Barry's lip open with a backhand slap, and chased his mother around the house with a belt, laughing and shouting. Barry fled for the safety of his bedroom, and put his fingers in his ears to block out the sounds of leather meeting flesh, and of his mother 's screams, and his father's curses. He'd tried to help her once before, and as a result, had been out of school for a week until the bruises faded. Afterward, his mother had made him promise never to do it again.

And he hadn't. Not because of his promise, but because he was afraid.

Afraid of what his father would do the next time.

So he did nothing.

Under his pillow was a BB pistol, powered by a CO2 cartridge. It looked just like the gun Clint Eastwood used in his Dirty Harry movies. Barry often wished it were the real thing. Sometimes, when his father was passed out drunk and there was no danger of waking him up, Barry would creep up beside him in the darkness and point the BB pistol at his head.

But not tonight.

Barry cried himself to sleep; hot tears, full of shame and anger and hopelessness.

He dreamed of monsters.

Doug cowered in bed; dirty flannel Spider-Man sheets pulled up over his head, he listened to his mother pawing at his doorknob, pleading drunkenly, her speech slurred by vodka, whispering the things she wanted to do to him, things Doug had read about in Hustler. Dirty things. He'd never told Barry or Timmy, but those things filled him with dread. The same pictures of naked women that his friends drooled and snickered over made him feel queasy.

He'd seen those private feminine parts in real life, and it was horrible. The thing his mother had between her legs looked nothing like the women in the pictures. It didn't offer the same promise. It was a dark place, full of shame and guilt and nausea.

“Doug? Dougie? Come on, baby, open the door for Mommy.”

“Go away,” Doug whispered. “Please, go away.”

Over his bed were three movie posters from Friday the 13th, Parts 2, 3, and 4. Though none of the boys were old enough to see the films at the theater, they all knew the story. Doug stared at the sinister image --the killer, Jason, with his bloody machete. It was preferable to what waited outside his door.

“Doug? I know you're awake. Open up.”

“Go away and leave me alone.”

“I've got a present for you. It's a surprise.”

He bit his lip and fought back tears.

“Can you guess what it is? I'm wearing it. Let me in and we'll do some new things.”

He stayed silent.

"Doug? Open this door. Quit being a baby. I've told you before. You're not Mommy's little boy anymore. You're Mommy's man. And Mommy needs a man. Mommy needs a man bad."

She shoved against the door with all her weight, but the deadbolt he'd installed held firm. He'd purchased the lock at the hardware store; paid for it with money he'd earned raking the neighbor's yards last fall. Timmy and Barry had teased him about it, not knowing its real purpose.

“Douglas Elmore Keiser, you open this door right fucking now.”

She hammered on the door with her fists. Doug heard a glass bottle roll across the floor. He stifled his sobs so that she wouldn't hear. He plucked a tiny yellow Lego block from the floor and squeezed it until his knuckles turned white. The hard plastic contours dug into his palm.

Eventually, she stumbled back into the living room, but not before telling Doug through the closed door that he was just as worthless as his no-good, limp-dick father.

Doug knew why his father had left, knew why he'd run off with that waitress. It didn't matter what he told his friends; he told himself the same lies during the day.

At night, he understood the real reason.

He fell asleep, crying and nauseated.

He also dreamed of monsters.

Timmy lay in bed with his headphones on, tuned in to 98YCR out of Hanover, but they were playing “Pass the Dutchy” by Musical Youth, which he hated, so he switched over to 98Rock out of Baltimore, and listened to “Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” by Kix instead. That was much better. His parents didn 't like him listening to that type of music, especially Ozzy Osbourne (whom Reverend Moore had deemed a Satanist)

--so, of course, Timmy listened to it every chance he got. Kix had played at the York Fairgrounds the year before. He'd begged his parents to let him go, and of course, they hadn 't.

Earlier, he'd been watching a movie on his little black-and-white television, The Car which had been corny but sort of cool, too. At least it had taken his mind off things for a while. But then his mother had told him to turn it off and go to sleep. He 'd obeyed the first command, but found the second one impossible.

He was exhausted, both physically and emotionally, but Timmy couldn't sleep. His mind kept running through the day's events, playing back the funeral. When he closed his eyes, he saw his grandfather lying in his coffin. His mother's voice echoed in his mind. “It looks like he's sleeping.”

Timmy turned on his flashlight, careful not to let the beam shine under the crack of his door, which would alert his parents to the fact that he was still awake. He shined it around the room.

G.I. Joe and Star Wars action figures stared back at him. A toy motorcycle and his baseball glove stuck out from under the bed. Posters adorned the wall; Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan and The Empire Strikes Back, Madonna lying on her back, pouting for the camera; Joan Jett, sexy with a guitar; the album covers for Iron Maiden's Powerslave and Dio's The Last In Line (much to his mother's chagrin); all of the heroes and villains that populated the Marvel Comics Universe, as depicted by John Romita, Jr.; dinosaurs pulled from the pages of National Geographic.

His bookshelves overflowed with books, magazines, and comics; Hardy Boys hardcovers, Paul Zindel paperbacks (Zindel was the boys'version of Judy Blume), back issues of Boys Life, Mad, Crazy, and others. Other treasures sat atop his dresser-- a model of Spider-Man fighting Kraven the Hunter that his father had helped him build, his piggy bank that doubled as a globe, a blue glass race car that had once held Avon aftershave and a small wooden box that his grandfather had given him. Inside were his most secret possessions: a wooden nickel and pocketknife (also both given to him by his grandfather), a rubber whoopee cushion, faux-gold collector's coin featuring the Hulk, the rattle from a rattlesnake his grandfather had killed while hunting, marbles, some of his father's old fly lures from when he was a boy, and buried in the bottom, a dried dandelion and a note. Katie Moore had given him the last two items at a church picnic when they were much younger --first and second grades, respectively. The note simply said, in a childish scrawl, I like you Timmy. He'd been embarrassed by it at the time, still under the firm belief that girls were infected with cooties. Despite that, he'd never thrown it out, nor shown it to anyone else.

In the darkness, he reread the latest issue of G.I. Combat with a flashlight, until his eyes finally drooped, then closed. The flashlight slipped from his limp hand and rolled onto the floor. Eventually, the batteries died.

Timmy's breathing grew shallow. Tears soaked his pillow as he slept. He dreamed about his grandfather, and in the dream, Dane Graco's grave was an empty hole in the ground. In the distance, he heard a woman screaming.

Closer to him, something growled.

Although he didn't want to, Timmy shuffled closer to his grandfather's empty grave.

When he looked closer, he saw that it wasn't empty after all.

The hole was full of monsters.

The dead slept, too, but did not dream.

James Sawyer was forty-three when he died of complications from Hodgkin's lymphoma.

Before that, he'd worked second shift at the paper mill, where he operated a forklift in the shipping and receiving department. In his spare time, he enjoyed going deer hunting and putting model cars and airplanes together with his sons, Howard and Carl. He 'd met his wife, Marcia, in high school, fell in love with her instantly, and had never been with another woman. Never even considered it. He was active in the Golgotha Lutheran Church, and in the local Lion's Club. He never smoked and rarely drank. James was a man of gentle humor, and his spirits remained high, even in the final stages when the cancer ravaged his body.

He passed away in a sterile, bland room at the Hanover General Hospital. James and Marcia were holding hands when it happened. He gave her one last squeeze, whispered that he loved her, and then he was gone. His family laid him to rest in the cemetery; he was buried in a gorgeous mahogany casket, beneath a black marble stone with gold lettering that proclaimed him a loving husband and father.

George Stevens's death was more sudden and less peaceful. He drowned in the old abandoned quarry located halfway between Spring Grove and Hanover on the summer of his fourteenth birthday. He'd been swimming there with friends, and earlier, they'd shared their first beer-- piss-warm Michelob, stolen from one of their older brothers. There were rumors that the old quarry was haunted; that the remains of a mining town still stood at the dark, murky bottom, and the spirits of the townspeople still lurked in the waters, waiting to drag unsuspecting swimmers beneath the surface. Will Marks, his voice slurred by the beer, had told them about how he'd seen a figure under the water once-- a boy their age, pale and bloated. George didn't believe the story, so when Will Marks dared him to dive down and see for himself; he did it, egged on by his friends and the warm, fuzzy feeling with which the beer had left him. He leapt from the tire swing and into the inky depths, unable to see anything, plummeting ten feet before striking his head on an old refrigerator that someone had thrown into the quarry. Even underwater, he heard his own neck snap.

It was the last thing he heard. His friends pulled him out of the water, but he was already dead, and they never found out if George saw the ghostly aquatic townspeople or not.

Cathy Luckenbaugh, a bright, cheerful twenty-one year old who was loved by everyone who knew her, had spent the Christmas holidays with her family and was on her way back to the Penn State campus when a drunk driver crossed the yellow lines on Route 30 and hit her head on at seventy miles per hour. Part of her went through the windshield. The other half, everything from the abdomen down, remained inside the car. Her death was quick and relatively painless, despite the severe trauma. Cathy had been studying English literature, and hoped after college to get a job as a teacher, and to marry her boyfriend, Ken Bannister, whom she'd met the previous semester. Her family buried her in the Golgotha Lutheran Church Cemetery, near her aunt and grandparents. Ken married another girl he met after college. Many years later, Cathy's image was used in a television commercial for Mothers Against Drunk Driving.

Damon Bouchard started stealing when he was eight. His first heist was a pack of baseball cards from the Spring Grove newsstand. By the time he was twelve, he 'd been busted twice for shoplifting. Two times being caught versus the hundreds of times he'd done it? Damon was happy with those odds. He graduated to breaking and entering, did a brief stint in York County Prison, and died two nights after his release. He 'd just come from a meeting with his parole officer, returned to his third floor apartment, passed his neighbors on the way up the stairs, watched them pull away from his kitchen window, and broke into their apartment. In the dark, he 'd tripped over the cat and fell face first into a glass coffee table, slicing his head and throat to shreds. He'd felt the blood gush from his wounds, as well as his mouth and ears, and his last impression was one of anger, wishing he'd had time to kill the stupid cat. Damon's long-suffering parents buried him next to their plots. They rarely visited his grave.

Britney Rodgers was five when her father started climbing into her bed at night, and seven when he smothered her with a pillow to keep his awful secret. Her mother had died while giving birth to her, and her only friend had been her stuffed rabbit, Mr. Bun. Her father said it was her duty. At night, while he grunted and sweated above her, reeking of booze and sour sweat, Britney would hide Mr. Bun's face beneath the pillow so the rabbit wouldn't have to see. Britney's father buried her body in the woods behind their house, and the police found her four days later. She was given a proper burial next to her mother. A police detective made sure that Mr. Bun accompanied her into the ground. Her father was killed during the Camp Hill prison riots, and was buried in a potter 's field near Harrisburg. The detective who arrested him visited his grave every year on the anniversary of Britney's death--and pissed on it.

Raymond Burke lived a long, full life and died in his sleep at the ripe old age of eighty-seven. His wife of sixty-two years, Sally, had passed away three months earlier, and as far as Raymond was concerned, he died with her on that day. They 'd never had children, or even a pet, and he felt totally abandoned. He'd never been by himself, and didn't know what to do. The house was too quiet, and the silence amplified his loneliness.

After Sally's funeral, he'd gone home to wait to die, cursing each morning when he woke up alone instead of finding himself with her, until the morning when she finally was. They were buried side by side.

Stephen Clarke was thirteen when he first had sex with the family dog, Trixie, and fourteen when his older brother Alan found out about it. Their parents had been gone for the day, dining with another couple at the Haufbrau Haus in Abbotstown. Alan walked into his brother's room without knocking, only to find Stephen sitting naked on the floor, his back against the bed and his legs spread. Trixie was between them, busily licking peanut butter off Stephen's erect penis. Disgusted, embarrassed, and enraged, Alan had threatened to tell their parents as soon as they got home. Stephen pleaded with him, but Alan refused to listen.

As his parents pulled into the driveway, Stephen ran to his parent 's bedroom, unlocked his father's gun cabinet, pulled out a Winchester 30.06, loaded one round into the weapon, put his mouth over the barrel, and squeezed the trigger. He was buried in the cemetery, and in the years immediately following his death, his family visited his grave with a mixture of grief and unspoken shame. Eventually, they stopped visiting. A car ran over Trixie two years after his death.

The moon shined down upon their graves.

The dead kept their silence; kept their secrets. Young and old, good and bad, innocent or guilty, loved or unloved, it didn't matter what they'd done in life, how they'd lived it, or how they'd ended. In death, they were the same. In death, they found rest beneath the newer portion of Golgotha Lutheran Church Cemetery.

Something else was in the ground, too. Something that was not dead, yet not really alive. For years, it had slept beneath the soil in the old portion of the cemetery at the bottom of the hill, the section where the names and dates on the cracked tombstones were faded and covered with moss. The forgotten area, where the dead received no visitors (other than the caretaker), because all those that remembered them were dead, as well. The creature slumbered beneath an old granite marker with an even older symbol carved into the stone. Both the symbol and the creature were ancient.

The creature in the ground had no name, at least none that it could remember. None of its kind did. They were low things, cursed by the Creator long ago to dwell beneath the surface; white and wiggling like carrion worms. Not the Great Wurms, like Behemoth and his ilk, but low things; condemned to dirt and shadow, condemned to walk and breed in darkness, condemned not even to feast off the rich lifeblood or the warm, still-living flesh of the Creator's beloved children (the way the others, the Vamphyir and the Siqqusim, did), or to act as the planet's antibodies like the ancient race of subterranean swine-things had done during times of world strife. His race was not smiled upon by Him like the angels and small gods were, nor did they enjoy the autonomy and freedom from His gaze the way the Thirteen did. No. His kind were condemned to feed on the cold, rotting corpses of the dead --the scraps from the Creator's table. Warm flesh was forbidden to them, and they could only shred it with their claws, empty it of blood and organs and wait for it to turn rancid. The Creator 's commandment was that they not taste warm blood or flesh. They could slay, of course, in self-defense or just sheer malice. But they could not feast upon the living. They were cursed to eat carrion, commanded to clean up after death.

There was no air in the subterranean prison, but the creature did not need to breathe.

It wished, at times, for death, but death would not come. Its kind were impervious to the weapons of man. Guns and knives meant nothing to it, other than a temporary wound, which would soon heal. It could have slashed its own throat with its claws, but that would not have ushered in oblivion. Only the sun 's rays could destroy it, and the sigil kept it from reaching the light--kept it from doing anything but lying there.

The thing was a ghoul, and quite possibly, as far as it knew, the last of its race.

It had been nearly two centuries since it had encountered another of its kind, and that had been on another, faraway continent. Its loneliness simmered inside its clammy breast.

The ghoul had no idea how long it had lain there, imprisoned and unable to move or to feed, bound by the symbol on the gravestone above it, trapped by magicks now forgotten, by sigils borrowed from books of power like The Daemonolateria and The Long, Lost Friend mystic symbols copied and etched by men long dead, men who 'd lain moldering, turning to dust and bones in nearby graves, rotting in peace while it half-slumbered in boredom and despair-- and suffered from an overwhelming hunger. Realistically, the imprisonment hadn 't been long, not by the ghoul's standards. One hundred years. Maybe a handful more. A blink of the eye for its kind, but the hunger had made it seem longer.

It was lonely.

It was angry.

And above all else, it was ravenous.

That hunger gnawed at the ghoul's empty belly, a cold, hollow craving that it had no means of satisfying.

Until two weeks ago, when it was finally freed.

Then it had made up for lost time, and at long last, satisfied its appetite.

That night, after the sigil was accidentally broken, after the gravestone had cracked and fallen to the earth, it awoke fully and became aware. Aware of the human standing above it. The creature could smell him --the stink of his man-sweat, the alcohol oozing from his pores, the fear in his heart, the anger in his head. The ghoul could smell it all, and more, smell the dead in the cemetery. The creature growled along with its stomach.

The man's head was like a hive of enraged bees, and the ghoul could sense it.

Above the grave, the man moved. Mumbled something angry and unintelligible, voice slurred by alcohol. Cursed the fallen tombstone, even though he'd been the one to knock it over. Lit a cigarette.

The ground shifted.

The ghoul surged toward the surface, cleaving the soil like a shark through water.

Its long, bony fingers erupted from the earth. The filthy, curved talons on the tips of its fingers were cracked and peeling. Its arms thrust forward, white and cold.

Its thick, fleshy hide was hard and greasy. The ghoul 's hands curled around the startled man's ankles, gripping him tight, holding him in place. Then the thing's hairless, pointed head emerged from the rippling dirt like a pale, rotten, oversized gourd. Its yellow eyes bulged. Sharp teeth, blackened with decay in some spots, flashed in the moonlight, wicked incisors glinting beneath black, rubbery lips.

The man screamed, cigarette falling from his mouth. His cries echoed through the empty graveyard with no one else to hear them.

Laughing, the ghoul pulled itself from the grave and rose to its full height. It was completely naked, its body almost entirely devoid of hair except for a tangle between its legs and a few wayward strands along its body. The man was too frightened to flee. A wet stain spread across the crotch of his pants. A half-empty bottle of Wild Turkey slipped from his grasp and rolled across the wet grass. He trembled as the creature shook the dirt from its body. It was thin, almost emaciated. Its bones were visible beneath the hairless skin. The ghoul licked its lips, the tongue slithering across its face like a gray snake.

Despite his terror, the man gagged and coughed, recoiling from the creature's stench. It smelled like strong cheese, left out in the summer sun for too long.

Pungent. Spoiled. Bad milk spilled inside a Jiffy John.

“Oh, Jesus ... Somebody help! Help me!”

He backed away, his foot colliding with the bottle.

The creature hissed, its breath like a sewer.

“Help!”

The ghoul paused, studying the terrified man's dialect. Though it knew most of the languages of men, it had been some time since it had spoken them.

“What is your name, human?”

“Christ. It's a flashback. Agent Orange or something--”

“Silence. I am no vision or dream.”

The man flinched. “Y-you're real?”

“Of course I am real. Again, what is your name? What are you called?”

“C-Clark S-S-Smeltzer.”

“What are you doing here?”

"I'm the c-caretaker. I was drinking, and I-I was mad. Angry. I kicked the tombstone.

I'm s-sorry. Was it yours?"

The ghoul glanced down at the shattered fragments. The marker had cracked in half, the sigil cracking with it; thus, freedom.

The man's eyes grew wider. “It w-was, wasn't it? Oh God ...”

The ghoul grinned. The caretaker began to sob.