Ghouls

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 (T₃)

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.

“Sorry,” he said, and closed the door. “Just curious. Seemed odd to have a closet in a study.”

Her eyes widened, concentrating speculatively on his face as she spoke. “It’s not a closet; it’s the stairwell to the cellar. I keep telling Charles to nail it shut, since we never use it. One of these days someone’ll go down there and wind up with a cracked skull.”

He couldn’t stand it when she made him guess. She was doing it on purpose, he knew she was. Her sadistic streak ran deep. He went closer to her, and elevated himself an inch off his heels to look past her shoulder into the hall.

She smiled and handed him an envelope. “Here’s your paycheck.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Willard,” he said, projecting his voice. He tilted his head to get a better look behind her. “Hope I didn’t disturb you, coming so early.”

“Cut,” she said, and laughed. “We can stop with the ‘Mrs. Willard’ for now. I get such a kick out of watching you peek around to see if it’s safe.”

Glen released a hard, allaying breath. He noticed now that her eyes were fixed on his crotch, and that her robe had come unsashed. It seemed her breasts were keeping the robe open, luring his gaze to her exposed flesh. She wore her nakedness obscenely and without a thought. One foot parted; he thought again of that sadistic streak.

They embraced immediately. Kissing, he reached into the gap of the robe, sliding his hand to her shoulder blades, then slowly down the length of her back. His palms pressed against her rump, squeezing their hips together. Her head lolled back at a soft angle; he tracked a damp, warm line along her throat in kisses.

“Charles went to the library in Bethesda,” she said. She closed her eyes. Around his waist her arms tightened, drawing slack. “He won’t be home for hours.”

“Good,” he managed to say, and his kisses went back to her mouth, long, hot, penetrating kisses. He breathed in the soapy fragrance of her hair; it roused him, made him feel light in the head. His hands continued feeling her beneath the robe.

“I thought about you…” he whispered, “…all night. I couldn’t wait to see you, couldn’t stop thinking about how much I love you.”

“Show me,” she said back. “Show me how much.”

“I’ll show you. I’ll…” His hands were already out from behind her, his fingers delicately touching her breasts. Then he watched her eyes and touched her lower.

She gave a little hiss, his touch sending up a spike of pleasure. Her words grew heavy with heat and love. “Not here, darling. Oh. We have lots of time. We can go upstairs.”

“Here,” he said. He could feel a warm current moving in his gut, and he could feel her heat. Urgency pulled them slowly and carefully to the floor like a sudden swell of gravity. Now she lay before him on her back, soft and spraddled and legs trustingly open. Shadows emphasized her shape; her skin shone darkly in the downreaching light. Their eyes locked—he was looking at her. Searching. Kneeling up between her white, open legs. He loved her so much, another man’s wife. Her abdomen seemed to be quivering, her flesh tense in wait, and he was kissing circles lightly around her navel, while his hands smoothed over her breasts and down to her warm, bare hips. She breathed jaggedly through her teeth, as if exerted. His kisses roamed harder, lower, more direct. So close now, he began kissing the inside of her thighs, inching up, and was at last working on the vital spot. Her mouth opened. Her eyes reduced to slits. She stared off into dim space, sighing her bliss.

She tasted sharp and lovely. Glen felt her body under him squirm. Though the room was deadened with silence, he could hear her sounds as though they had been excessively amplified. He could hear her lungs working, her heart, her pulse. He could hear the tiny whimpers that came with every breath she let out. He could hear her lips part, her hands in his hair, and the wet sounds of her throat as she swallowed. But he was so lost in his love for her that he didn’t hear the strange, faint shuffling from the cellar.

««—»»

The voice rocketed through his sleep.

“Kurt! Kurt! There’s something awful in the backyard! Kurt! Wake up, wake up!”

Small hands attached to his shoulders and shook him around, roughly, violently, lifting his head off the bed, shaking shaking shaking.

“Oh, wake up, you poop!”

Kurt thought he was being shocked out of a coma. His eyes peeled open, and they took a long time focusing on Melissa’s terrified face, which seemed to hover over him like a demon spirit. She continued shaking him, continued shouting in his ear.

His eyes bored into her. “Damn it, Melissa. If you weren’t a girl, I’d punch the stuffing out of you. Now just what the f— What are you doing waking me up at—” a hard glance to the clock—“at eight-thirty in the morning when you know I didn’t get to bed till after four?”

She spoke, panting, as some sheer terror made gibberish of her words. “I went outside to put water in the birdbath out back, you know where the birdbath is—something between the trees like guts or hair or something in a pile. Kurt, you’ve got to do something, it’s awful—”

He tried to be mad at her, but found he couldn’t. She was a menace, yes, a gadfly, a prank, and pain in the ass, but still, she was only a little girl. “If this is another one of your jokes—”

“It’s not, Kurt. I swear, it’s not,” she assured him, rhythmically shaking her head. “I wouldn’t kid about something like this.”

Like the time she’d said she’d heard someone in the attic. Kurt had grabbed his revolver and pulled down the attic stairs. A bucket containing cold three-day-old barbecue sauce had tipped over on his head. “Go downstairs and make me coffee,” he told her. “I’ll be down in a minute.”

Melissa’s face was stark. She nodded and dashed out of the room. Kurt couldn’t remember ever seeing her this unstrung.

He pulled on old clothes, every movement of his body sluggish from being cheated out of sufficient sleep. When he went down the steps, his feet thumped like blocks of concrete. Instinct made him fumble in his top pocket for a cigarette; he groaned audibly when he found none. The sunlight in the kitchen seemed like an energy field designed to repel. Melissa had her back to him; she was staring intently out the sliding-glass door into the backyard, her fingertips pressed against the glass. She wore red sneakers, striped socks, a bright yellow T-shirt, and brand-new denim overalls. Looks like a children’s wear mannequin, he thought. The pack of cigarettes in her back pocket was shamefully obvious. He stiffened, sneaked up on her then, and had slipped the cigarettes out just as she began to spin around.

“Thief!” she shouted, grabbing. “Gimme ’em back!”

eld Not a chance,” he replied. He held the pack up, just out of her reach. “I told you the other day, you’re forbidden to smoke. Period. I’m only doing this for your own good. You’ll thank me ten years from now.”

“Sit on it,” she said. “Homo.”

Kurt lit a cigarette immediately, savoring the first-puff rush. “Ah, see, it all works for the best, since I just happen to be all out of cigarettes. Ironic that you should buy my brand.”

Melissa grinned now, triumphantly. “They ought to be your brand. I took ’em out of your car.”

“You little klepto,” he said when he realized it was true. “If you were my kid, I’d paddle your backside.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not your kid, and instead of worrying about my backside, what are you going to do about that thing in the backyard?”

The quick switch to seriousness in her expression jogged his memory. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot the reason you so rudely got me out of bed. So what’s so terrible in the backyard?”

“I can’t tell what it is, just that it’s dead. It’s…it’s big and it’s gross.”

Occupational conditioning forced him to muse the very worst possibility. “Melissa, let’s be serious for just one minute. This thing in the backyard—it’s not a, uh, you know… It’s not a human being, is it?”

“No, but it’s big and it’s gross.”

“So you’ve told me.” He opened the sliding door. “Well, come on.”

“Uh uh,” she said. “Not me. One look per customer. Just go to the birdbath. You’ll see.”

He stepped out onto the patio and walked diagonally across the yard. The air revitalized him, a mainline to his brain. He noticed the birdbath at the edge of the yard, and noticed also an indistinguishable heap at its base. As he neared, a bird squalled at him from above. He looked up and saw a large crow hiding behind a splay of leaves in the tallest oak. It reminded him of a vulture waiting to scavenge.

He came to a stop at the birdbath and just stared. The heap before him was the remains of a large buck. He knew it was a deer only by the head, which had been twisted around several times on the neck, producing a corkscrew effect. The tongue lolled slackly from the frozen mouth, a bloodless tubule that seemed much longer than it should’ve been. The animal had been ripped apart. The antlers weren’t to be seen, just cracked knots where they’d been snapped off the skull. Its belly lay torn open, the rib cage pried apart, spilled entrails gleaming. He looked once more to the head; the visible eye looked back at him like a shiny black button.

Mutilated, he thought. He walked back toward the house in a hot daze. This wasn’t the work of a poacher or a predator. He sensed instead pure malice, as though the animal had been ripped apart for sport.

“What is it?” Melissa asked when he’d come back in.

“A deer. And you’re right, it is awful.”

“How did it get so…torn up?”

“Dogs, probably. It’s not uncommon for a pack of wild curs to do something like that.” Kurt sat down at the kitchen counter and yawned.

Melissa was gaping at him. “You’re not just gonna sit there and let that thing rot in the backyard, are you?”

He picked up the phone. “No, I’ll call the county. They’ll send someone out to take it away. In the meantime, you can fix my breakfast.”

Melissa’s eyes now shined with hilarity. “Don’t hold your breath. You can fix your own damn breakfast.”

“Nothing fancy. Orange juice, couple of strips of bacon, couple of eggs over hard.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Hell, why not? Fry up some hash browns, too.”

Melissa put her hands on her hips and laughed openly at him. “You really think I’m gonna cook your breakfast.”

“I know you will, Melissa,” he said. He started to dial the county animal control office. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Uncle Roy you’ve been smoking. He’ll ground you till the end of the next school year.”

“You’re bluffing. You would never do that… Would you?”

Kurt grinned at her and brought the phone to his ear. Melissa stood aside, scowling, hesitant. Then she yanked open the refrigerator door and reached in for the eggs.

««—»»

“Still no word on Cody Drucker,” Bard was saying fatly from behind his desk. “Still no word on the Fitzwater girl. And still no word on Swaggert.”

It was 4:00 p.m. now, the beginning of Kurt’s shift. He’d relieved Higgins only to find Chief Bard still hanging around the station drinking coffee and faking paperwork.

Kurt slouched in his seat. “Last night somebody dug up Vicky Stokes’s dog.”

Bard stared at him. “Huh?”

“Two days ago Vicky’s old collie died. So she buried it in the backyard. The next morning she goes out back to put some clothes on the line, and there’s just a big hole in the ground. And the dead dog is gone. Sound familiar?”

Bard’s eyes swelled to rifts. “What the fuck is going on in this town, anyway? Who the fuck would steal a dead dog?”

“Who the fuck would steal a dead man? Who the fuck would steal a girl who can’t walk? Who the—”

“You think these things are related?”

“No, but I do think a lot of freaky stuff is happening in this town all at once.”

Bard cupped his chin in his hand, elbow on the desk. It made his face look lopsided.

“And another thing,” Kurt said. “This morning Uncle Roy’s kid found a dead deer in the woods behind our house. Wild dogs is my guess; it was torn to shreds. Anyway, I called animal control and had them take it away, and as the driver’s bagging the deer, he mentions that it’s the first time this season that animal control’s been through Tylersville.”

“So?”

“Two days ago 154 was heaped with all kinds of run-down animals. Coons, possums, rabbits.”

“Road pizza. Big deal.”

“Yeah, big deal, but this was two days ago. Yesterday I drive the Route and notice that most of the dead animals are gone. The road’s clean. But today the county tells me that no one’s been out yet to pick them up. Since when does the good fairy clean up animal carcasses?”

“It’s a mistake,” Bard said. “It has to be. The guy didn’t know what he was talking about, that’s all. You know those county public safety employees, they’re all one step off the drug train.”

Kurt nodded absently but said nothing.

Bard went home a few minutes later, leaving Kurt alone in the dim office. He remained there a while, stuck in the metal seat and staring at the window without seeing past the pane. It wasn’t lethargy, or fatigue from too little sleep. His awareness seemed altered, caught in a rare mode, and his eyes slowly widened then, because he thought he knew what was happening. It was that frozen, falling feeling, a sense of black foreshadow he’d known many times in the past. Most police officers acknowledged this at one time or another—a strange, inexplicable warning sign, the warning from the gut.

Later he found himself making town rounds beneath the same weighing dread. He felt locked up in the new patrol car, isolated as a man in an iron lung. His senses tuned in irrelevant impressions. He seemed to view the oncoming road from a low vantage point, for the first time noticing how long the hood of the car seemed to be, like a slalom of white ice. Familiar scenes and images now accosted him in a vaguely threatening way. The rushing squad car seemed to be dividing space, the scope of the road passing above and below and around the car. Trees on either side made the bends with the Route, unbroken in their course and dense as smoke. The outer trunks tilted inward, boughs burdened with new green life. Some of the older branches reached out over the road, as if trying to touch the trees on the other side, or trying to smother him. By now the sky was overrun with clouds; the bright vivid colors of the forest dulled in the spoiled light. Kurt waved to a couple of old men holding bagged bottles in front of the Liquor Mart, but they only gaped at him with stubbled, wizened faces, stickmen in tattered clothes.

Afternoon pressed on, the light graying in increments. He wasn’t aware of the time, he wasn’t aware of anything more complex than the scenes which faced him through the windshield. He thought about Vicky, but only for a moment, as if his sudden detachment forbade warm thoughts. Mentally he struggled to regain some sense of purpose, but his observations only made him more disgruntled. He remembered what the animal control man had told him, and he scanned both sides of the Route, hoping to see that he was mistaken. Come on, road pizza, he thought, flexing his vision. Come on let’s see some of that possum pie. But the road was clean.

His brain felt like a blob of lead, fighting to drag him down into the seat. The radio spat something that nicked at his failing attention. Had he received a call and missed it? He listened again. The dispatcher’s voice sounded irritated.

“Two-zero-seven, are you 10-8?”

“Ten-four,” he said into the hand mike. “Forgot to call in. Sorry.” Apologizing to a radio. What a day.

“Signal 5 with watchman at Belleau Wood entrance number 2.”

“Ten-four.” He put up the mike and glanced at the dash clock. It was just past eight now. He wondered what Glen would be doing at Belleau Wood two hours before his shift began.

Nighttime settled ponderously on the road. The power steering shimmied as he pulled a quick, clumsy U-turn, the new car handling like a barge. He evened out and accelerated north.

Belleau Wood entrance number 2, he recited in his mind, and when he was there, he couldn’t remember passing the first entrance. The chain was still up, he saw, and the security truck was idling on the other side of the line. Kurt grabbed his flashlight—unconscious reflex—and got out, cutting the engine and leaving on the hazard flashers. A stitch in his pants crotch popped when he stepped over the chain to approach the truck.

Glen was in the driver’s seat, evidently unaware that Kurt had arrived. Staring into the access road, he clenched the outside rearview with his fingers, strangely, as if testing the strength of the chrome.

“How goes it?” Kurt said, and slapped his friend’s shoulder. Glen flinched, taken by surprise. Relief ran back into his face when he looked up. “Ah, Kurt. I phoned in the 82 with the dispatcher. Hope you don’t mind the interruption.”

“Well, today I’m not exactly the busiest guy in the world.”

“I’ve got something to show you. Get in.”

Kurt walked around and slid into the passenger seat. “Say, how come you’re out here so early? Thought you didn’t start work till nine or so.”

Glen seemed distracted. He didn’t answer at first. “Huh? Oh, yeah. Willard asked me to come in a few hours early for a while. He didn’t tell me why, I guess he’s worried about poachers.”

Kurt expected him to put the truck in gear and go. Instead, Glen just sat there, one hand on the wheel, the other still diddling with the outside mirror. He seemed preoccupied, barely conscious of Kurt at all.

“Hey,” Kurt said. “You blitzed or something? You don’t look too good.”

Glen slowly turned his head. His face was paler than usual, drawn. His hand shook perceptibly when he let it come off the wheel. Very flatly he said: “I found Cody Drucker.”

The significance of those words hit Kurt like a sudden kick to the face. His stomach flip-flopped. “Let’s go” was all he could think to say; questions now would be useless.

The truck lurched when Glen let up the clutch. Ahead, deep ruts gouged the road. Glen gripped the wheel high and steered on edge to keep the bottom out of the gullies. Kurt braced himself against the dash.

“I don’t usually drive this road,” Glen said, glancing at Kurt intermittently, “’cause it’s in such bad shape. But tonight I decided to have a look, and… Jesus. You just gotta see it for yourself.”

The woods absorbed their sounds—the truck seemed to be moving with the engine off. Behind them the last of the sun shown metallic red light through the trees, like a distant city flame. Kurt felt a tremor trace his bones.

The truck began to decelerate. As if steeling himself, Glen sat up rigid behind the wheel, veins standing out on his hands like thin, blue worms. His eyes sought something up ahead.

“It should be… There—” Glen said. “There.”

The truck stopped.

“What?”

“There.” Glen pointed off to the right.

Kurt squinted through the glass; he shook his head. Then he leaned out the window.

What he saw could’ve made him laugh—a bizarre arrangement of dark, polished wood, which he momentarily realized was a demolished coffin. He saw, too, a dark slender heap lying in front of some trees.

They both came out of the truck as if summoned. Kurt’s mouth froze open in macabre astonishment; he neared the scene the way dared children might approach a sinister house. The coffin looked exploded; it lay in large pieces, collapsed. Kurt envisioned something huge slamming it against the trees to break it apart.

“I don’t believe this,” he heard himself say, but the words sounded as though someone else had said them. The other thing—the dark, slender heap—was the embalmed corpse of Cody Judson Drucker. Looking at it, Kurt thought of a dressed dummy with broken limbs. The corpse’s face seemed stretched and very white, and though the eyes were still closed, the mouth had somehow come open to reveal a mysterious wad of cotton. Kurt found he could no longer think of this as a person. What lay before him was simply an it. Its left hand sagged flaccidly from the cuff, as though the bones had been removed. He noted stubble on its chin, and lastly that it lacked shoes, just white socks over stiff feet. It was a travesty.

Glen was standing at a distance now, “Look at the arm,” he said. “Look at the right arm.”

Kurt looked. There was no right arm. Kurt studied the perplexing empty sleeve and wondered with undue detachment where the arm could be. Where’s the arm? People just don’t steal arms. They steal wallets and hubcaps and color television sets. Not arms. So where’s the goddamned guy’s arm?’

As if telepathic, Glen said, “It’s next to the mushrooms.”

Kurt spied a small sassafras tree a few feet off the road, and at its base a cluster of fat, pale mushrooms. Amongst them lay the arm. It was bent at the elbow, and torn off at the shoulder. Where the old man’s withered bicep had been was now a dry, ragged indentation.

Kurt’s eyes were held to it. “You know what I think this is?”

“It’s a bite-mark,” Glen said behind him. “I’d bet money.”

From a low branch, sassafras leaves hung over the arm like groping mittens. What bothered Kurt most was that the color of the arm and the color of the mushrooms were exactly the same. “This is a joke,” he said, a concluding verdict. Confusion overflowed in his head, and disgust. “I’ve never seen anything so fucked up in my entire life.”

“There’s one more thing,” Glen said. “Over here.” He took Kurt to the other side of the road. Glen pointed. At their feet was something small and black.

“A glove,” Glen said. “It’s the last thing I noticed.” Kurt stared down, as if into a pit. Recognition of the object rocked him. “It’s more than a glove. It’s a knuckle sap.”

“You mean one of those mitts with sand in the knuckles?”

“Yeah, you don’t see them around much anymore. Like wearing a blackjack on your fist… Good Christ, this beats all.”

“You sound like it’s important.”

“Damn right it is.”

“Why?”

“Swaggert’s the only guy I know who owned a pair.”

Kurt bent down and with a clean handkerchief picked the sap up by an edge. And in nearly the same instant a blade of nausea twirled in his belly and rose to his head. His face turned white. He dropped the sap and stepped back.

“What’s wrong?” Glen asked.

Kurt could hardly speak, unable to forget the sickening weight. “The glove,” he murmured. “There’s a hand still in it.”

— | — | —