Ghouls

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

Was it a scream?

Kurt propped quickly up on his elbows, eyes wide and alert. The den was still with delusive darkness, and he felt a crawling chill course through his bones. Like a catapult, it shot him back to eerie childhood memory fragments, the shapes in the closet you knew were men with meat cleavers, the shoe on the floor which sufficed for a rat, midnight visits from the bogeyman, the fizzywink, and an entourage of campfire phantoms who all, the scout masters swore, had really truly escaped from insane asylums in Baltimore. Thump-thump-drag, the Hook Man of Lover’s Lane, and “Close the windows, lock the doors, don’t let anyone in unless it’s me.” They were fine old stories, but perhaps too fine now. Kurt wondered what he would do if someone else were really in the room with him. Shit a brick and wave good-bye. Be careful with that hook, Eugene. Paranoid, he scanned the room. The window stood open, drapes tied back and admitting the strange, pale light of a Lovecraft moon. He couldn’t remember opening it, and he could’ve sworn he’d heard a scream.

Screwed out of another night’s sleep, he thought. Disgusted, he leaned up from the couch and turned on the light. The room was free of phantoms.

Vaguely he recalled a dream of waking up in the back of a bus. There are no other passengers. The bus is swerving, out of control, and heading for the edge of a cliff. Is the driver drunk? Perhaps he is sick and needs help. Kurt stumbles up the aisle, tossed back and forth into the empty seats. The engine’s drone deafens him; the bus plows on. But when Kurt finally makes it to the front, he sees that there is no driver. There is no steering wheel, no brakes. And with that final recognition, the bus accelerates off the edge of the cliff.

Another classic Morris nightmare. Subconscious distrust of mass transit? Freud would shit.

The scream had been far off and brief, but a scream just the same. He must’ve dreamed it. He supposed it could’ve been himself, as the dream-bus had plummeted off the cliff.

In his old blue robe, he padded out of the den, inordinately pleased with the particulate darkness about him. It soothed him somehow, wiped his senses clear. Perhaps the sound he’d heard was Melissa crying out in her sleep. It wouldn’t have been the first time, with all that horror junk she watched on TV. One foot into the foyer, he saw a figure stop on the stairs.

His heart seemed to wrench completely around.

Vicky gasped. “God, you scared the—”

“Shit out of me,” Kurt said, and then his heart began going again. “It’s close to two.”

“I know. We really should stop meeting like this. What would the neighbors say?” She came the rest of the way down the steps, bringing with her the scent of soap. “I thought I heard a scream.”

“Me, too.” So much for the dream theory. “It might have been Melissa having a nightmare. I was just on my way to check.”

They went through the TV room and down the hall. Kurt clicked open Melissa’s door. The room was frozen as a soft painting. Melissa lay burrowed beneath a mound of blankets, one arm slung over her head. Her fingers twitched. “But, Ben,” she murmured in her sleep, “Johnny’s got the keys.” Then she jabbered something else about a gasoline pump and fell silent.

Kurt closed the door. “How do you like that? The little horror talks in her sleep.”

“You talk in your sleep,” Vicky said.

“How would you know?”

“I’ve heard you a bunch of times. Your voice travels right up through my heat duct.”

“You’re not serious,” he insisted.

“I wouldn’t lie to you. You’re a sleeping chatterbox.”

He started back down the hall, still not sure if she was joking or not. “Okay then. What do I say?”

“Nothing incriminating. Too bad I don’t take notes. A couple of hours ago, though, I do seem to recall hearing you blabber something about a bus. Yeah, that’s right, you kept saying, ‘There’s no one driving,’ or something like that.”

Shit, I’m mouthing off in my sleep. What next? Somnambulistic handstands?

“Signs of a soul in torment,” she said.

In the kitchen, Kurt poured orange juice into coffee cups. They faced each other in the dark, Kurt leaning against the counter, Vicky against the dishwasher.

“So what did we hear?” she queried. “Murder in the wee hours?”

“It was probably Melissa, like I said. Or maybe a couple of catbirds raising hell, someone laying wheel on the route. Who knows.”

“Lenny loves to do that. Sometimes I think that’s the only reason he bought that pig of a car, to burn rubber.”

The juice turned sour in Kurt’s mouth at the thought of Lenny Stokes, and made him only more aware of his imbecilic jealousy. “I wrote him up for it many times,” he said.

Vicky lit a cigarette over the snap of a match. Her face flared, soft and beautiful in a brief glow of orange. “Did Melissa tell you the good news?” she asked.

“What good news?”

“I have an aunt in Carbondale—”

“What the hell is a Carbondale?”

“It’s a town, silly, in Illinois.”

“That’s the stupidest name for a town I ever heard.”

“What difference does it make what it’s called? Anyway, my aunt owns this restaurant near the university there, and she offered me a job waitressing. Tips are good. Says I can make two-fifty a week after taxes if I hustle, which is a lot more than I make at the Anvil.”

“You’re not taking the job, are you?”

“Of course I am. I’d be crazy not to. It’s just what I’m looking for.”

Kurt tried to maintain a guise of consideration. “But if you want to work in a restaurant, there’s plenty around here. Why go all the way to Carbontown?”

“That’s dale. Carbondale. And that’s the point—getting out of Tylersville.”

Her scorn for Tylersville came with unhesitant ease. Through this he saw how much she truly hated where she lived. The need to object strained in him, but he replied patiently. “Why not hang around here a little while longer? Maybe something good will come up; you never know. Unemployment’s under seven percent, there’re all kinds of jobs in Maryland now. Anyway, you could wind up hating Carbonburg.”

“You’d really piss me off if you weren’t so sincere,” she said. She stood in the dark, slyly tolerant. “But face facts, Kurt. Tylersville isn’t a safe place to live anymore.”

He couldn’t argue with her about that. She was sideswiping him with common sense, cutting him off at every tactical angle. He felt impotent and misplaced, a brain in a stranger’s body.

Goddamn Carbonville. I’ll never see her again.

Through the kitchen window he viewed the moon. It seemed closer to the earth than it should be, its details so refined as to appear fake, not the real moon at all, but an ostentatious facsimile. The stars, too, seemed unreal in the same way, swirls of glittering spillage in the sky. Suddenly his world was the scope of a cold, surrealistic dream. It was true; if she left town, he would never see her again. His spirit would be left mauled, his heart incised down the middle. But what could he say to her? The moon seemed pallid and accusing as an old man’s face; it mocked him. He could feel its pull on the earth and his brain, and he felt lost.

The moment made no sense. He walked over and kissed her. It was a long but not particularly deep kiss, and at first her reaction was no reaction. Then, pressing forward, he slipped his arms around her, and she did the same. He could feel vivid warmth through her nightgown.

How long the contact lasted he couldn’t tell. Dumbly, he realized the kiss was over. He was standing away from her again, leaning against the counter.

“Why did you do that?”

The question seemed regulated, her voice cool and neutral. His hands tingled, like the onset of a strong drink. He saw that she’d held the cigarette as they’d kissed, but now it was burned all the way down.

“Why did you do that?” she asked again.

“I don’t know… I wanted to—no, I had to, if that’s not the funniest thing you’ve ever heard.” But then his words lolled, confusion and embarrassment chopping them away. She wasn’t harassing him, as he thought she might, or dismissing him. He felt disoriented, unsteady, as if standing on the fantail of a swaying ship.

I’ve been making excuses all my life. I will not make excuses now.

“Sometimes I don’t know what to do,” he eventually said. “I don’t know what I want, what I’m doing, where I’m supposed to go. Every time I turn around, another year is gone, and everything is pretty much the same. I think I like that, I like it a lot. If I’ve offended you, as it seems I have, then I hope that—”

“Oh, Kurt, shut up,” she said, but her voice was very quiet, very calm. “We’ve known each other for most of our lives, haven’t we? For as long as I can remember, whenever we’ve been alone, you’ve never been able to talk to me straight up. You act like you’re sitting on a box of dynamite, and if you say something true, you’ll blow up. After all those years, don’t you think it’s time you were honest with me?”

He answered in a gray, resolute monotone, as if confessing to murder. “I love you, I always have. I’m not talking about infatuation or lust. No, it’s love—I’m sure. Whenever I go out with a girl, it’s no good, because I want her to be you, and it never amounts to anything because I simply don’t care. I’ve been waiting, planning for years, hoping for some way to tell you this. But I never could. No guts, I guess.” He put his head back and sighed, smiling, for he knew she could not see his face in the dark. He must tell it all, he must. The truth had stained his soul long enough. He must cleanse himself of the truth, no matter how bad she thought he was. “I’ve hated Lenny for nearly as long as I’ve loved you, and when you married him, I thought I’d die. It was like being buried alive. The only real aspiration of my life was gone in the space of a blink.” He drew in another deep, cleansing breath. He was purging himself of this. At last he was doing it, his hour of the wolf finally unloosed. “Remember that English class we had together in high school, when we each had to pick our favorite poem and analyze it in front of the whole class?”

“I remember,” she said. “That was tenth grade, right?”

“Right, tenth grade. And the poem you picked was Because I Could not Stop for Death by Emily Dickinson, and Glen did some stupid song by Black Sabbath; but mine was a poem by Byers that no one, including the teacher, had ever heard of. The name of the poem was Three and the last lines were, ‘This goes on forever, but I can wait longer, your years are my seconds, your misery my bliss.’”

“I don’t understand,” she said.

“Don’t you see? Honesty. You want honesty, well, there it is. More than anything else I wanted you to be miserable with every guy you’d ever become involved with. And when you married Lenny, I wished for him to blow it with you. It didn’t matter how, I wished he’d get put in prison, or run out on you, or die. Anything. I wanted your marriage to fail, and when it finally did… I rejoiced. Because I’m certain that no one could ever love you as much as I do. No one. Ever.”

Now the house seemed too quiet; Kurt stood frozen in it. This moment had festered in him so long but now that he’d said it, instead of relief, he felt turmoil.

She came gently through the darkness, nearly gliding as the passage of a shadow. Sweet shock traveled through him when they embraced; her touch was warm and direct. He could see the moon reflecting in her eyes, a perfect white dot on each iris.

They kissed and touched and held each other, and when the moon had inched out of the frame of the window, they went upstairs, hand in hand and quiet as ghosts.

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