Ghouls

CHAPTER ONE

“Yeah, Chief. This is Kurt.”

“Hot damn. I’d never have fucking guessed.”

“The dispatcher just radioed me. Told me to give you a landline.”

“Uh huh. That was a half hour ago.”

“It’s not my fault they wait a half hour to relay their calls.”

Bard’s words were suddenly garbled, smacking. He was often known to engage in conversation with his mouth full. In fact, he was often known to have his mouth full on any occasion. “I’m not saying it’s your fault. That’s the price we pay for being on the county commo band. What good’s a police department without its own communications system, will you tell me that? Maybe one day this tight-fisted pockmark of a town’ll cough up the funds for our own dispatcher and frequency. Fucking county acts like our business isn’t important.”

“Okay. So what’s so important?”

“On your way back to the station, I need to you to pick me up a box of doughnuts. The chocolate-covered kind, the big ones.”

“Now that’s what I call important police business, yes, sir.”

“Well, it is. I’m hungry. I haven’t eaten all day.”

“But you’re eating now. I can hear you.”

“Just shut up and get the doughnuts. And grab this month’s Hustler while you’re at it.”

“I’m not going to buy a skin magazine in uniform.”

“You will unless you’d like to wear the uniform of some other department. Baltimore City’s hiring, if you don’t mind the lowest starting pay in the state and the highest murder statistics. Or, hell, I’m sure a guy with your experience could walk right into a nice cushy foot beat in Southeast D.C.”

“I hear you, Chief.”

“Good. If they don’t have Hustler, get High Society.”

Kurt wished he had the—testicular fortitude?—to tell Bard exactly where he could put the doughnuts and magazine. Three months in the police academy for this? Dad would be proud. “That’s all I am, Chief? An armed errand boy?”

“Yeah, but before you do any of that, I’ll let you go play police officer for a change. I’ve got a resident complaint for you, possible signal 7P. That’s trespassers on private property, in case you’ve forgotten your code sheet.”

“I know what a 7P is, Chief. I’m the only one around here who bothers to answer them. So what’s the 20 for these trespassers?”

“Belleau Wood. The prop-owner’s wife made the complaint. Glen doesn’t come in for a couple of hours, so she phoned us.”

“That’s the rich guy’s land, right? Dr. Willard? I didn’t know he was married.”

“Well now you do. She said somebody popped the chain on one of their entrance gates. Probably a bunch of kids back there cornholing or something.”

“You want me to bust them?”

“I don’t give a fuck, use your police officer’s discretion. You can kick their dicks off for all I care. Just get a move on.”

“Okay, Chief. I’m on my way.”

“And don’t forget. The chocolate-covered kind, the big ones.”

PFC Kurt Morris hung up the Liquor Mart pay phone and went back to the town car, a dulling, white Dodge Diplomat with a banged-in rear bumper and one of the high lights missing from the visibar. The car looked like it hadn’t been washed since the day it rolled off the assembly line, which may well have been true; it wore a sheen of dirt. Recently, Glen Rodz had asked him, “Don’t you think it’s about time you washed the cruiser?” and Kurt had replied, quite logically, “Why? I don’t ride on the outside.”

Kurt squealed out of the lot, not because he was in a hurry, but because the cruiser’s bald tires made more noise than purchase. The call to Belleau Wood was no great event; he’d answered many such calls over the years, when the property’s security guard, Glen Rodz, was not on duty. Belleau Wood seemed to attract Tylersville’s youth “like flies to a shit-bucket,” Chief Bard was fond of saying. Lots of teenage beer drinking, but mostly kids making out. Kurt had witnessed many flesh shows thanks to signal 7P’s. What he’d seen in the backseats of some of those cars would make John C. Holmes himself keel over.

April was bowing out now. For the first time this season, Kurt noticed that everything around him pulsated in life and vibrancy. The unsightly black-flecked snow had melted away, leaving the winding asphalt of Route 154 a cleansed, black shimmer. Trees, barren a month ago, stood straight and heavy in prominent greens. To the left, the vast square of Merkel’s cornfield glowed coppery, fecund brown, showing newly turned soil, and would soon glow green as a scape of hardy man-tall corn rows. Colors seemed sharper, more intense, the air rich with the scents of life. It was more than just the shift of nature; it was an overhaul of his soul—spring fever, and the nearing of long days, endless skies, and the warmth he feared might never come. The end of another gray Maryland winter.

Backward and hard-minded, Tylersville wasn’t a town at all, really; it was a road—State Route 154—and all on either side of that road was called Tylersville. Route 154 cut a twisting dozen-mile path through the worst of Maryland’s woods and hills and swamps, and joined the city of Bowie to the south with an extremity of Annapolis to the north. The small, sparse homes and trailers which stretched along the Route, as it was called, did not total more than one hundred, and were it not for the shopping center and the apartment complexes at the south end, there wouldn’t be population enough to even constitute a town. Tylersville had its own police force only because it happened to exist along this sensitive access as a municipality between two sizable cities. The department itself was small, yet crime was barely evident at all save for the drunks and the rednecks and the motorheads who liked to think of Route 154 as a testing track for their hot rods.

Kurt worked the four-to-midnight shift, and he assumed he’d continue to do so for the rest of his life. The work was tedious, the environment less than edifying, and the pay had never been known to urge him to jump up and down; but he supposed that the job suited him. Beyond his boredom, he found a redeeming function, slight but there. It was a job that had to be done, a job that even offered the chance to help people, and that at least seemed favorable to standing in line at the unemployment office.

Sometimes it felt as though whole shifts were spent driving the Route back and forth, from one end to the other. He had done this hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, traveling the same miles and looking at the same unremarkable scenery over and over. The bulk of police work in Tylersville wound down mainly to traffic. Speeders ran rampant along the Route, its snake-twisted turns and clean, long straightaways a pronounced challenge for the droves of fast cars which inhabited Prince George’s County; running radar was Kurt’s favorite recreational therapy. The only nontraffic-oriented crimes to occur with any regularity were the weekly weekend fights which erupted at the Anvil (a topless roadside bar) and an occasional domestic flare-up, drunk husbands beating the piss out of drunk wives, though Kurt had known it to be the other way around once or twice.

I wonder which access? he thought. He scratched absently at the back of his neck, smoothed down dark-blond hair, and then frowned because he knew Chief Bard would soon be yammering at him about a haircut. “The Soul Talk Center’s that’a way,” and “When are you going in for the rest of the sex change?” were two of Bard’s more amusing hints. “Cut your fucking hair or I’ll fucking fire you” was one not so amusing. The sideburns, too, were longer than they should be, but Kurt would put the blade to those without needing to be told; wild, bushing sideburns were consistent traits of all Tylersville’s redneck klan. The very last thing he wanted to look like off duty was a rube.

The farther north he drove, the poorer the roadside residents appeared to be—their cars older, rustier, their homes more dilapidated, a few probably worth condemning. There were some trailer homes, he knew, recessed deep off the road and in the hills, where the people didn’t even have electricity. Poor white trash...

The road darkened toward this end, the fir and pine and poplar forest denser here and so tall that the heavy, reaching branches cut off the daylight as the sun moved steadily off. Here there were no homes on the right side of the road, the trees spireing over swamps rather than hills. A glance to the left after another mile, and Kurt saw the wildly overgrown confines of Beall Cemetery occupying a short clearing in the midst of the wood. (It struck him oddly then that so many Maryland cemeteries and funeral homes bore the cryptic name Beall.) He’d always thought the cemetery to be forgotten, but as he looked now he made out a line of cars at the shoulder, and a cluster of somberly dressed mourners standing round an open grave. And he remembered then the Drucker tragedy of a few days ago. Town drunk and crank Cody Drucker had stepped inadvertently on a croquet ball, whereupon he’d fallen down the stairs, clunking and cussing and breaking his neck in the process. No one could deduce exactly what the croquet ball had been doing on the landing, nor could anyone explain why Cody had been wearing black socks and black shoes and nothing more. It was unimportant, though; the town wouldn’t likely miss old Cody. The thin turnout at the funeral seemed an accurate reflection of his popularity.

There’s the mutha. Kurt slowed, then stopped on the shoulder. As reported, the chain across the first Belleau Wood entrance gate was down. He cut the wheel and nosed into the entranceway. Closer inspection of the chain told all—the case-hard master padlock on the post was still secure; the chain itself had been severed. Boltcutters, he thought. Damn things should be outlawed. He idled through and followed the old miner’s track, penetrating the legal boundaries of the property.

What the town referred to as Belleau Wood consisted of several hundred acres of undisturbed woods, some ignored farmland, and a half dozen mineshafts which had been closed since the late forties. The property had deteriorated to an unimpressive estate centered around the Belleau Wood mansion, possibly the least impressive feature of all. Abruptly right, built atop the tallest hill, the “mansion” stood brooding and disconsolate, a large pillar-porched colonial farmhouse, distinctive only in its constant state of disrepair. The house and all of the Belleau Wood property was owned by one Dr. Charles Willard. No one knew what kind of doctor he was; few knew him at all, and fewer cared. Kurt supposed that years ago Belleau Wood had made a striking piece of land. Now, though, after so much neglect, it looked like real estate in hell.

This road, one of four chained entrances to the property, formed the entire length of the acreage’s southern boundary. When Kurt had followed it to the very end, he saw Lenny Stokes’s primer-gray Chevelle parked near the mouth of the first mine. This was the only shaft that had not caved in. Kurt swore, irritation slipping up; he grabbed his Kel-Lite (a twenty-two-inch metal flashlight), got out, and entered the manway of the mine.

Darkness came in stages as he stepped cautiously in. The air was stale here, and heavy with fetors of stone dust and decomposed talc. Revealed around the flashlight beam was a maze of wooden stulls, splintering, rotted, that supported the mine’s roof. Kurt realized the danger, knew that it was just a matter of time before the stulls gave way and sealed the mine shut forever.

The flashlight blazed ahead, puncturing the black void. Streaks of talc ran through the walls like abscesses in the stone. Rubble filled ancient trackbeds, overflowing; trolley rails bent up to form twisted, skeletal shapes, caution: watch for trolleys, one sign warned. In the light, others floated up: keep left, haulage line, and main shaft ahead. Hard hats lay about like empty skulls, some dented, some crushed. Kurt felt pressed down by a sudden, haunted despair; this place tilled up ghosts of his childhood. His father had worked twenty years in coalmines. “Good, hard work with a pension a man can live on, the kind of work that makes this country strong.” Twenty years in the stopes. His father had collected only a few months of pension before dying from a combination of emphysema, black lung, and cancer.

Kurt shivered out of the fading oppression, stepping on, and then he perceived hints of female laughter and unintelligible male talk. This, he knew, would be Lenny Stokes and one of his entourage of sexual accomplices. Lenny Stokes and Kurt went back a long way, enemies since grade school, polar opposites; all they had in common was their age, twenty-six. In a town full of bad-asses, Stokes held the number-one position, and he truly looked the part. Face pitted by an adolescent war with acne. Weasel eyes. Lumberjack shirt and shitkicker boots. He wore his hair long and slicked back, and had Elvis sideburns and a satanic goatee. He poached and dealt drugs for money, ran around with any available girl for fun, and beat his wife when he had nothing better to do.

Kurt came around a slant in the manway and was detected at once. Two shock-white faces peered up into the beam. Lenny Stokes stood with his jeans down to his knees; what hung out began to dwindle. Kneeling before him was Joanne Sulley, a slim, vampiric brunette. Stokes had been “dating” her, behind his wife’s back, since last fall. At this particular moment, Joanne appropriately lacked blouse and bra.

“Party’s over,” Kurt said. Stokes and the girl became glimpses of flesh and shadow. The flashlight roved over chiaroscuro faces dispossessed of color by the effect of being so grandly caught in the act. Stokes yanked up his pants, muttering in his mysterious Deep-South twang, “Goddamn son of a horse’s ass. I shouldn’ve fuckin’ known some cop’d come walkin’ in.” Joanne groped frantically on hands and knees, in search of her blouse. To Kurt’s amusement, she didn’t seem to be having much luck.

“Lenny,” she squealed, “who is it?” and Kurt realized they couldn’t see his face, just the bright-white circle of his baton-light. “Morris,” Stokes snarled, shielding his eyes. “It’s got to be Morris.”

“That’s right,” Kurt said. “Good old all American love in the afternoon. Making sure her tonsils are still there, huh, Lenny?”

Stokes grimaced in the fierce, white beam. “Goddamn candyass. Get that fuckin’ light out of my eyes.”

Kurt did not comply with the request. “I ought to haul your tail in for chopping that chain.”

“You ain’t haulin’ shit, chump, ’cause that chain was down. Somebody else cut it.”

“Sure, Stokes, and water runs uphill, too, right? One of these days I’ll catch you with those boltcutters of yours and wrap them around your thieving hillbilly neck.”

Rage pinkened Stokes’s face. “Them’s some pretty rough words from a pussy. Just ’cause you got a gun and a badge, that don’t mean you can go fucking people around all you please. I ain’t scared of you, Morris, and one day I’m gonna kick your ass so bad you’ll think you died and come back as a soccer ball.”

“Talk is cheap, Stokes, and I can tell you talk a lot. Why don’t you just kick my ass right now?”

“No, not now, pussyman. When the time is right.”

Joanne was still groveling on the ground, her voice a shrill echo. “Oh, Lenny, I can’t find my shirt. Help me find my shirt.”

“Ditz,” Stokes replied. “It’s in the car. You took it off ’fore we came in.”

“I didn’t think you owned a shirt,” Kurt said to her. (Joanne was one of the more popular topless dancers at the Anvil, and commonly spent more time without a shirt than with one.) “Why bother owning things you never use?”

Blushing hot red, she stood up, but before she could cover her breasts, Kurt’s light scanned her upper body, purely by accident, of course. In the gritty glow, her flesh gleamed fish-belly white, starkly diverse against large, pink nipples. She quickly crisscrossed her arms and shouted, “You’re doin’ that on purpose! Stop shining that light on me, you pervert!”

Kurt laughed out loud. “Here you are half nude and going down on a guy in a mine shaft, and you call me a pervert. That’s the best joke I’ve heard all week. Don’t worry about it, Joanne. I’ve seen your tits before. Everyone has.”

Joanne held her arms tighter to her chest, radiating anger and embarrassment. Stokes said, “Why don’t you lay off, jack? We weren’t hurting no one.”

“You’re trespassing, which is against the law, for your information, and I know damn well you cut that chain. And did it ever enter that cement-filled head of yours that coming in here could get you killed? This place was due for a cave-in about fifty years ago… Get out of here, both of you. Find someplace else to make whoopee. I’ve got more important things to do than waste time arresting you two airheads.”

Stokes leered in the brittle light. “You’re just a fuckin’ pig, that’s all you are.”

“Yeah, and let this pig give you some sound advice. The next time I catch you in here, you’ll be in the county jail faster than you can say sodomy”—he turned to the girl—“and that goes for you too, Miss Nude America. See what kind of tips you get doing your striptease in the dyke tank.”

“You can’t talk to me like that!” she shrieked at him. “Lenny, he can’t talk to me like that!”

“Don’t worry, babe,” Stokes said, and turned to leave. “He’ll get his. Come on.”

“Oh, Lenny?” Kurt said. “I haven’t seen your wife lately. Did you beat her into a coma again, or did she finally walk out on you?”

“Vicky knows better than to walk out on me. But then that’s none of your goddamned business, is it?”

“Sure it is, Stokes. And get this—the next time I hear of you beating up on that girl, I’ll personally shove this flashlight so far up your ass you’ll be able to flick the switch with your tongue.”

“We’ll see about that, pig. Oink, oink.”

In the narrow light, Kurt watched Stokes and the girl stumble away toward the mine opening until he could no longer see them.

He remained in the manway for some time, standing detached and odd. He thought about Stokes and Joanne Sulley, tasting the acrid secret guilt of being pleased that Stokes was still openly cheating on his wife. How much longer could Vicky last with him? She must know of his adultery. That aside, Kurt’s behavior had been inexcusable. Police officers were to treat all people with professional objectivity, but by now he would not even bother lying to himself, or trying to rationalize his unacceptable conduct. When it came to Lenny Stokes, Kurt was simply not a respectable police officer. He knew this now; he’d known it for years. Stokes was more than just a typical town rowdy; it was a personal thing. Kurt hated Lenny Stokes. Hated his guts.

More thoughts then, ugly, hurting thoughts of Vicky Stokes, and the things Lenny did to her, and must do to her, the beatings, the puffed eyes, bruises turning sallow-black, and the time at the Anvil when Stokes had hit her so hard that blood came out of her ear. It all made him sick, sick at the moving parts of this world, sick at himself. Too many times the daydream spilled round his brain like some rancid, luminous liquid, the vision of his own revolver pressed hard against Stokes’s temple. The hammer dropping…

He closed his eyes, shook his head till the craze of edging thoughts and scenes had spun away. He continued to stand there, inexplicably, in this absurd mine. Darkness smoked over him from the right, the left, and behind. It chilled a hollow, lonely place in his heart, the silence thickening. He turned the flashlight on and off several times in rapid succession, eyes acclimating indecisively from the strobic exposures of white to black, white to black, and he dared himself, in the childish way, to leave the flashlight off and just stand there, but didn’t for the equally childish fear that something black, half seen, and hideous would reach out, snatch the light away, and crackle laughter.

Still more thoughts came, weird, disconnected, impossible thoughts.

The flash back on, he pointed its piercing beam ahead into the mine. From somewhere beyond, water dripped ticking clocklike; dust floated finely across the light. The shaft passage descended deeper and deeper, an endless bore into the earth. Abruptly he turned and began to walk out, the walk becoming a trot, and by the time he’d made it back outside, he actually had been running, because during that last second before breaking away, a final thought had come—the macabre notion that something within the depths of the shaft had been watching him the whole time.

— | — | —