by Clint Smith
People, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, were gathered down in the main hall. With his hand clutching the railing, Max craned his head above the top of the crowd, which seemed to be congregated in the living room near the front door. And now he could see what they were watching.
Winston Kolb had Jerry pinned-up against the wall near the front door. Jerry’s face—having obviously suffered some trauma—was horribly florid; his lip was split and a rill of blood ran from his nose. He struggled against Winston, who threw a vicious, under-arcing punch into the smaller boy’s stomach. Jerry slid down the wall, hitting the floor with both knees before doubling up in a fetal position. Max noticed the whisker-patchy hippie he’d seen when they’d arrived; he was drinking a beer and blocking the front door.
“You stupid, thieving motherfucker,” Winston said, breathing in wheezy bursts. “You thought you could steal from my buddy and get away with it?” Winston gritted his teeth as he kicked Jerry in the lower back.
For the first time in hours—in weeks, in months—things appeared clear to Max. Jerry, of course, had stolen the drugs. Max shouldn’t have been here tonight—tonight was a trap for Jerry. Winston was grinning, showing a bit of blood around his teeth. Maybe Jerry tried to fight back. The obstinate glee of the thought was remote and fleeting. As close as they were to the front door, it occurred to Max that maybe Jerry had tried to make a break for it.
“You poseur piece of shit,” Winston said, readying himself to deliver another kick, when he glanced up toward the back of the crowd—Winston’s face contorted, locking eyes with Max. “That guy!” he shouted, raising one of his meaty hands and pointing. “That guy came with McWilliams!”
Max’s mind seemed to be catching up with his body, and it took him a moment to register that he’d wheeled past a few of the hallway gawkers and was now rushing toward the back door. Someone made a lazy attempt to stop him as he ran through the kitchen, but Max shoved the guy aside and burst through the back screen door.
The cold rain and night air steeled Max and steadied him as he darted across the unkempt back yard, ducking under a clothesline before slamming against a wooden fence. Max grabbed the top of the fence, his sneakers skidding against the damp planks as he hauled his body up and over, falling sideways into a row of trashcans.
There were people in the yard now. Frantically, Max pushed himself up and ran for cover in a small belt of trees that lined a junk-cluttered backstreet. Just as one of the pursuing partiers had edged over the top of the fence, Max clawed through a few branches and lost his footing, slipping and tumbling down a steep hill and landing in a soggy, leaf-choked creek. Covered in septic-smelling muck, Max stumbled forward, slinking up the other side of the ravine without looking back. Soon he reached a chest-high chain-link fence, lifting his leg up awkwardly and vaulting himself over, his body jarring as he landed on the puddle-pocketed gravel of a sidestreet. The shouting was still echoeing out there in the woods behind him, but seemed disorganized and eventually began to fade. He waited, caught his breath and, again, struggled to his feet.
For over an hour Max stayed close to the back alleys, weaving through poorly lit sidestreets as he headed north toward the city—the twinkling skyline visible from time to time between rows of outdated houses in these outlying neighborhoods. Max guided himself toward the beacon of big buildings, knowing that if he could get close, he could make it to Amy’s apartment. The rain was light and constant, helping to rinse some of the muck from his clothes. He only stopped once, overtaken by a savage wave of nausea. Max steered into an alley, vomiting intermittently for nearly a minute before absently wiping his mouth. His eyes—which had been blurred by retch-induced tears—quickly widened as he concentrated on the inky strands of bile on his hand and wrist. His eyes flicked to the ground, trying to comprehend what had spilled out of him—a great glistening pool of black, viscous liquid. Repelled, Max wiped his hand on his jeans, and through rain and pain and panic, he hurried on.
Max Kidwell stumbles off the dimly lit street and into an alley—a crooked, accustomed shortcut which leads to Amy’s apartment. Max feels his skull softening, elongating. He looses his footing and falls, slamming down, palm-first, into gravel and broken glass. As he stands a large chunk of lacerated flesh tears away from his wrist and forearm. But there is no pain—Max is both detached and savoring the new sensation, prepared now to give himself over to it.
Reaching the apartment’s lobby doors, Max searches his mind for the apartment number. He punches the call-button and, as he presses, the skin covering his finger splits open. After several seconds, he hears the voice of a girl. Amy says something, a gurgle sound. Then there’s a buzz. Max is moving again—moving by some distant, rote memory—through the lobby, into the stairwell. Here he falls again, landing shin-first against the edge of a concrete step, causing a jagged, fleshy fissure to open up along his back. Most of the skin is violently sloughed off during the fall, but his clothes and ripped jeans hold most of him together. Max reaches to touch his face, pressing his arms against the sides of his head, where he feels his large, bulbous eyes—his new eyes—are now. He has an ephemeral sting of regret about not hugging his mother goodbye earlier this evening. Even so, with cephalopedic ease he slinks up and out of the discarded tissue and sinew—out of his old body.
The second floor hallway appears concave through his new globular eyes. The bronze number on Amy’s apartment door is the one clear, remaining memory in Max’s mind, like a nursery rhyme one learns as a child and can faithfully recite. He thumps the door. Amy answers immediately, and at once her sleepy face freezes, registers horror, inevitability, resignation, and—somehow—recognition.
Amy begins to cry, silently, and takes several mincing steps backward, disappearing into the darkness of her apartment. The thing that was Max Kidwell edges into the room, raises several writhing, coiling appendages, and smears the threshold with gore as the ink-slick tentacles reach back and close the door.
Ghouljaw
There came a time, he realized, when the strangeness of everything made it increasingly difficult to realize the strangeness of anything.
—James Hilton, Lost Horizon (1933)
1
I was drowning in the ocean under a bone-toned moon.
Those were the first words I had hastily scrawled on a legal pad, sitting at my kitchen table in the middle of the night. It was my first attempt to capture the details of my dream. Not just a recurring dream, but the only dream that now exists.
I remember that first night, clinging to the dream, lingering in that amniotic place between lucidity and oblivion. I remember being distantly aware of my fiancée’s voice calling out for me to wake up, yet I had endured the sensation of drowning, of sinking, because I wanted to know where it took me. I wanted to see the bottom. On this night, however, things were too dark. The black weight of water, the ice-cold suffocation as the moon dimmed and I drifted down, was too much. I began groping, desperate to find the lifeline of her voice.
“Paul,” Gretchen said, as if calling after a wandering child. “Paul, wake up.” And with a sharp inhale, I did. Gretchen was propped up on her elbow, caressing my chest. “Are you okay?”
“Yeah,” I said, struggling to catch my breath. “Yeah, I think so.”
“You had me worried,” she said, sinking back onto her pillow.
My vision was beginning to adjust to the dim light in the bedroom. Gretchen’s dark eyes were intent. Her skin, the naked slope of her shoulder, looked pale in the baby blue of the moonlight—the sort of soft lambent light reflected off snow.
She yawned and tucked a few ribbons of dark hair behind her ear. “Do you want to talk about it?”
I blinked a few times and stared at the ceiling, listening to the low train-whistle wail of winter wind causing the windows to chatter in their frames. Even then, fresh from resurfacing from the velvet undertow of unconsciousness, the images began to fade—gauzy veils began overlapping, blurring the vividness of the dream. I told Gretche
n everything I remembered.
When I finished I turned toward her. Gretchen was frowning; her mouth hung open. “Jesus,” she said, “that’s awful.” She blinked and shivered.
After a while her eyelids softly bobbed shut and her breathing came in gentle exhalations. Carefully, I slipped out of the bed, pulled the blanket closer to Gretchen’s neck, and crept out of the bedroom, easing the door closed behind me.
It was February—the icy marrow of Midwest winter. In the dark I found my robe draped over the recliner. The slick-chill hardwood floor creaked under my bare feet as I shuffled into the kitchen. It was three or four in the morning—the small hours, as my father used to call them. I had to get ready for work in a few hours. I had to get ready to be a teacher in a few hours.
I clicked a small lamp on near the counter, pulled a pencil from the drawer, and searched for something to write on. I spotted a yellow legal pad on top of Gretchen’s briefcase.
I stared at its blue lines for a long time—struggling to retain some clarity before the dream’s definition was choked out, struggling to sharpen the dimming images.
I see an umber-smudged moon in a starless sky, hanging over a tranquil body of water. The sand on the beach where I’m standing is black and glitters like powdered obsidian. I seem to float toward the water. Up ahead, rocking against the tide, is an old canoe. As I approach I see long, thick threads of seaweed hanging over the sides. There’s something inside the boat. Lying along the bottom is a long burlap sack, stained with dark splotches and crudely stitched up along the seams.
The sack begins to move and shift as if something inside is squirming. Now and again, I hear a whimper, vaguely human, from within. I step into the canoe, balance, and push myself into the water, using a splintered oar to paddle into the soft chop of the ocean.
Some time passes. The shore disappears. Whatever is inside the burlap sack is writhing more violently now, and the muffled sounds almost form themselves into words. Noticing a skinny pickaxe lying along the floorboards, I discard the oar, grip the axe, steady myself, and stand. I lift the axe high and pause for a moment before bringing the beak-shaped spike down in vicious arcs—piercing the thing inside and puncturing the canoe’s hull.
Then there is water. Night-frigid water. My body sinks, and with no thought of breathing, I give myself to the descent. Lambent shafts of moonlight stream through the black water but begin to fade as I float down. Despite the saltwater sting, my eyes somehow see clearly. As the slender, twitching fingertips of moonlight fade, they touch the surface of something down in the darkness—on algae-mottled limestone and buttresses, ornate spires and a steeple. It is, I see, a cathedral. Shadowy things move behind the shattered stained glass. The moonlight disappears completely and, as I sink toward the structure, there is the echo-gurgle eruption of a pipe organ. That’s when I start drowning.
I scooted my chair closer to the kitchen table, pressed the pencil to the legal pad and wrote: I was drowning in the ocean under a bone-toned moon.
I only caught a glimpse of it, some gray shaky movement on the other side of the kitchen window. As I straightened in my chair the hazy thing slipped away like a piece of soot-stained fabric yanked from a clothesline. Still gripping the pencil, I stepped toward the frost-framed window and scanned the yard. Nothing. Nothing but swirling snow shaping itself into snake-shaped drifts. The neighbors’ houses were dark. I glanced up at the moon, glowing crisp and bright behind black tendrils of winter-thin tree limbs, before pulling back from the glass to inspect my reflection. My eyes looked dark and puffy. My slim face looked drawn and pale. I was beginning to lose some intangible quality of youthfulness. I attempted to bring some dignity to my appearance by smoothing my disheveled brown hair.
I did not write much more that first night, but I did scribble down one thing. A name. I still have no intelligent explanation for its origin, only that it whisper-drifted into my mind that night, and now serves as a private, nonsensical moniker for the presence inside that sunken church: Ghouljaw.
2
What follows is something I recently remembered. For what it’s worth, it has provided insight into what later happened to me. To Gretchen and me.
My father, after the separation and shortly before the divorce, moved out to the country. By that time, Mom (who’d given up trying to keep it a secret) had moved in with her boyfriend, who lived just a few counties over. I was young, ten or eleven at the time, so I split weekends between my parents.
In my innocence, and with my limited adolescent perceptions, I was only vaguely aware of how truly haunted my father was. And to what lengths he’d go to distract himself from his phantoms.
Dad’s cottage-style house, a Brothers Grimm cobblestone affair, was pleasant at first, but it soon fell under disrepair, reflecting Dad’s disorganization and disorderly tendencies. He filled the house with things he claimed he could fix: old radios, appliances, clocks. Every other weekend he had something new scattered out on the dining-room table, which had become more of an autopsy slab for debris than a communal eating space.
One weekend Dad had been working on the upstairs bathroom, and the shower was torn apart—one of his “projects.” I had to use the utility shower in the basement.
Similar to the upstairs, the basement at Dad’s house was a wreck—a dusty obstacle course of boxes and sheeted clusters of junk, meagerly lit by a few bare bulbs on pull chains. The shower stall was in the back of the basement.
Clutching my towel and clean clothes to my chest, I weaved through the cluttered maze, clicking on the hanging low-watts, which merely gave me enough light to get to the next bulb.
Once in the back room, where the shower was, I saw that the filmy shower curtain was shut, and I hesitated a second before gripping the mildew-stained curtain and yanking it aside. It was dark there. With the exception of a few cobwebs in the upper corner, the space was shadowy but safe.
I twisted the knobs; water coughed and sputtered from the calcified shower head. I undressed and waited. The concrete slab was slick and frigid under my feet. Eventually, steam began rising from the stall. Pulling the curtain closed behind me, I wasted no time lathering up and washing my body, my hair, my face.
Over the hiss of the shower I heard a warbling, phlegmy giggle, like a pneumonia-stricken kid laughing softly on the other side of the curtain. I jerked my head toward the sound, squinting through soap suds; thin sheets of steam swirled around me.
“Dad?” I called out. Of course, no response. Just another congested chuckle.
I frantically rinsed the soap from my face and drew back the curtain. The lights blinked a few times and went out. My heart cranked up to a drumming throb. I remember not hesitating at all in my panic, but simply stepping out thoughtlessly—almost confidently—into the dark and reaching out for the pull chain in the middle of the room. My slick feet made it perhaps three steps before I slipped, pitching sideways and catching the back of my head on the corner of a shelf before my small body smacked down on the concrete. Wavering. That’s all I recall: wavering in the darkness before going to sleep.
When I opened my eyes the lights were on. Pain, acute and intense, had sewn itself into a thousand fissures along my skull. I made the silly mistake of trying to raise myself onto one elbow before world-spinning nausea spilled into me. I twisted my body and vomited. Blood was on the floor. I was shivering wildly.
Just as I was about to cry out for my father, it came. It seemed to pour out from the darkest parts of the room—black things collecting into one single, corporeal shape that rose over me, blocking out the light and covering my body with its shadow.
It took me nearly two decades, but I remember it all now. It had been a black, undulating sheet before slowly gaining hideous definition. And from that diaphanous blackness emerged a pallid, gray face; its translucent skin was marbled beneath by faint purple veins. A noble shock of white hair was swept back from a widow’s peak. It—he—was smiling a greedy, goblin grin composed of thick crooked teeth. His l
arge unblinking eyes were bloodshot and rheumy, set in bruise-shaded sockets.
Through the shock and shivering I discerned some sort of black cape or robe. Only now can I describe it as a two-tiered, pilgrim-style cloak.
Its dark lips twisted to an impossibly wide smile as it began to lower toward me; two corpse-pale hands slipped out from inside the cloak, and long fingers reached out as he glided down. I shut my eyes.
“Paul?” said a voice from far away. “Paul—you all right down there?”
I opened my eyes. As if viewing a video being rewound at high speed, I watched the black mass pull back, swirling apart in shadowy pieces and rejoining the dark corners of the basement.
Dad was with me seconds later, covering me with a towel and performing a trinity of cursing, crying, and apologizing.
At the hospital and after the stitches, the doctor explained that I had a substantial, but not critical, concussion.
I could not forget the slender scar on the back of my head, but I allowed the post-accident shower encounter to fade from my consciousness. Repressed is the more appropriate term—a term a therapist used in one of my sessions recently.
That day at the hospital was the last time I saw my parents speaking civilly to each other. Later, as a teenager, I told myself that if I ever got married that I’d never do what my parents did to each other. Never.
3
I met Gretchen a few years ago, shortly after moving to New Bethel to accept a teaching position at the elementary school. Back then, before being promoted to branch manager, she was an associate at the bank down on Main Street. I went in one afternoon to open a new account. Things happened fast after that.