Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  His son’s question had momentarily rendered Bill without words; he haplessly stammered for a few seconds before saying, “Stories, tales, are written that way—with all those past-tense verbs—so that we can. . .”—he was desperate to conclude his impromptu lecture—“. . . so that we can better understand the past, and help us know more about ourselves now in the present, and maybe far off in the future.”

  Casey’s face was stern. “No, I mean, is the house still here in town? Is the farm somewhere out there?” He gestured vaguely at the screens of trees, at the passing fields of parchment-colored cornstalks.

  Bill inadvertently twitched a frown, uncertain. “Yes.” He supposed the sprawling property was still owned by the Aikman relatives. But the house? It was beyond condemned twenty years ago; it had surely collapsed by now. Or it was burned down by hoods. “I don’t know why it wouldn’t be out there.”

  Casey waited a while before speaking. “Can we go see it?” Bill was already shaking his head before verbally dismissing the suggestion, but Casey pounced on his father’s hesitation. “Oh, please. We’re already having such a good time . . . it would be like an adventure and it would be such a nice memory . . . please?”

  Bill stopped shaking his head. A nice memory. Guilt now. Guilt again. An odious title wormed its way into his head: widower’s kid. He sucked in a breath. “Casey”—his delivery was sober, determined—“if we drive out there, we’re only going to look, okay? Nothing else—we stay in the car, got it?”

  In the dim light cast from the dashboard, Casey’s smile was radiant. “Oh, I promise, it’ll only be for a minute.”

  Bill turned the car around in a gravel driveway.

  A sepia-mottled moon was lying rather low on the horizon, giving the illusion of being trapped in the black lacework of tree limbs. They coursed along back roads, which grew narrower as they drew closer to the secluded Haymaker Lane; and each time that black-and-white image of Vicky reasserted itself, Bill distracted himself by entertaining Casey with another elaborately fabricated legend. All lies.

  The house on the hill was worse than Bill could have imagined or described. Of all the things he’d told Casey, nothing could have prepared him for what the car’s headlights fell on. A wood-decaying horror.

  After finally arriving on the cattail-lined lane, Bill had pulled the car partway into an overgrown driveway. Casey complained that he couldn’t see the house from the road. It was true—a jagged wreath of elms and pin oaks had created a barrier around the house, which was nothing more than a shapeless, night-shaded mass within the inky tangle of trees. Begrudgingly, Bill eased off the brake and the car crept forward. Making their way up the hill, he and Casey jostled and jounced over the rutted trail. Bill heard odds and ends rattling around in the glove compartment—matches, maps, junk.

  Now, with the engine idling and the headlights creating a torn curtain of shadow against the house, Bill said, “Well, this is it,” startled to find his voice so thin.

  With the exception of the high attic dormers, the windows had been completely knocked out—by vandals, Bill assumed—leaving only shards of glass around the casings. With the mullions and sash bars having been broken away, the black rectangles gave the illusion of absorbing light; and even with that stark illumination falling over the house, it did little to bring any color to it. The paint had faded and flecked away, exposing rotting wood-plank siding, giving the exhausted structure a uniform slate appearance.

  The whole place had been intimidating to Bill when he was fifteen, but now the dwelling had an almost cognizant quality to it. With the moon glowing on the other side of the house, the crooked columns supporting the sagging porch gave the illusion of crouching spider legs. And all at once, the circle of trees seemed like skeletal sentinels—vacantly faithful suitors holding a vigil at the skirt of this abused muse. It was remarkable but, in the silence of the car, Bill felt the image of the house transform into the medium of actual sound, a warbling whisper—the voice of the librarian. Go away, it repeated in a reedy cadence. Leave this alone. Go away.

  A spell of silence had settled into the car. “Turn off the headlights,” Casey whispered, his face fixed on the house, a smile playing at the edges of his mouth.

  Bill surprised himself with the ease at which he complied. Yes: this had the potential of being an indelible father-and-son memory; but they were beginning to traipse too close to the sensible threshold of Bill’s comfort zone. Under the moonlight, the wild lawn acted as a dark blanket spiked with slivers of chrome.

  After a while, Bill said, “We’d better get going, it’s—”

  “I want to go up there.”

  This time there was absolutely no negotiation—with either himself or his son. He needed to regain some semblance of control. “No, Casey.” He flicked on the headlights, re-illuminating the hideous face of the house, the open cavity that used to be the front door looked like a frozen howl. “I frankly feel a bit foolish for trespassing.”

  Bill was reaching for the gearshift when Casey said, “Dad?”

  “Mmm?”

  The boy’s voice was soft, plaintive. “Will Mom ever come back as a ghost?”

  After a second or two, Bill sank back in his seat. He’d rehearsed his answers for years, never properly polishing an adequate response. But each time, Bill had drifted back to the circumstances of Vicky’s death, and his explanations had been distorted by embarrassment and perverted by resentment. What was he going to tell him?—Your mother was sad sometimes, and it got worse after you were born. . . . Never. Your mother was killed in a car wreck . . . she’d gone out for cocktails after work with a man from her office, a man daddy didn’t like. A clerk at a local hotel said they’d spent a few hours in a room that evening before abruptly checking out. The man was probably driving mom back to pick up her car when he clipped a guardrail, resulting in a really awful accident. The guy lived, your mother didn’t. We went to the funeral . . . you were little, you didn’t understand . . . we threw dirt on her coffin. Christ—never.

  As if a black straitjacket tightening around the fringes of his mind, the claustrophobic truth enclosed Bill’s conscience.

  “No,” Bill said, “she won’t come back.” He glanced over at the pale shape of his son. Silence hung between them like a solid thing. Bill peered through the windshield, the moon’s reflection making a silver Rorschach shape on the hood of the car. “But, son, you have to know that your mother—”

  In a blur, Casey unfastened his seatbelt and shoved open the passenger door.

  Bill stammered—“Casey!”—and fumbled for his own door handle, making a feeble attempt to give chase before getting yanked back down by his seatbelt. He had the brief glimpse of his son running through the untended grass before disappearing between in the columns of tree-trunk shadows.

  Bill scrambled out of the car, sprinting up to the house. “Casey!” he called out, frantically scanning the front yard. Not knowing where to begin, Bill darted around the side of the house.

  Casey was standing in the side yard, reverently facing a long row of broken windows. Bill’s initial impulse was to forgo speaking to the boy, but rather clutching hold of his son and spanking him all the way back to the car. Instead, relief spilled in to Bill.

  “Casey?”

  His voice was hushed. “Yes, Dad?”

  Bill was panting. “Damn it, don’t ever do that again.”

  “Sorry, Daddy. But I wanted to see up close—I wanted to see all that.” Casey gestured at something through the hollow socket that had once been a first-floor window. The tall grass made sibilant, hissing sounds as Bill sidled up next to his son, slipping his hand into Casey’s. He was preparing to formulate some sort of scolding before glancing inside the house, into what used to be a parlor or living room. Bill was now as mesmerized as Casey. Helplessly, his mind was pushed backward, back down to his fifteen-year-old self; and while many of these memories had remained smudged and obscure, the sensation of physically confronting the Aikman place had
the effect of adjusting focus, bringing definition through an internal lens.

  A memory came. The memory came. A group of teenagers, Bill one of them, a gang of six or seven local kids who’d been running together that summer, a mix of guys and girls. Victoria Sanford was there. Since elementary school, Bill had had a crush on Vicky (most guys did), but she was “wild.” Wild—that was the term Bill’s mother often used. Bill’s term would have been “out of my league.” Although years later in college, he would learn a more accurate word: “indomitable.”

  Because of her exotic complexion, Vicky had always reminded Bill of a firmly built Indian girl: nutmeg skin, long, coffee-colored hair, and eyes so deeply chestnut that they verged on black. Throughout their elementary and middle school years, he liked most everything about her. Except, sometimes, her laugh. It took on a coarse quality as they entered their teens. It was as if there was something bitter inside her laugh now, like specks of glass in an otherwise welcomed breeze.

  And there had been gossip—by adults, mostly—that Vicky’s “wild” behavior was a result of her parents’ separation and eventual divorce, something about her father—something he did; there were even hushed discussions about “it” being something he’d done to Vicky.

  It had been overcast that afternoon in July, the sky an endless tumble of soot-dusted cotton. The group leaned their bikes against trees in the front yard of the abandoned farmhouse. Inside the former dwelling they found only a few interesting items—a rust-rimmed sink with some shattered plates, a fireplace in which someone had tried to burn a shoebox full of Polaroids. The floorboards had creaky-weak spring to them, as if a section might collapse and send someone plummeting into the root cellar.

  It had been Vicky’s suggestion to explore the second floor.

  Once upstairs they split up, giddily searching rooms. Bill was leaving an empty bedroom when he heard Vicky hiss. “Hey, Bill.” He spun around. She was down the corridor a bit, peeking around a corner; she jerked her head. “Check it out.” Bill pursued, rounding the elbow of wall. Vicky was now at the far end of the hall, standing in front of a door, palming its brass knob. Her face held the expression of a magician’s assistant preparing to reveal some sort of wicked trick. Vicky was wearing cut-off jeans, clipped so high that her pockets showed from under the frayed lips of her shorts, and a black Def Leppard T-shirt, the logo from the Hysteria album. Bill approached but said nothing. She turned the knob and the door yawned open. A staircase. The attic. “Come on,” she purred. “You’ve got the guts to go up with me, don’t you?” Bill fidgeted, suddenly aware of the possibilities. It was humid up there, her cinnamon-tinted skin looked sweat-filmed. For only a moment, Bill was crippled by hesitation. But a moment was all it took.

  The other kids were curiously converging now. The attic windows let in some meager light up there, a dust-and-shadow diffuseness. Silence wore on for stretch as Vicky scanned the group, her unnerving gaze settling on Bill for a second or two before rolling her eyes. “Jesus, you guys. Who’s coming with me?” The teenage gang murmured noncommittally. “Fine,” she said with no hint of disappointment. She dashed through the threshold, bounding up those scuffed and creaking stairs as the group watched her ascension until she was at the head of the narrow passage, supplying an impromptu victory dance. “Come on, guys, take a look,” she said. “It’s spooky as hell up here.”

  And then Vicky Sanford tugged up her T-shirt and peeled down her bra, providing the group with an improvised peepshow. With something very much like awe or admiration, one of the girls, Darlene Zukowski, said, “What a crazy bitch.” Vicky laughed, an abrasive, teasing noise that Bill would become acquainted with in the years ahead. “Hey, fellas—I’ll give you another peek if you come up and join me.” Blood rushed into Bill’s face, his pulse already hammering in his throat as Vicky—this time swiveling her hips with slow, sensual finesse—lifted her T-shirt again, this time cupping her heavy breasts. Bill’s mouth went dry at the sight of her chest, the inverted-heart-shaped curve lining her cleavage and tracing the lower crescent of each breast, the firm indention between her sternum and belly button.

  The small crowd of teenagers chortled, and Bill remembered one of the guys—Luke or Davey—whistling, egging her on, making a joke—“Better get it while the getting’s good”—before stepping into the corridor. Most of the others followed, including a couple of girls. Only a few kids remained on the second floor, Bill being one of them, milling around while footfalls, muffled laughter, and other noises issued from the attic.

  Bill never heard the story of what actually happened up there. He never asked.

  Even though Vicky was in most of his classes that autumn semester, he never asked. In the years ahead he reluctantly listened to rumors—the pregnancy rumors that, as far as Bill knew, never turned out to be true; while other stories, the parties where Vicky got drunk, got out of control, were unshakably accurate. During those four years of high school, Bill watched Vicky pass herself around their small group of friends, and still Bill didn’t ask. And despite their chance meeting at the nearby college—“So, Bill . . . when are you going to get sick of acting shy and ask me out for a drink?”—and the dates that followed, the quiet out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the hasty and tumultuous marriage, Bill never worked up the courage to ask.

  Bill only had the courage to tell—he told Vicky what her problems were. After completing a few college courses, he started using words like histrionic, latent, borderline, disorder, and promiscuous. For Bill, her agreeing to marry him became an opportunity to fix—to teach—that wild girl exposing herself at the top of the stairs.

  Now, standing next to his son in the untamed yard in front of this decaying house, Bill shuddered and clenched his teeth, forcibly pulling his gaze away from the high attic dormers.

  It was little more than a whisper, but Bill nearly screamed at the abrupt emergence of Casey’s voice. “Dad—Dad, do you see it?”

  Bill bristled. “See what?”

  Casey lifted a finger, “It’s right there,” indicating a spot within the house. “See it? See it? It’s moving.”

  Bill winced, growing impatient, not understanding. “Son, I—”

  And then Casey squeezed his father’s hand. “Dad, look—it’s right there.”

  Squinting, Bill scoured the fractured ribcage-interior of the house. A breath carrying a question was strangled in his throat, his mouth hung open. Something was . . . there.

  The harder Bill gazed the more vivid the thing became. Vaporous at first, it gathered itself up from the overlapping gloom, squirming shapes contracting into a gauzy figure. It was drifting across the parlor now, a slender shrouded thing.

  Bill’s breath caught as a face swam out of that ragged blackness—an angular, expressionless face, like a dirt-smudged cameo carved from bone. A gray hand slid from within the undulating cloak, its fingers hooked and reaching up, revealing a cadaver-pale throat, sliding further down now, exposing a gray slash of collarbone. Bill clasped his free hand to his mouth, his other hand still gripped with Casey’s.

  “Do you see it?” Casey said.

  Bill spoke, but it was little more than a whimper. “Yes.”

  Casey tore his hand away and raced forward, running up to the open cavity where a window had once been and, as if to hoist himself inside, clutched hold of the lower lip of the sill. Casey cried out, spinning around and thrusting his hand at Bill.

  “Daddy—I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry.”

  In the moonlight Bill saw blood glistening in Casey’s palm. Bill remembered the shards of glass in the casings of the empty window frames. He cradled Casey, calming him, guiding him back to the car, doing his best to disregard the rag-and-shadow figure hovering in the parlor.

  Bill settled Casey into the passenger seat and rummaged through the glove compartment, locating a stack of napkins to stanch the bleeding.

  Casey was sniffling, still apologizing. “I just wanted to get a closer look.”

  Bill was nodding. �
�I know it, I know it. It’s my own fault for coming out here.” He dabbed the napkins against the small laceration, seeing now that stitches would be unnecessary. “You’re a curious kid . . . it happens. Keep pressure on it . . . like this.” Casey winced and nodded.

  Bill used his knuckles to gently swipe at the channels of tears on his son’s cheeks. He was moving to close the glove compartment when his hand froze, his fingers a few inches away from a tiny box of Ohio Blue Tip Matches. He picked it up. Bill inadvertently flicked his eyes at the house and heard a witch’s whisper. Burned down by hoods. The matches gave a bone-dry rattle as he gave the box an experimental shake.

  “Dad.”

  Bill trembled, shifting his gaze to Casey’s tear-swollen face. He dropped the matches back in the glove compartment and slapped it shut.

  The headlights quaked as the car shook over ruts on the overgrown driveway. Bill checked the clock on the dash before giving a glance in the rearview mirror. He stared at the vibrating, rearview reflection of the house on the hill. With moonlight glowing from behind, the house’s silhouette appeared sharp-edged, as if crookedly cut from black paper. Something separated itself from the dwelling, a shroud shape floating into the yard, lingering in the knee-high grass. “Casey?”

  His son had been facing the passenger window; now he turned, his expression and the set of his small body at ease. “Yes?”

  “Will you tell me what you saw back there?”

  Hitching in a breath, Casey told his story, and Bill listened. But with each bump along the narrow country road, Bill heard the box of matches shuffling around in the glove compartment, the brittle rattle of bones.

  Don’t Let the Bedbugs Bite

  Sundays have become unbearable. But before this Sunday—that is to say before this morning—the only thing I seriously needed to worry about was nursing a hangover. Now things have become . . . complicated. Now what I need to focus on is neglect, and maybe consequence. Either way, this Sunday was different. Worse.