Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  Maggie’s face, softly lit by the diffuse candlight from the dashboard, wrinkled with mischief. “I know.”

  Maggie knew about a horse trail on the cornfield fringes of the park’s property. She slowed the Jeep and steered sharply onto a rutted, tree-lined lane that Lewis had never noticed in his decades of living in New Bethel. Maggie cut the headlights and, after several minutes of jouncing over frozen, snow-filled ruts, the vehicle emerged from under the low ceiling of tree limbs just outside an open, snow-cushioned meadow. From time to time, a ragged break in the clouds allowed enough moonlight to cause the wide expanse of snow to glow. Maggie twisted the key from the ignition. “Okay, handsome.” The interior light popped on as she shoved open the driver’s side door. “You grab the sleds, I’ll grab the dog.”

  Hatcher Hill was insipidly called “Sledding Hill” by park officials and unimaginative locals who had either outgrown the folk story or were too young to comprehend the original legend. But for those like Lewis who had grown up with the story—and for those who had helped perpetuate and alter the details of the tale—this steep, tree-topped slope would always be Hatcher Hill.

  Lewis hadn’t been here for ages, probably since high school, and knew that the truth behind the nickname had been sadly simple: one afternoon back in the early ’80s, a high-school kid named Toby Hatcher had been sledding with some friends and somehow managed to veer off course and into the wooded shoulder at the bottom of the hill. Hatcher sped headlong into a tree trunk, fracturing his skull. His friends rushed to the guard station, an ambulance arrived from nearby New Bethel.

  Following the funeral, kids around town (Lewis included) began reproducing the story, embellishing it with macabre adornments. One of Lewis’s favorites permutations was this: Hatcher had overturned and been decapitated by one of metal runners on his sled (not true; it was a flat, cheap, plastic thing) and that sometimes—on a frigid winter night . . . just like tonight—Hatcher’s headless body could be seen sledding down the hill, the torso leaving a dark streak in its wake as the pale, floating orb of his disembodied head unblinkingly watched from the nearby woods.

  Lewis did not believe in hauntings any more than he believed in luck or love or prayer or the vows he exchanged in front of that ghastly pastor eighteen months earlier. People haunted their own houses, bewitched their own woods. People, if they were careless, were apt to make the real unreal (or vice versa).

  Nevertheless, for an indulgent moment as he and Maggie postholed their way through the snow, and with Zooey eagerly loping and tugging at her leash, Lewis briefly entertained himself by surveying the woods and conjuring the unlikely image of Toby Hatcher’s blue, blood-drained head gliding within the stilted screen of trees.

  Maggie had tied Zooey’s leash to a tree at the top of the hill. Down below, Lewis and Maggie, peppered with flecks of white, caught their breath following an impromptu snowball fight. “Hey,” said Maggie as she wiped snow away from her pink nose and cheeks, her breath visible in short-lived bursts. “I want to show you something.”

  Lewis sniffed. “More surprises, huh?”

  From her puffy coat Maggie produced a small flashlight, which she clicked on. “Come on,” she said and started walking toward the tree line.

  Lewis took a few steps but looked over his shoulder, up toward the hill. Zooey was still visible, her skinny body bouncing and tugging at the generous length of her leash. “What about the dog?”

  Maggie didn’t slow. “Zooey will be okay. Besides,” she said, jiggling the flashlight’s beam at Lewis, “this is something special. Just for you and me.” Lewis followed Maggie into the shadow-latticed mouth of the woods.

  Twigs snapped and snow crunched under their boots. They hiked for twenty minutes through an overgrown warren that could hardly be considered an honest trail. Yet Maggie clearly knew where she was going. But just when Lewis was about to ask how much farther they had to go, Maggie clicked off the flashlight and stopped. “We’re here,” she said.

  Lewis frowned, but his eyes acclimated quickly. Up ahead through the trees was a small stone footbridge. Lewis, wide-eyed, adjusted his knit cap and shuffled forward. “How’d you find this?”

  Maggie shrugged. “I think it’s been here forever.” She giggled at that. “Kidding. I think it’s like a relic or something from the old Pentecostal campground.”

  Up close Lewis saw that the bridge and its waist-high railing had been constructed with large cobblestones with a crooked maze of mortar holding them together; several boulder-size rocks served as walkway markers at either end. Beneath the bridge ran a skinny creek, frozen over and sheeted with snow, and the distance between the banks allowed a narrow gap between the overarching tree branches. Now and again a breach in the clouds allowed for ragged shafts of moonlight to fall over the bridge.

  Almost reverently, Lewis and Maggie stepped onto the footbridge, both leaning over the railing. Maggie gave Lewis a searching look. “What do you think?”

  Lewis smiled, sincere when he said, “Amazing.”

  Then Maggie looked down, scanning the walkway. She crouched and picked up an errant stone, which she clutched to her chest. Lewis watched as Maggie shut her eyes for several long seconds before opening them and lobbing the rock out onto the frozen creek. The stone clinked off the frozen surface, creating an uncanny echo that reverberated into the woods, giving Lewis an unexpected chill and eliciting a shudder.

  “Okay,” said Maggie. “Your turn.”

  Lewis hesitated before acquiescing, searching the snow-dusted bridge and eventually finding a baseball-sized stone. He briefly imitated Maggie’s silent mantra before rearing back to throw, but paused when Maggie said, “Don’t forget to make a wish.” Lewis pitched the rock out across the creek. There came a glassy shattering and splash as the stone broke through the surface of the ice.

  The two looked at each other and began laughing. Lewis finally said, “So what’s that mean?”

  “It means you still get your wish.” Maggie slowly inched in on Lewis. “You know, you can be a lame old man sometimes, but you’ve got potential.” Then Maggie slid her arms around Lewis and pressed her chest against his midsection. Lewis leaned down and kissed her. Maggie’s upper lip was moist with perspiration from the hike. Once the moment had concluded, Lewis began to pull away, but Maggie tightened her grip.

  She was staring at him, her inky eyes luminous in the moonlight, and something about the solemnity of her expression startled Lewis. He blurted a nervous laugh and smirked. “What?”

  She tilted her chin. “You know, we’ve been friends—real friends—for a while now.” Holy shit, thought Lewis, here it comes. He nodded, exhaled. “And we’ve been doing this”—Maggie cocked her head to the side as if the curt gesture were casting its meaning back across the fields, the winding backroads, neighborhoods, all the way back to Lewis’s house, all the back to his bedroom—“since the end of summer.”

  Lewis said, “And it’s been a lot of fun.”

  Maggie smiled. “Yeah. It has been. But”—she bit her lower lip—“like, if you started seeing someone else, or if you are seeing someone else, I think that would make me uncomfortable. You know?” Lewis nodded. Again her expression grew almost severe. “Do you think it will stay this way forever?”

  Sometimes you can be so innocent. “I think as long as we keep making our own rules, then yes, we can keep being friends and keep having fun.” Aside from slightly loosening her grip, Maggie was intolerably unresponsive. “You know”—Let’s try another route—“at this time last year, if someone would have told me that my marriage was on the verge of falling apart and I’d be divorced before the end of summer, I would have leaned into their face and laughed.” He felt her posture shift but she continued staring at him. “But the good thing about uncertainty is that we have the flexibility to change at any time.”

  Maggie’s delicately furrowed brow suggested she was trying to decipher the context of his bullshit response. She said, “So the future is just supposed to be
a surprise?”

  Lewis contemplated that. “Yes. A surprise.”

  He thought this might serve as a nice conclusion, but Maggie renewed her embrace. And now, training her dark, solicitous gaze on him, she said, “I love you, Lewis.”

  This was something he’d deftly avoided for months, but he’d been so immersed in the unconditional dating and carefree sex that he’d never devised a way to deal with the subject of love when it inevitably emerged. So. Here we are.

  Lewis’s exhalation escaped as a thick phantom of fog as he gently clasped Maggie’s upper arms. He frantically tried to assemble some sort of concessional manifesto that might prohibit any further articulation of commitment while simultaneously sustaining the equilibrium in their tacit pact of guilt-free sex.

  Here, standing at the apex of the footbridge and enveloped in an almost unnatural silence, it was as though he’d returned to that scene on his wedding day with Beth, to that odious ritual at the front of the church. Lewis was not religious at all, but he’d done as he’d been asked. Please, Lewis . . . it’s just a formality . . . my family insists . . . do it for me. He wanted to make Beth happy. He wanted to be happy. The least he could do was be a cooperative collaborator. But as his brief tenure as a husband came to a close, Lewis vowed he’d never deliberately return to being a victim—promised he’d never invest in that sort of precarious, self-shaming suffocation—swore he’d never have to risk enduring the sneering taunting confession of infidelity from someone he truly loved. He was sick of playing the role of noble, domestic soldier. For once, he wanted to be the Big Bad Wolf. Mad, bad, dangerous to know.

  But she’s not asking you to marry her, a voice prompted. Christ, man, she just wants to hear the words. But what if he did tell her what she wanted to hear? The answer was quite simple: verbally reciprocating this memorialization would only lead to more promises, more pacts, all resulting in an exponentially diminishing leash around his throat.

  With a feeble streamer of silver-and-blue breath, Lewis uttered this bloodlessly insufficient response to Maggie’s confession of I love you: “I know.”

  The dog was gone.

  On their way back from the bridge, Lewis had made meager attempts to talk to Maggie, who remained in front of Lewis, rigidly marching forward. Several times Lewis had nearly coaxed himself to grab Maggie and profess that he was a coward and an asshole and that he loved her too. They were about halfway up Hatcher Hill when Maggie stopped and gasped.

  Part of the leash, appearing to have been chewed through, was still attached to the tree; on the ground was a radius of trampled dirt and snow where the dog had struggled to free herself. Then Lewis noticed something. “Maggie, look,” he said, pointing to a single set of tracks leading downhill, the sleek, distantly spaced indentions suggested the dog had taken off in a straight-line sprint.

  “Zooey!” Maggie cried, aiming her flashlight at the tracks and running in the same direction.

  Lewis was running behind Maggie along the bottom-hill boundary of trees, but as she ran ahead Lewis slowed, certain he’d heard something in the woods. He stopped and narrowed his eyes, concentrating on the noises—crunching underbrush, twigs splintering softly, and then a low-level clacking. The sound elicited the involuntary image of rattling porcelain, which ceded to the aspect of teeth—black teeth—chatter-clacking in the cold. Unmistakably a tall figure, moving with a jerky, deformed ambulation, eagerly lurched forward just a few yards within the scrim of trees. Lewis staggered backward. “Maggie.” His intended shout came out as a whisper. He cleared his throat. “Maggie . . . I think I hear something.”

  Maggie jogged up, the beam of her flashlight quaking on the spot Lewis had indicated. “What?” she said, her face screwed up in impatience. “I don’t hear anything.” Now neither did Lewis.

  Just then in the distance, over on the far side of Hatcher Hill, a slow-moving black shape crept out of the woods.

  Lewis pointed. “There she is.” Lewis began to follow Maggie but faltered, warily assessing the overlapping stilts of gray tree trunks that faded into the black folds of woods. And this is what did it: the sound was barely audible at first, not unlike the hush in a seashell, but then came the slow, seething swell of a whistle—an echoey, discordant keening that caused Lewis to clap his hands over his ears before twisting at the waist and running away.

  The dog was limping but picked up speed as her owner closed in. Maggie tossed the flashlight into the snow and dropped to her knees, wrapping her arms around the dog’s neck and caressing her face, kissing her snout and rubbing her ears. Zooey whimpered softly. Lewis was breathing heavily as he jogged up, but his relief at finding the animal was short-lived as he noticed the dark, speckled trail that the dog had made in the snow. He picked up Maggie’s flashlight and aimed it toward the dog’s backside. Lewis could only utter, “Maggie,” as the beam shakily played over the red specks freckling the snow and the bloody substance streaking the animal’s hindquarters.

  Back at the Jeep, Lewis tried to be useful by spreading out a blanket to create a makeshift bed. He attempted to help Maggie lift the dog, but she recoiled, fixing Lewis with a alarming expression—a warning not to touch her. “She’s my dog,” Maggie hissed through clenched teeth. “I can take care of her myself.”

  While Lewis was certainly concerned for the dog, he was wary about touching the viscous blood congealing on the animal’s backside. And though he could not detect an actual wound, Lewis guessed she’d injured herself in a thick tangle of thorns or possibly on some rusty barbed wire along one of the old fencelines. But then he thought about the distorted figure creeping through the woods. Suddenly he wasn’t so certain exactly how the dog received the injury. He had tried to get Maggie to examine this disturbing discovery more closely, but she’d ignored him, opting simply to cradle the whimpering dog and carry her back to the Jeep.

  They were quiet on the drive back to the suburbs. Lewis’s attention alternated between the hypnotic swirl of falling snow slashing through the Jeep’s headlights and snatching glimpses of Maggie’s impassive face. He tried to conjure the thoughts that accompanied her expression—What a fucking fool I am . . . first I humiliate myself by spilling my guts to this creep and then Zooey gets hurt.

  Lewis settled his gaze on Maggie’s face and licked his lips. “I’m sorry.”

  Maggie didn’t bother glancing over and simply kept her eyes on the snow-blown country road. After a while she sighed. “I know.”

  It was a Thursday morning the following week when Lewis received a text message from Maggie. His students were occupied with an assignment while he—Mr. Brewster—tried and failed to use his cell phone inconspicuously.

  From: Mag

  Received: Thursday Feb 21, 8:55 a.m.

  Priority: Normal

  Zooeys sick – skipping class to take care of her

  To: Mag

  Sent: Thursday Feb 21, 9:07 a.m.

  What’s wrong?

  From: Mag

  Received: Thursday Feb 21, 9:10 a.m.

  Puking

  To: Mag

  Sent: Thursday Feb 21, 9:13 a.m.

  Anything I can do to help?

  From: Mag

  Received: Thursday Feb 21, 9:20 a.m.

  No. Will call U l8r

  Maggie’s spring break as a university student came two weeks before Lewis’s spring break as a high school teacher. He’d known for months that Maggie and a few friends had been planning a trip to some debauched locale in Florida, and he had reluctantly harbored an increasing anxiety about the impending week-long vacation. Although she was no longer in high school, Maggie, he was certain, would succumb to the Girls-Gone-Wild climate of that requisitely hedonistic nightlife. When in Rome.

  At one point, Maggie had suggested that he take a few days off from teaching and fly down to meet her. “It would be like something from the movies,” she’d said, curled up on the couch next to him as they watched an old black-and-white called Dracula’s Daughter. “Just imagine, a handsome olde
r man stepping off a plane, buying me a martini in the airport lounge before whisking me away to his hotel room.”

  Lewis chuckled. “My boss would dock me on an evaluation for taking off that kind of time two weeks before a contracted break.”

  Maggie nudged him. “Oh, come on. Live dangerously. It’d only be for a couple days. What’s the worst that could happen?”

  Lewis made a face. “Well, if I get too many piss-poor evaluations I get fired.”

  “So?”

  “So I’d get fired, couldn’t afford the house, and I’d be forced to find a job as a short-order cook or something and go live in a shitty apartment.”

  “Good,” said Maggie, grazing her nose over his collar bone. “I know someone who’d love to be your roommate.”

  “Oh yeah,” Lewis said, playing along. “Who?”

  Maggie stretched up and kissed him.

  Lewis was a mess the entire week Maggie was in Florida. And for the first time in his life, his low-key brand of concern had morphed into outright anxiety, and that anxiety had eroded into a foreign sort of obsession.

  During that long week Lewis maintained contact with Maggie through occasional text messages and several profile postings on Facebook, but for the most part their routine—well, Lewis’s routine of sex and distractive companionability—had been crippled. The house was painfully quiet, and Lewis had even grown to miss Zooey’s overzealous and mercurial behavior. He idly wondered who was taking care of the dog while Maggie was away.

  As the voyeuristic accessibility of the Internet was wont to stoke everyone’s inner stalker, Lewis stayed up late, sitting in front of the computer, repeatedly refreshing the browser to keep tabs on Maggie. And it was with an aggressive effort that Lewis, through the spiderweb haze of inebriation, restrained his drunken impulses to contact Maggie and tell her he was thinking about her.