Ghouljaw and Other Stories

by Clint Smith

  Hell, Paul thought. Nothing I said or imagined could have saved us.

  Now, framed by the black borders of exhaustion and half-drunk desperation, Paul saw a jittery home movie of his family as it had been, still intact, still in one piece, during one of their first vacations together; and he saw his girls as they had been—two kids on the beach, building a sandcastle, achingly brilliant sunshine highlighting the rippling water.

  Again Paul steeled himself against these sentimental phantoms. In this world, it was what was real that mattered. Things—money things—that Molly clearly found more reliable than anything Paul could offer, and it was real.

  Paul slapped the revolver’s cylinder shut and inspected the remaining contents in the duffel bag.

  He pulled out a plastic baggy containing several critical pieces of information—Social Security card, account numbers—to help expediate his identification someday. Years from now, he hoped. When his girls were older. He paused a moment on his driver’s license. “This is who I am, folks,” Paul said. No, he thought, this is who I was. He gave a morose smirk at the organ donor designation on his driver’s license before withdrawing several lengths of bungee cord. The plan was simple: Secure the bungees to the lower bole of a tree and wriggle into them, snuggly strapping himself in place, still somewhat concealed yet readily available for scavenging denizens. Paul looked up at the overcast sky between the thinning, interlaced branches, and closed his eyes.

  The gunshot made him flinch. With breathtaking abruptness, a single shot exploded across the forest. Paul’s eyes went wide, reacting as if his own revolver had inadvertently discharged; but no—the report, now wavering to a dying echo, had come from somewhere nearby.

  Wide-eyed, he scanned the clearing, already abandoning his plan. The most important thing right now was getting the hell out of here. But before he could get moving, Paul was frozen by another sound—a rhythmic twig-snapping and leaf-crunching, something big steadily cleaving its way through undergrowth. And then he saw a dark shape bouncing, swiftly separating from the crowded backdrop of tree trunks.

  A massive deer bounded into the clearing, its powerful legs stabbing at the leaf-peaty earth as it charged ahead. He stammered and staggered backward, but ceased his retreat as the deer inexplicably faltered and stopped, its body going rigid and its black eyes locked directly on Paul.

  The ginger-colored animal was panting, each snorting huff sending ghosty streamers into the air. Paul too was breathing in panicky puffs as his gaze flicked back and forth between the deer’s eyes and its formidable crown of antlers, the multi-pronged rack branching out on either side of its head. Paul glanced down at the deer’s torso, to the dark red smudge near its ribcage. The gunshot, the wound, and the deer’s sudden presence made sense, but those thoughts collided with something dissonant: Why did it stop? Paul focused on the deer’s black eyes and stopped blinking, stopped contemplating what was happening.

  The clearing began to change. Light was fading, dimming, as if a curtain of coal smoke were drifting up from the forest floor. Shadows began blending together, turning everything into a dark canvas behind the deer, which stood motionless—staring, bleeding, panic-stricken, yet somehow . . . proud.

  Paul was seized with an overwhelming sensation that he was moving in two directions: being dragged forward—his consciousness magnetized toward the buck’s black eyes—and sinking backwards, as if gently floating on his back.

  And then he thought about his mom.

  Thirty-three summers before, when Paul was five, his mom had taken him to a local pool for swimming lessons. He was a nimble kid, eager, energetic, and when it came to swimming he was a natural. But he dreaded floating on his back. The combination of touching nothing and hearing his respiration coming in amplified gasps evoked a sort of reverse claustrophobia, causing him to splash and thrash upright, desperate to find purchase on something stable, something tangible.

  Paul was experiencing this precise sensation now—pressure overtaking him from beneath, surrendering to the buoyant embrace of water.

  As the last of the light dimmed from the clearing, he began enduring a flashbulb barrage of images, memories.

  Paul saw—and saw through—his child-self propped up on a pillow in his bed, running a fierce fever, his mother rushing into the darkened room and placing a cool washcloth on his forehead—the boy-Paul feels the sudden urge to vomit, and suddenly he is a college student, throwing up in the toilet at his apartment, too drunk for his own good, and then Molly is there in the bathroom, appearing disappointed but amused as she cleans him up, helps him to bed, and then Molly is on his bed—no—Molly is in a hospital bed, Paul is next to her, clutching her shoulder and stroking her forehead as she pushes their first child into the world.

  Paul felt something scalloped loose from his mind.

  He was unaware of the tears that had begun to stream from the corners of his unblinking eyes as he continued to be bombarded by half-forgotten memories and emotions; and then it was all blurring together—he was a child, boiling with fever; he was a college kid, regretting his irresponsibility; he was a man grateful for the ordinary and significant opportunity to be called Dad. And while a portion of Paul’s mind was experiencing all this, the other part continued its descent, falling backward, fathom after fathom, into amniotic blackness. And then Paul imagined the warm scene of his daughters building a sandcastle on the beach, his youngest daughter jumping up, running toward him, crying, mumbling something about a sting, a red, blossom-shaped blotch on her leg. As if to grasp those phantoms, Paul unconsciously raised his arms, reaching out.

  The concussive stutter-crack of gunfire filled the clearing.

  Paul—the seeing part of Paul that had been drifting toward the deer—was instantly yanked back now; but before that conscious presence could fully return to his body, he felt a punching thud pierce his upper chest. He had time to watch the deer twitch, stagger, then both he and the big buck fell, Paul collapsing to one side of the moss-covered log.

  He was staring up through the branch-knotted canopy, at the shards of gray sky between the boughs, yet somehow he could still see himself down there, lying on his back on a bed of damp dead leaves. In an almost adrenal rush of awareness, Paul began to understand that the seeing thing, the thing seeing him, hovering in the clearing had a shape—a formation of sensate dimensions. Paul initially registered a sort of giant, all-seeing umbrella. But that wasn’t quite right. Now his mind desperately clung to something that had nearly gone into mental atrophy: his imagination. As inexplicable as it was, Paul surrendered rationality, and the indistinct thing floating in the clearing rapidly took the shape of a massive black jellyfish.

  The giant bell-shaped hood glistened in the gray light, its long black tentacles dangled beneath it, whipping languidly as it floated contentedly over the clearing. He could see everything within the jellyfish in a dome-shaped panorama as it narrowed its attention to the far side of the clearing, where the deer was thrashing and making choking noises, its antlers whipping at the air, its black eyes electrically alive with terror. There were now several large wound-smudges along its torso.

  Now there were voices, and the jellyfish rotated its awareness again. A man came jogging out from the far side of the forest, swatting at the tangled foliage; he was toting a large machine gun, what—with Paul’s help—the jellyfish coolly recognized as an assault rifle, an AK-47.

  The man was dressed in dark clothing—ball cap, camo sweatshirt, camo pants—and he was wearing a backpack. He was a youngish guy with a narrow, clean-shaven face, tall and thin, what some people might call lean and wiry; but upon closer inspection, the man’s eyes were underlined with dark crescents, and his sallow skin was stretched too tight over his cheeks and chin, things Paul associated with poor health or meth use. An undertaker’s apprentice.

  Another man emerged now, breathing heavily, clearly trying to keep pace. This one was wearing a logger’s jacket. Unlike his partner, he was wide and burly, and had what looked
like a week’s worth of whisker-stubble on his too-fleshy jowls. He reminded Paul of a cruel Bassett hound.

  “Goddamn it, Roger,” the younger one said. “Thought I had him on the first shot.”

  The bigger man, Roger, panted as he spoke. “Don’t . . . make no sense,” he said, slinging his own rifle over his shoulder. “Why the hell was it just standing there?”

  The slim one was already shaking his head. “Don’t know. Don’t matter.” He paused, caught his breath and wiped his nose on his sleeve. “Maybe it knew it was as good as dead.” And then he raised the machine gun to his shoulder and marched over to the dying deer.

  “Don’t shoot the fuckin’ thing again, Blake,” Roger said wearily, “unless you want to send out another goddamn invitation.” The bigger man walked forward. “Just get it over with—quietly. Or I’ll leave your ass out here to carry the whole thing back to the jeep yourself.”

  The other one—Blake—shrugged. “Fine by me.” He looked over at his partner and flashed a grin, his teeth resembling irregular rows of infected corn kernels. “But I ain’t sharing none of the profit.” Roger snorted and stepped further into the clearing. The deer had slowed its flailing but was still mewling.

  “Hurry up,” Roger said, glancing around the clearing. “I ain’t in the mood to run into a ranger.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” said Blake, resting the machine gun against a tree. He slipped off his backpack and began scrounging through it. After a few seconds he produced a tool. A rusty hacksaw.

  Paul remained mentally and physically severed: still helplessly seeing through the jellyfish, while his brain—secure in his paralyzed body—continued feeling, adding voice to what he was watching.

  Suddenly, a few of those long black tentacles hanging under the jellyfish’s gelatinous dome writhed and drifted out, extending to the hunters’ foreheads, and Paul was bombarded by awareness. It wasn’t quite omniscience, but what Paul sensed was intent—this was a kind of game or contest. The deer was a prize. A piece of the deer. He was gripped by the revelation of what they meant to do. A wild swirl of nausea flooded his unflinching body.

  Paul watched helplessly as the jellyfish considered the deer’s black eyes.

  A few times as a boy, Paul had gone night fishing with his father at a pond just outside of town. They both carried flashlights with them on the boat. Once, struggling to lure a worm, Paul had fumbled his flashlight, dropping it in the water. He watched as the light danced and wobbled, the glowing beam fading as it sank into the murk. It felt as if it had lasted an excruciating amount of time, the helplessness of it, but it had disappeared faster than Paul could hitch in a breath.

  Paul could sense the deer’s life-light fading now, and he hoped the animal was far enough from the surface not to experience fully what was about to happen.

  Blake approached the weakened buck cautiously, circling for a moment before savagely seizing a tangle of antlers and pressing a boot against its thick neck. The animal let out another shriek as Blake unceremoniously placed the hacksaw along the deer’s throat and began sawing, the hunter grunting with each clumsy stroke, the rust-mottled saw—steadily streaking with gore—roughly serrated through the deer’s neck, just under its jaw, as its black eyes continued to stare in hopeless astonishment.

  Abruptly the jellyfish’s sight zoomed in to a torturous proximity, its vision magnified close enough to see green grime under Blake’s fingernails. It flashed over to Roger and watched the big man spit a viscous stream of tobacco juice, a string of spittle catching on his beard as he barked instructions at Blake, then it flashed back down to the deer, hovering inches from its face. Paul saw a few pearls of moisture racket off the animal’s glistening nostrils as Blake struggled to saw through bone and sinew.

  Paul wanted to close his eyes, but it was the jellyfish that was observing, absorbing everything with detached avidity.

  After ripping through a clinging portion of meat and skin, the deer’s head—along with its prized rack of antlers—was torn free. Blake let out a whooping cheer and hefted the spiky crown.

  “All right, that’ll do,” Roger said listlessly and gestured toward the backpack. “Get it wrapped up so we can get the hell out of here.”

  Blake obeyed, still showing his infected-corn grin. From the backpack he unfolded a murky tarp, along with a length of rope, and set to work on packaging the trophy rack.

  The jellyfish scanned down to the deer’s body, and Paul was made to watch the deer’s dismembered form for several repulsive moments. Gouts of blood pulsed from the ragged wound on the deer’s neck. Only minutes before the deer had been standing twenty yards away, stoic, its deadly, umber-smudged antlers forked out like upturned talons. Now it was in two pieces—part of it being wrapped in filthy plastic, part of it lying on the ground, ejaculating blood. It looked like a botched autopsy, a madman’s tantrum.

  The jellyfish shifted its attention from the dead animal and began drifting away, making a sleepy retreat from Roger and Blake and returning to the air above Paul, who was again seeing it and seeing through it to himself—the pale, lifeless thing lying on the ground that was called Paul Dawson.

  The jellyfish began descending and its black, slender tentacles began merging, twining together conically, converging on Paul’s face. The twisted tendrils extended to his forehead and began corkscrewing, sinking in with drill-bit precision, but instead of pain Paul felt a washcloth coolness spread out over his brow as he watched the gelatinous form contracting and funneling. And just as the last of the jellyfish’s bell-shaped dome contorted and sank into his brow, Paul blinked, sucked in a stream of cold air, and had the fierce urge to . . .

  “HEEELLLP!”

  The echo of his scream faded. Lying on his back, concealed by the fallen tree, Paul could only hear curses being traded and the clack of a gun being cocked. And then there was something else: Now, with consciousness and corporeality reunited, Paul was consumed by radiant pain in his upper chest. He ran an uncoordinated hand over the wound, his palm coming away crimson.

  In time there was the cautious crunching of underbrush. Blake appeared, emerging from over the top of the log, eyes wide and wild, his machine gun shakily trained on Paul.

  “Please,” Paul gasped, raising his blood-coated hand. “Please . . . have to get . . . help.”

  Blake continued staring, repeating the same expletive. Finally he called out over his shoulder. “Roger—get your ass over here.”

  Roger ambled into view, sidling up next to Blake. They inspected Paul like two fishermen who’d reeled in an aquatic oddity.

  “Where the fuck did he come from?” Roger said absently.

  “Jesus,” Blake mumbled. “Some goddamn hiker.”

  Roger leaned down over Paul and spoke slowly. “Where the fuck did you come from?”

  Paul hooked his fingers over the bullet wound. “Please”—gasping—“losing blood . . . need to get . . .” but the words died away. Gauging Roger’s uninterested expression, Paul became icily aware that his pleas were drifting toward uselessness.

  Roger exhaled and pivoted, scanning the clearing, whipping off his ball cap and wiping sweat from his forehead. Paul stared at the man, awestruck with the man’s bully-distilled features.

  “Roger,” Blake said, gun still aimed at Paul, “what are we—”

  “Shut up,” Roger said calmly, smoothly replacing the ball cap. He came forward and rested his boot on the log beside Paul. He said, “Now why are you all the way out here, fella?”

  Paul again stared at Roger, trying to calculate how this was going to end. After a stretch of silence Roger began flicking his eyes around Paul, settling on something. “Blake,” Roger said, gesturing toward Paul’s unzipped duffel bag. “Go over there and fetch that bag.” Initially Blake didn’t move, only flinched a nervous glance at Roger. “Do it, boy,” Roger said. Blake cursed, lowered the gun, and tromped over to where Paul had dropped his bag. Paul and Roger continued staring at each other.

  “The hell . . .” Blak
e was frowning as he lifted Paul’s plastic baggy full of personal information.

  Roger said, “Give it here.” He slid his hand into the baggy and withdrew the driver’s license. “Paul . . . Dawson.” After reading quietly for a few seconds, Roger twitched a frown and said, “New Bethel. Hell, that’s forty miles or better.” He inspected Paul. “What are you doing this far south, Paul Dawson from New Bethel?” With his boot resting on the log, Roger’s posture, expression, and tone resembled a drowsy, small-town sheriff.

  “Roger,” Blake said, and held up Paul’s revolver. The two shared a quiet moment before Roger glanced back at Paul.

  “Well well,” Roger said. “Now what would a guy like you be doing with a sweet piece like that, Paul Dawson?” A bird gave up a throaty squawk high up in the trees. Roger snorted. “I’ll tell you something, Blake, this guy ain’t no hiker, and he sure as hell ain’t no hunter. So I’ll ask you again—what are you doing all the way out here?”

  A rational part of Paul—a part that he had neglected in the years, months, and days leading up to his grim adventure—was overwhelmed by the alien urge to survive, the urge to formulate a cogent plea to these hunters. No, not hunters, Paul thought soberly. Killers. And with that, what prevailed within Paul was another foreign desire—the desire not to cooperate. Right now, the only thing more hateful to him than the disappointment of his own life was the horror of ending it on their terms—begging, helpless. He lingered on the jittery moving portrait of his girls on the beach, the sandcastle, the laughter, the lapping waves, his daughter crying after getting stung on the leg by a jellyfish.