Edward Lee - Ghouls

— | — | —

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

Lenny Stokes paused at the post of the access gate. He was struck clean by the night’s impossible stillness. Even with his Chevelle rumbling intrusively behind him, he couldn’t help but stop and feel the moment. Was it beauty he sensed? His eyes opened for the first time in his life to a wonder of nature? It seemed wrong for him to feel such things.

The night was alive. Swarms of fireflies drifted shiftingly through the woods like luminous smoke, a legion of green flecks of light. A possum crossing the lane looked up at him against the headlamps, then waddled clumsily into the brush. A night thrush lifted off in the air, silent and serene and silhouetted by a moon so bright and heavy with light he thought it might detach itself from its hold in the sky and fall to earth.

“Hurry up, Lenny,” Joanne called out from the car. “Let’s get going. Or are you gonna stand there all fuckin’ night?”

Lenny frowned. The sensation cracked and slipped away, but he’d never understood it to begin with.

He wedged the cutter over a random link, feeling for bite. Soft, he thought. Like pewter. He gripped the long HKP No. 3 bolt cutters as if they were a pair of handlebars on a motorcycle. His muscles tightened, arms shaking but under control, and there was a quick snap of metal. The chain fell away like a severed tightrope.

He got back into the car and pushed in the headlight knob. Darkness seemed to scoop them up. Joanne popped open two cans of beer, spraying the windshield, giggling.

Lenny stared ahead.

“What’s wrong with you?”

Lenny sipped his beer—it tasted like water. “Feel a little funny,” he confessed. Something sour coated his stomach, and his eyes hurt. Fatigue bogged him down like heavy winter clothes. He considered calling it off, trying again another time when he felt better. “Guess I’m just run down er somethin’.”

Joanne arched her head back and emptied half her beer down her throat.

Lenny let off the parking brake; the car rolled forward into the access road. Branches scraped along the fenders, like nails against slate; the tires popped gravel. Lenny was breaking out into a light sweat.

“Maybe we should go back,” Joanne slurred. “You look like you’re about to heave-ho.”

Feel like it, too. “Musta drank too much, shoulda ate first. No point comin’ out here fer nothin. ’Sides, I need the bread.”

Half a mile into the woods they came to the first clearing, Lenny’s favorite. He turned off the engine, and they embarked. Joanne carried the remains of the six-pack by one of the plastic rings, like a little girl with a doll. She started to say something, but Lenny silenced her with a quick “Shhh!” and led the way into the rise, his spotlight gripped limply in one hand. He had a .22 target pistol stuck in his belt. It was ideal for poaching, so long as you hit them in the neck or head, and it made about as much noise as a loud clap.

They sat up on the bank, facing the clearing.

“What now?” Joanne asked.

“We wait. And keep yer voice down. Bucks got ears, too, ya know.”

“Maybe that security guy’ll come.”

“Fuck him. Anyway, we won’t be here long. Best deerspot in the county, rat here at Belleau Wood. All I need is one good shot, an’ we’ll be on our way.” He placed the pistol and light on either side. The truth was they might be here for hours before a decent-sized buck came along. Over the past week or so it seemed the flourish of deer had all but vanished.

Joanne pulled another beer off the six-pack. Her stomach was making noises like an aquarium, from so much beer. She drank a lot for a girl, an awful lot, but she never got fat. She didn’t seem to have any fat on her at all. Dances it off, he thought. And fucks it off. She’ll neva go ta fat. Neva.

Joanne leaned back lazily and wiggled her toes. “Do you miss your wife?”

“What kinda question is that?”

“I don’t know, I just wondered.”

“Why the hell would Ah miss that frigid mousy bitch? Ah need her lak a hole in the head. Jus’ as soon as the divorce papers come—” but Lenny stopped. Something wasn’t right. He sat up, concentrating without direction. “Listen,” he whispered.

Joanne burped. “I don’t hear anything.”

“Tha’s jus’ it. Ah don’t hear anythin’ neither. Not even a cricket.”

The clearing looked sleeted in the moonlight, frozen for eons. There was no sound at all.

“Must’ve been the sound of the engine when we came in,” Joanne suggested. Her beer can dripped condensation onto her thigh, darkening her jeans. “We might as well go.”

“Jus’ sit tight an’ be quite.” He looked at his watch but saw that it had stopped a few minutes short of midnight. “We’ll give it an hour.”

Fine against the night, Belleau Wood mansion sat sentient at the top of the highest hill, throwing a cold, crisp shadow down the vast inclination of land. Its windows were alight.

As they waited, Lenny’s self-awareness began to dissolve around the edges; soon, he caught himself dozing off. An intoxicating exhaustion seeped into him, slowing his heart and brain—it dragged him down as if into a pit. He lay back and watched Joanne through sleep-dulled eyes. Shifting in and out of focus, she began to move in cool, grainy slow-motion, like a fever dream. The moonlight seemed crystalline now; it traced her in sharp, mercurial lines. She drew her top off over her head, soundless, then leaned back and offered her breasts to the moon. Her eyes were glinting slits, her face slyly wanton and radiating warped desire. It was a familiar look.

Hell with the deer.

Flushed, intent, Joanne saw his hands float up like rough, disembodied things homing on the heat of her heart. His hands—they were more than hands, they were transmitters of a strange chemical energy, catalytic prods which ignited in her all the unallayed lust she’d ever known; she concentrated on his hands. They induced her to move closer; she loved to be felt, she loved his hands on her. His touch was potent, primitive. His touch made her shiver with knifelike flashes of heat.

“Right here under the moon,” she whispered.

“Rat here unda the moon,” he said.

He stripped off her jeans, and she straddled him.

“Not yet,” she said, a famished pant. “Not…yet.” Her skin glowed, her nipples rose from the sudden charge of blood. His fingertips kneaded a lovely pleasant ache into her breasts. She took his big wrists and pushed, hissing, sliding his touch over her tingling belly and down, and her nerves disgorged a flood of restless, quivering pleasure. She felt suddenly very wet inside, and slick with heat. She held his hand there for a long time, as if to push it into her completely. The wet heat trickled upward. She felt her blood turn to glitter, and her mind swam away with the moon.

“Turn me inside out with it,” she whispered. Her small hands fumbled with his belt. “I want you to fuck me till I can’t see straight. Fuck me right into the ground.”

A pair of tall, lean shadows arched over them, like trees.

Lenny’s wonderful rough hands cupped her buttocks. He positioned her over him, then pushed down. Joanne whined once very sharply at the thrill of being pierced.

There was a rustling of motion, insanely fast. The shadows converged. Joanne opened her mouth to scream but was gagged by a squirming hand; some of her teeth cracked when she bit down on the invading fingers. Lenny was lifted up and thrown a considerable distance—he collided head-long into a stout tree trunk, then thudded to the ground. The impact sent a tremor through his bones; he fought to keep conscious, fought to breathe. The pistol was out of reach, lost in the grass and tangling shadows. His gashed scalp poured blood into his eyes. Floundering, his face dulled by the white of shock, he looked out across the clearing.