Ghoul

'Go ahead,' Timmy challenged. 'You lay one hand on me and I promise you'll regret it.' Barry's dad charged. Timmy stood his ground.

'Clark!'

Barry's mother rushed outside and grabbed her husband' s arm, wrestling him away from the boys. He shook her off and grinned humorlessly.

His flashing gray teeth reminded Timmy of a shark's.

'Bet your father will want to hear about this, Graco. He won't be too goddamned happy when I tell him how his son is smarting off to adults.'

'Go ahead and tell him. He's right down over the hill, working in the garden. In fact, I'll go with you.'

Timmy knew that his father despised Clark Smeltzer as an abusive, bullying drunk, but furthermore, Clark Smeltzer knew it, too. Timmy wasn't worried.

'Come on, Doug.' He turned his back on Barry's parents.

'You get out of here,' Mr. Smeltzer hollered. 'And don't go bothering Barry, either. He's got work to do!'

The boys ignored him.

'And stay out of that cemetery. You hear me? I don't want to see you playing there no more.'

Doug stopped. 'But we always play there, Mr. Smeltzer.'

'Not no more you don't. Stay clear of it. I've told Barry the same thing. He's not to be there except for when he' s helping me, and never after sundown. Those are the new rules. Gonna put up signs this week saying so.'

'You don't own the cemetery,' Timmy said. 'You're just the caretaker.'

'Don't matter. You mind me, boy. I catch you there and it'll be your ass. That's a promise.'

Without glancing back or responding, the boys hopped on their bikes and pedaled away, still careful to stay out of Randy Graco' s line of sight. Timmy wondered if his father had heard Mr. Smeltzer 's outburst, and then decided that he didn't care.

'Jesus,' Doug panted as they reached the end of the parking lot. 'You're crazy, Timmy. You know that?'

'Why?'

'Mouthing off the way you did? Being a smartass? I thought he was gonna lay you out cold, man. One of these days you' re going to get smart with the wrong person.'

'You sound like my mom.'

'I'm just saying, is all.'

'It's bullshit, and I'm not going to take it. He's not gonna push me around the way he does Barry.'

Doug stopped pedaling and slammed on his brakes. His back tire skidded on the pavement.

Balancing the plastic tube, he cleaned his glasses on his shirt.

'You okay?' Timmy asked.

'Yeah. Why wouldn't I be?'

'Well, what he said about your old man…'

Doug shrugged. 'Oh, I don't care about that. I mean, it's not true. You know? My dad loves me. When he comes back from California, everyone will see.'

'Yeah.'

Timmy glanced back at the house. Barry's parents had gone back inside. He wondered what price Barry's mother would pay behind that closed door, perhaps right now, for stopping her husband from hitting him. Then he wondered why she didn 't do the same when he hit Barry. If she'd stuck up for her son' s friends, couldn 't she stick up for her own son as well?

Doug put his glasses back on and smiled. It looked false. Strained. They coasted into the road. Timmy's handlebars were sweaty. So was Doug' s shirt, especially around his armpits.

'What are you thinking about, Timmy?'

'Did you notice that both of Barry's parents had new jewelry on? It looked really expensive.'

Doug shook his head. 'No, I didn't see it. But big deal. As bad as he treats Barry and his mother sometimes, we should be happy he' s spending money on them at all.'

'Yeah, I guess you're right. I don't know. Just seemed weird. He never does stuff like that. Barry has to bum money from us for lunch at school sometimes.'

'Maybe Mr. Smeltzer got a raise.'

Timmy shrugged. 'Yeah, maybe.'

'It's not really any of our business.'

'I guess not.'

'So what now?' Doug asked.

'Let's go find Barry.'

'You heard Mr. Smeltzer. He said we weren't supposed to play over there anymore. Said he'd kick our ass.'

'The heck with him. He ain't watching us right now.

Probably went back to bed by now. Let's find Barry. I want to see this map you made.'

'But what if someone else spots us?'

'Who's gonna see? Other than Barry, there's nobody out there this morning.'

'Except for the dead people.'

Timmy grinned. 'Well, yeah, except for the dead people. They're always there. Wouldn't be a cemetery without them.'

'Yeah,' Doug agreed. 'It would just be a bunch of empty holes in the ground.'

Chapter Two

After making sure Barry's parents weren' t watching them from the windows, the boys crossed Golgotha Church Road and wheeled around the church and into the cemetery. To their left, down over the sloping hill, were the old graves. Timmy noted again how two of them had sunk into the ground.

In front of them, sprawling out behind the church, was the more modern portion of the graveyard. This part stretched nearly a quartermile to the west. It was split into three large sections by narrow, cracked blacktop roadways, each barely wide enough for a single car to drive on.

The first road, off to their left, separated the older graveyard at the bottom of the hill from the more modern cemetery above. Halfway along this path was an old yellow clapboard utility shed with a rusty tin roof that was covered with fallen tree branches and leaves. Beyond the shed was another stretch of woods. The boys often played inside the old shed, gaining access, when they didn't have Barry's dad's keys, through a boarded up window at the rear, half hidden by a massive pile of dirt left over from new graves. Inside was a small backhoe, a riding mower, two push mowers, a grass catcher, winch, shovels, rakes, pickaxes, hoes, wooden planks and plywood to cover up open graves, canvas tarps, stone markers, plastic flowers and wreaths, vases for the graves, and little flags for Veteran's and Memorial Days. Because of the dirt floor, it always smelled musty inside. Barry, Doug, and Timmy often waited with their pumpaction BB and pellet guns until a rat or groundhog burrowed up through the floor. Then they'd nail it. Barry especially enjoyed this activity since it was one of the few times his father seemed genuinely pleased with him; they were taking care of the rodents that plagued the graveyard. This morning, the shed 's doors hung open, swaying slightly in the breeze, and the tractor was missingboth signs that Barry had been there earlier.

The path to their right bordered the northern end of the cemetery. On one side were gray and brown tombstones carved from granite and marble. On the other side was a long, sloping pasture in which beef cattle grazed. An electric fence kept the cows from wandering into the graveyard. Last summer, Barry and Doug had dared Timmy to pee on the fence, offering up back issues of ManThing, Defenders, Captain America, and Kamando from their collections, as well as one of Doug 's Micronauts action figures (a blue Time Traveler) and some of Barry's extra Wacky Packages cards. It was a hard deal to turn down, especially because Timmy collected Defenders and it was an issue he didn't havethe one where Hulk, Dr. Strange, Valkyrie, Nighthawk and the rest of the team fought a villain called Nebulon, and Chondu the Mystic possessed the Hulk's pet fawn. So, steeling himself, he'd peed on the fence, got the shock of his life, and had endured two days of not being able to sit down comfortably along with the jeers of his two best friends. His testicles had turned black and blue, and after returning from the doctor's office, his parents had grounded him for two weeks. By that time, it didn 't matter. Admitting to