Ghouls

eld Not a chance,” he replied. He held the pack up, just out of her reach. “I told you the other day, you’re forbidden to smoke. Period. I’m only doing this for your own good. You’ll thank me ten years from now.”

“Sit on it,” she said. “Homo.”

Kurt lit a cigarette immediately, savoring the first-puff rush. “Ah, see, it all works for the best, since I just happen to be all out of cigarettes. Ironic that you should buy my brand.”

Melissa grinned now, triumphantly. “They ought to be your brand. I took ’em out of your car.”

“You little klepto,” he said when he realized it was true. “If you were my kid, I’d paddle your backside.”

“Yeah, well, I’m not your kid, and instead of worrying about my backside, what are you going to do about that thing in the backyard?”

The quick switch to seriousness in her expression jogged his memory. “Oh, yes, I almost forgot the reason you so rudely got me out of bed. So what’s so terrible in the backyard?”

“I can’t tell what it is, just that it’s dead. It’s…it’s big and it’s gross.”

Occupational conditioning forced him to muse the very worst possibility. “Melissa, let’s be serious for just one minute. This thing in the backyard—it’s not a, uh, you know… It’s not a human being, is it?”

“No, but it’s big and it’s gross.”

“So you’ve told me.” He opened the sliding door. “Well, come on.”

“Uh uh,” she said. “Not me. One look per customer. Just go to the birdbath. You’ll see.”

He stepped out onto the patio and walked diagonally across the yard. The air revitalized him, a mainline to his brain. He noticed the birdbath at the edge of the yard, and noticed also an indistinguishable heap at its base. As he neared, a bird squalled at him from above. He looked up and saw a large crow hiding behind a splay of leaves in the tallest oak. It reminded him of a vulture waiting to scavenge.

He came to a stop at the birdbath and just stared. The heap before him was the remains of a large buck. He knew it was a deer only by the head, which had been twisted around several times on the neck, producing a corkscrew effect. The tongue lolled slackly from the frozen mouth, a bloodless tubule that seemed much longer than it should’ve been. The animal had been ripped apart. The antlers weren’t to be seen, just cracked knots where they’d been snapped off the skull. Its belly lay torn open, the rib cage pried apart, spilled entrails gleaming. He looked once more to the head; the visible eye looked back at him like a shiny black button.

Mutilated, he thought. He walked back toward the house in a hot daze. This wasn’t the work of a poacher or a predator. He sensed instead pure malice, as though the animal had been ripped apart for sport.

“What is it?” Melissa asked when he’d come back in.

“A deer. And you’re right, it is awful.”

“How did it get so…torn up?”

“Dogs, probably. It’s not uncommon for a pack of wild curs to do something like that.” Kurt sat down at the kitchen counter and yawned.

Melissa was gaping at him. “You’re not just gonna sit there and let that thing rot in the backyard, are you?”

He picked up the phone. “No, I’ll call the county. They’ll send someone out to take it away. In the meantime, you can fix my breakfast.”

Melissa’s eyes now shined with hilarity. “Don’t hold your breath. You can fix your own damn breakfast.”

“Nothing fancy. Orange juice, couple of strips of bacon, couple of eggs over hard.”

“Oh, is that all?”

“Hell, why not? Fry up some hash browns, too.”

Melissa put her hands on her hips and laughed openly at him. “You really think I’m gonna cook your breakfast.”

“I know you will, Melissa,” he said. He started to dial the county animal control office. “Because if you don’t, I’ll tell Uncle Roy you’ve been smoking. He’ll ground you till the end of the next school year.”

“You’re bluffing. You would never do that… Would you?”

Kurt grinned at her and brought the phone to his ear. Melissa stood aside, scowling, hesitant. Then she yanked open the refrigerator door and reached in for the eggs.

««—»»

“Still no word on Cody Drucker,” Bard was saying fatly from behind his desk. “Still no word on the Fitzwater girl. And still no word on Swaggert.”

It was 4:00 p.m. now, the beginning of Kurt’s shift. He’d relieved Higgins only to find Chief Bard still hanging around the station drinking coffee and faking paperwork.

Kurt slouched in his seat. “Last night somebody dug up Vicky Stokes’s dog.”

Bard stared at him. “Huh?”

“Two days ago Vicky’s old collie died. So she buried it in the backyard. The next morning she goes out back to put some clothes on the line, and there’s just a big hole in the ground. And the dead dog is gone. Sound familiar?”

Bard’s eyes swelled to rifts. “What the fuck is going on in this town, anyway? Who the fuck would steal a dead dog?”

“Who the fuck would steal a dead man? Who the fuck would steal a girl who can’t walk? Who the—”

“You think these things are related?”

“No, but I do think a lot of freaky stuff is happening in this town all at once.”

Bard cupped his chin in his hand, elbow on the desk. It made his face look lopsided.

“And another thing,” Kurt said. “This morning Uncle Roy’s kid found a dead deer in the woods behind our house. Wild dogs is my guess; it was torn to shreds. Anyway, I called animal control and had them take it away, and as the driver’s bagging the deer, he mentions that it’s the first time this season that animal control’s been through Tylersville.”

“So?”

“Two days ago 154 was heaped with all kinds of run-down animals. Coons, possums, rabbits.”

“Road pizza. Big deal.”

“Yeah, big deal, but this was two days ago. Yesterday I drive the Route and notice that most of the dead animals are gone. The road’s clean. But today the county tells me that no one’s been out yet to pick them up. Since when does the good fairy clean up animal carcasses?”

“It’s a mistake,” Bard said. “It has to be. The guy didn’t know what he was talking about, that’s all. You know those county public safety employees, they’re all one step off the drug train.”

Kurt nodded absently but said nothing.

Bard went home a few minutes later, leaving Kurt alone in the dim office. He remained there a while, stuck in the metal seat and staring at the window without seeing past the pane. It wasn’t lethargy, or fatigue from too little sleep. His awareness seemed altered, caught in a rare mode, and his eyes slowly widened then, because he thought he knew what was happening. It was that frozen, falling feeling, a sense of black foreshadow he’d known many times in the past. Most police officers acknowledged this at one time or another—a strange, inexplicable warning sign, the warning from the gut.

Later he found himself making town rounds beneath the same weighing dread. He felt locked up in the new patrol car, isolated as a man in an iron lung. His senses tuned in irrelevant impressions. He seemed to view the oncoming road from a low vantage point, for the first time noticing how long the hood of the car seemed to be, like a slalom of white ice. Familiar scenes and images now accosted him in a vaguely threatening way. The rushing squad car seemed to be dividing space, the scope of the road passing above and below and around the car. Trees on either side made the bends with the Route, unbroken in their course and dense as smoke. The outer trunks tilted inward, boughs burdened with new green life. Some of the older branches reached out over the road, as if trying to touch the trees on the other side, or trying to smother him. By now the sky was overrun with clouds; the bright vivid