Ghouls

Drunk now, she felt afloat in sickness. The wine exhumed memories she didn’t want; she slid the glass away. A headache flared from temple to temple, like a skewer through her brain. Gradually, the light was making her feel watched; she scanned the walls for holes, the window for faces. When the feeling became unbearable, she snapped off the lamp and let the darkness bury her.

She could hear the storm’s furor thrash the house. She sensed hostility in the rain, a destructive purpose. Again she thought of something formless trying to get in.

Wine and bile merged in her stomach, twisting it to a raw knot. She closed her eyes and saw green, throbbing heads, and when she opened them, the heads remained. Never again, she thought. Never another drop. But she’d made the promise before. Suddenly, the room felt airless; she got up and went to the window as if walking a line for a sobriety test. The ache in her head reared. She knelt before the window, and with a pained whine pushed it open. Raindrops sprayed her cheeks; others trickled down her bare legs like insects. Clean fresh wet air poured into the room.

She listened now, very closely, to the sound of the rain—a sharp, unwavering hiss, like loud static. Next, she looked, homed her eyes on the obscure mass that was the backyard. The rain swarmed. She was bewitched by this teeming darkness; she was drunk. She continued to stare, seduced, almost as if she expected to see something.

But then she did see something.

Two vaguely manlike figures were trudging through the yard, mere etches within the blur of rain; they were barely visible. One of the figures seemed to have something slung over its back.

Vicky slammed the window down and crawled back to the couch. The panic lasted just seconds. As her awareness failed, she convinced herself that she hadn’t really seen anything at all. The figures hadn’t been there, they couldn’t have been. They were simply tricks of vision; it was the wine that had made her see them. The wine, she told herself, it’s the wine. Her senses slipped away then, and she passed out.

Outside, the figures lumbered on.

— | — | —

CHAPTER NINE

Earlier, before the storm and about an hour after Kurt Morris had properly reported Glen Rodz’s findings, a white Dodge panel wagon passed through Belleau Wood entrance number 2. This vehicle was unusually long; its doors bore small, familiar seals and the words PRINCE GEORGE’S COUNTY POLICE TECHNICAL SERVICES.

The crime scene had been promptly designated; stoic county uniforms waited like wraiths as the wagon pulled to a stop. From the vehicle two men emerged, one in street clothes, the other in dark utilities. Their faces were both white, and seemed as bereft of life as masks. The uniforms parted, insensate. The man in street clothes had cameras around his neck. He complained palely about the light and asked for case numbers. Then, with a black Nikon F3T, he snapped innumerable photographs of the coffin, the corpse, and the glove which contained Officer Douglas P. Swaggert’s right hand.

The sky rumbled. The man in utilities looked up in horror. He hastily doled out evidence gloves, and then everyone began moving. The smaller objects (the hand and the arm) were sealed in translucent carriers, carded with the tech’s signature, and placed in cold cans. As the coffin parts were loaded into the wagon, a county ambulance arrived, and from it stepped a young, overly muscled man dressed in jeans and a T-shirt that read ARE WE NOT MEN? WE ARE DEVO. He was the deputy medical examiner; no corpus delicti could be moved, touched, or transported without his authorization. He laughed mightily when he inspected the corpse; his laughter shook the woods. He laughed harder as the corpse was put into the ambulance, and he continued to laugh, to wail, really, even after he got back in himself and rode away.

The sky rumbled once more; the man in utilities seemed hyper. Contact zones were tarp-covered and staked with black 10-mil plastic sheet. The area was cordoned. Then the sky cracked open and poured rain. Uniformed officers flipped coins to see who would take the first watch.

At eight o’clock the next morning, fifteen more county officers gathered at Belleau Wood entrance number 2. They stood closely around the gate. They swapped revolting sexual jokes, and some complained with great hostility about being forbidden to smoke on a crime scene, until Bard and a county lieutenant from Hyattsville took charge. Mark Higgins joined moments later, and then the crowd of blue and gray uniforms was led into the woods to the place where Glen Rodz had found Cody Drucker and Doug Swaggert’s gloved hand. From there they made a systematic grid search of the crime scene, standing in a line one arm’s length apart and scanning the forest ground in a westerly direction to a depth of one hundred yards. Then they repeated this procedure northerly, but turned up no material clues to help explain the events which broke apart a coffin and removed an arm from a corpse and a hand from a living man. Chief Bard swore at no one in particular. The county field commander, Lieutenant Choate, extended the limits of the search perimeter identically on three sides. They searched this way all morning and well into the afternoon and found nothing.

In the meantime, at 3:00 p.m., Kurt Morris put on his uniform and drove directly to the city of Forestville, where he received the preliminary evidence report at the criminalistics facility. Then he returned to Tylersville to relieve Higgins of his shift.

A strange scene awaited him when he arrived at Belleau Wood. County police cars crowded both shoulders of the road. Radio noise filled the air, empty distant voices merged with static. Bruised colors lurked in the sky, an unbroken swath of very low clouds and the promise of more rain very soon. Bard was standing by the open gate, staring at a phone pole on the other side of the road. He stood perfectly still, like an artifact in a museum. Kurt was just a few feet away when Bard finally broke his gaze and noticed him.

The report drooped in Kurt’s hand when he held it out. “How’s the search? Found anything?”

“Don’t make me laugh,” Bard said. He took the report and riffled through it, frowning. “How am I supposed to understand this shit? I’m a police chief, not a medical dictionary. What did the M.E. say?”

“The M.E. hasn’t looked at anything yet; this report’s just a preliminary. But one of the evidence technicians told me that Swaggert’s hand was bitten off.”

“Bitten? Fuck. What about Drucker’s arm? Don’t tell me that was bitten off, too.”

“No, no it wasn’t. It was pulled off.”

Bard’s face seemed to stretch like rubber.

Kurt continued. “He also said that the incisor marks on Swaggert’s hand are probably the same as the bite mark on Drucker’s arm. But he’s got no idea what kind of animal did it.”

“Figures… What about prints? What about the coffin? There must’ve been prints on the fucking coffin.”

“Sure,” Kurt said. “Lots of prints. Pallbearers, funeral staff, the backhoe crew. It’ll take some time to sort them out and see what’s left over. The odd smudges are what get me.”

“Odd smudges?”

“It’s all in the report,” Kurt reminded him. “‘Odd smudges.’ The tech said he’s never seen anything like it on lacquered wood before. Could be a reaction to condensation and direct sunlight, but he doubts it. The coffin wasn’t there long enough.”

“Those dickbrains,” Bard said. “They’re probably just old latents.”

“Nope.”

“What do you mean nope?”

“The tech said they weren’t old latents; I asked him. And he doesn’t think they’re glove prints, either. We’ll just have to give them time.”

Bard uttered an unbecoming remark and scanned again through the report. Kurt looked questioningly into the woods. He caught movement in his direct line of vision—a series of gray blurs which seemed to hover between the trees; they were barely moving if at all. In a moment Kurt realized that the blurs were county police officers searching the woods.

“So I guess we can all use this report to wipe our dicks with,” Bard said with lowering disgust. “A fucking