Ghouls

click.

“Son of a bitch!”

Kurt flipped open the cylinder—there were no bullets in the chambers. The dump pouch for his speed-strips was empty.

He threw the gun as hard as he could. It smacked solidly into Swaggert’s head, denting the skull, then clunked down the stairs. Swaggert stopped, paused for a senseless moment, then continued to mount the steps.

Kurt spun and raced up the steps himself—only to collide with a scalped, bilge-faced Harley Fitzwater on the landing.

Kurt was trapped on the stairs.

A fat, squishy hand plopped on his head. It slid wetly down his hair, grabbed his ear, and pulled.

“Where’s my Donna?” came Fitzwater’s ruined, liquid voice. The grip tightened. Kurt’s ear was twisted half off.

“Hey, you walking shithouse! That’s my ear!”

“Where’s my Donna?” Fitzwater gurgled again, spewing dark slime. “You find my Donna.”

Swaggert converged, twitching and dripping muck. Kurt could feel the blood pulsing out of his ear. Fitzwater held him by pinned elbows, lifting him up. Swaggert prodded him with his stump, jabbed him, and clubbed him with it. He pawed Kurt’s face with a gnawed hand, smearing his chin with some vile-smelling ooze. When Kurt parted his lips to yell, Swaggert’s rotting fingers popped into his mouth and wriggled.

Life’s a bitch, Kurt thought. He wedged his foot against Swaggert’s chest, as if on a leg press. Then he shoved. The corpse thunked noisily down the steps, where it broke apart and collapsed to a pile of rot.

Next, Kurt socked a hard elbow jab behind him, and felt bones give way beneath the blow. He jerked himself free and turned, then slammed his fist into Fitzwater’s lopsided head. Something crunched, as apples might when stepped on. One of Fitzwater’s eyes burst like a blister.

“I’m kicking your ass, you dead piece of shit,” Kurt said. He beat the thing to the floor with his fists, then kicked viciously until the gas-bloated body split open and spilled a slew of maggots and putrefactive slop onto the carpet.

Kurt leaned back, exhausted. He watched Fitzwater’s body deflate where it lay. It percolated, head lolling, arms and legs draining flat. Soon it had sunken completely in on itself, like a punctured blow-up doll.

His face long with loathing, Kurt descended the stairs. He held his breath as he stepped over Swaggert’s heaped remains. He could actually see the stink wafting up from the pile, like heat waves on hot asphalt.

Only a dream, he thought in the dream. He laughed and went into the den. Blood was streaked all down his shirt, his ear barked with pain, and he could still smell the charnel stench. But he’d won, he’d beaten the things. At least until the next nightmare.

The den’s soft light comforted him, made him feel at home. He opened a window and leaned out. Fresh air at last—he breathed in deeply, gratefully. The sinister fog was gone, of course, and so was the wisteria. Quiet and sanity returned to the house. He looked out into a calm, commodious black, which didn’t seem right after all he’d been through. The obtuseness of dreams never failed to confound him. He smiled and thought of pleasant things.

The window slammed down on him, like a guillotine.

His shoulders and head were trapped outside; he was pinned to the sill. Fog rose in seconds—the window bit down harder on his back. He couldn’t move. He couldn’t free himself.

And he couldn’t escape the sight of Donna Fitzwater’s flesh-specked skeleton as it limped hastily toward him, out of the fog.

Her skeleton arm shot out. Fingers of bone hooked into his eyes, and his scream spiraled away up into the dense, windless night.

««—»»

Kurt woke on the shatter of vertigo. The couch seemed as cramped as a casket. Had all his nerves dissolved? The dream had sapped him, left him to feel as though his head had been shoveled out.

He needed light. He turned on the lamp, the same lamp in the den of his dream, and then the room was draped with unnerving shadows. His makeshift bed was a wreck, pillow squashed, sheets routed; no doubt he’d tossed and turned during the nightmare, like a blind man being flogged.

He lit a cigarette and walked about the room, hair tousled. He tugged his briefs up, as though someone might be spying on him, then he slipped on his robe. When he noticed the window standing open, he rushed to it and slammed it shut.

Had the dream meant something? Perhaps his subconscious was trying to drive something home, rub his face in an idea. It wasn’t hard to figure. Some believed that dreams functioned thematically—people, objects, and events were really symbols that served to relate something abstract and psychological. In that case, then, some hidden part of himself felt responsible for Swaggert and the Fitzwaters.

Others believed in dreams as vehicles of portent, each a train of images which forewarned the dreamer of impending danger.

Nonsense.

The cigarette tasted rancid, compounding for him the all-too-familiar acridity of smoker’s sleep. He stubbed it out and moments later lit another without being aware of it.

As the promise of further sleep became more and more a lie, he remembered what had happened at Squidd McGuffy’s earlier that evening. Glen’s behavior there had been explicitly odd, but then Kurt had to admit noticing a certain oddness about Glen lately. Nancy Willard, of course, was the girl Glen had meant—and refused to identify— in their conversation at McGuffy’s. And, of course, he hadn’t revealed to Kurt what Nancy had said, just that it was “Something crazy.” “Something impossible.” After that, Glen had withdrawn into a blank- faced haze. Perhaps it had been the alcohol—Glen had tossed back quite a few—but Kurt sensed a more complicated root. All he knew was that something had Glen worried nearly to the point of panic, and that suddenly he wished not to speak of it. Instead, Glen had finished his beer and had left, muttering the intention to go home, pass out, and start all over again tomorrow.

Kurt had waited at McGuffy’s another hour. Nancy Willard had never shown up.

He sat down and jumped back up again when he heard tapping at the door. It was going on 4:00 a.m. The door creaked open a few inches; Vicky peered in with apprehensive eyes.

“I saw your door opened a crack,” she said, “and the light on.”

Kurt sat back down, relieved. “Come on in. I need the company.”

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said, coming in. She wore a shiny lavender-tinted slipgown with a flowered pocket on the hip. “I kept having these really scary dreams, you know. The kind that make you afraid to try and go back to sleep.”

“Well, don’t feel bad,” Kurt said. “Nightmares seem to be contagious around here these days. The one I just had would make a great script for Tales from the Crypt.”

She looked down at the floor, as if sorry for something. “I dreamed that something bad happened to Lenny,” she said, fiddling with the fringe of her pocket. “At least I think it was Lenny, because Joanne was in the dream, too, and…”

“Forget about it,” Kurt cut in. He didn’t like to see her distressed; she’d had more than her share in her life. “It’s a load of crap—all this stuff about how dreams reflect our inner selves. Christ, I’d be on a nut ward if that were true.”

“I guess I just feel bad about what happened to our marriage. Sometimes I think it’s my fault, that things went the way they did because I was a crummy wife.”

“Horseshit,” Kurt said. “You’re a thousand times the wife he ever deserved, the shit—” but he cut himself off. He was meddling again.

“Oh, Kurt,” she said in a frivolous, sing-songy voice, “you’re always so supportive. Maybe I should’ve married you.”

“Well I sure as hell didn’t twist your arm to marry Lenny.”