Ghouls

“Get in!” he yelled. “The goddamn radio’s not here.” He started the engine; Vicky hauled her door closed and they wheeled out of the clearing, accelerating back down the road.

“What about these?” Vicky asked, holding up a walkie-talkie.

“They’re useless. They’re only two-way.”

“What are we going to do?”

“Stop at the first house with a phone,” he said, and then the image of Willard’s mansion blinked in his mind. He turned reckless into the next access, and in what seemed moments later, he was jamming the brakes in Willard’s cul-de-sac. “Wait here,” he told her.

He jumped out and raced up the porch steps. He pounded on the door, yelling into the intercom, only then noticing the red light on the alarm jack. Don’t tell me he’s not home. He looked behind him; Willard’s car was not in the court.

He’d have to kick the door in, which was never an easy thing, he knew firsthand. He might need tools to break a door as solid as this. But just as he backed up for the first try, a block of light swung across the porch. He turned and looked into a wave of dazzle. Willard had just pulled up next to the garage.

“Life or death emergency,” Kurt called as Willard got out of his black Chrysler. “I need to use your phone.”

Willard read Kurt’s urgency. He jogged up the steps, thrust a bag of Chinese carry-out into Kurt’s arms, then turned off the alarm system and unlocked the front door. They both rushed in. “To your left, in my study,” Willard directed, turning on a floor lamp. “The phone’s on the desk.”

Kurt picked up the receiver and punched in 911. “We found Glen Rodz’s car in one of the mines,” he said quickly to Willard. “Something happened to the dayshift officer.”

Willard approached the desk, strangely aghast at Kurt’s brief explanation. “You mean you were in the mine? At this hour?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said. “It was awful. I think someone—” but then the line was answered. Kurt spoke very carefully, “Officers in need of assistance at—”

Willard’s hand shot down and hit one of the extension buttons, severing Kurt’s connection. Then he snatched the receiver away and hung it up.

“What the hell are you doing!” Kurt snapped. “I gotta call the county!”

“I’m sorry, but I can’t allow that,” Willard said, and raised a small black automatic pistol with a sound suppressor screwed into the barrel. He aimed for the center of Kurt’s chest.

“You fucking nut,” Kurt said. “Higgins could be dead back there.”

“I’m afraid there are no could be’s about it. You’re very lucky to have gotten out alive yourself.”

Kurt was waylaid, infuriated by this challenge. He felt his gun hand open at his side.

Willard said, “Please do not make any sudden movements. I can pull this trigger much faster than you can draw. Now listen carefully. I want you to place your right hand on the top of the desk.”

“Suck my dick,” Kurt said.

Willard fired one shot a few inches over Kurt’s head.

Kurt placed his right hand on the top of the desk.

“Now with your left hand I want you to reach around and unsnap your holster.”

Kurt did it, thinking, Son of a bitch, son of a stupid fucking bitch!

“With your left index finger and thumb I want you to remove your service revolver by the tip of the hammer and place it on the desk.”

Kurt’s gun clunked on the blotter.

He pleaded with Willard, “Listen, Doctor, I don’t know what’s going on here, and I don’t really care. My partner’s back there in that mine, and I have to get help. You have to let me call the county police. I’m begging you.”

Willard dropped Kurt’s gun into his pocket. He’d been relaxed through the entire ordeal. “I already told you, your partner is dead, rest assured. If you only knew how close you came to death yourself… Less than the width of a particularly fine hair, I’d say.” His voice thickened very subtly. “Death beyond anything you could imagine.”

Kurt felt stripped, an impotent failure, having been disarmed by this eloquent wiseass twice his age. A pain spurred his chest when he remembered Higgins’s screams.

“So it was you who pushed Glen’s car into the shaft.”

“Of course,” Willard admitted, a coy lift to his brow. “Unlike yourself, though, I went into the mine during the day, when it’s much safer. And please know that it gives me no pleasure in telling you that Glen, too, is quite dead. There were no alternatives.”

“You murdered him.”

“More or less.” Willard removed cartons from the bag. “Help yourself, there’s plenty for both of us. Sha Cha beef, Szechuan vegetables in hot sauce, and the best shrimp toast you’ve ever had in your life.”

“You can blow it all up your ass with a funnel and shit it out your mouth. You’ve just confessed to murdering my best friend. Aren’t you going to tell me why?”

“Yes, you are due an explanation.” Willard munched pieces of shrimp toast as he spoke. “I couldn’t quite call it murder; I was merely preserving something far more important than a single human life. Look at it all as in the best interests of science. Glen nearly ruined my plans. I should have done away with him weeks ago.”

Willard ordered Kurt to a chair in the corner, while he himself remained standing. He kept the pistol homed on Kurt’s chest. “After I’d killed him, I logically needed to dispose of his car, quickly and effectively.” Willard shook his head, as though overly displeased with himself. “Things went awry too fast, I suppose; another miscalculation on my part. I thought sure the car would never be noticed at the bottom of the shaft.”

Kurt sat upright in the chair, overpowered by Willard’s unctuous sense of observation. Here was a man who thought of murder in the same light as stepping on ants.

Kurt’s words came out like the whisper of sandpaper. “All those people. Swaggert, the Fitzwaters, those two high school girls. You murdered them all.”

“Good heavens, no,” Willard roused to object. “Glen, yes, and of course Nancy—but only to save my… investment. My pot at the end of the rainbow, if you will. I had no hand in the deaths of all those others.”

“Then who did?”

“The ghala.”

“The what?”

Willard paused to light one of his rank, filterless cigarettes. The lines deepened in his face, as though he were looking for a way to express something immensely abstract.

Then he said, “Even in his most ignorant moments, man has never stopped seeking answers to the questions in life which have bewildered him. Hypnosis, for example, was in use a full century before anyone came close to accurately defining its basis as a psychological phenomenon. Originally it was believed that the hypnotic state was triggered by altering the flow of magnetic fluids in the body—fluids which, we now know, don’t exist. Early Norse and Portuguese seafarers depicted large fish and newfound mammalian life forms as serpents and monsters. The first settlers in New England for years upheld the conviction that lobsters were demonian mascots which crept up from hell through the crevices in the earth. Ignorant? Yes. Superstitious, ludicrous? Certainly. But you see they were only trying to expound a cause of existence for something strange to them, something they’d never before seen. They were only trying to explain something they didn’t understand. Do you follow what I’m saying?”

“Well,” Kurt said, “I understand that lobsters don’t come from hell. But other than that, I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Willard smiled. “Then let me reroute my approach. Today more than ever man excels in explaining the inexplicable. Just look at all the things once thought to defy the capabilities of scientific classification. Black holes, quasars, Easter Island, the Mayans, Kirlian photography, Stonehenge—the list goes on forever. You can scarcely name a major nation that isn’t now undergoing studies in psychic phenomena. The Defense Department allots two to six million dollars per year for research into remote-viewing and controlled out-of-body projection, while the Soviets have documentably succeeded with preliminary experiments in particle-phase teleportation and point-to- point thought transduction. Hence, nothing defies science in the long run; science simply needs more time to catch up with its endeavors.”

“Is there a point to all this, or are you just plain out of your fucking mind?”