Stories (2011)

  He saw the teeth lying in a puddle of blood, and having no choppers of his own—the tooth fairy had them all—he decided, what the hell, what can it hurt?

  Besides, he felt driven.

  Picking up the teeth, wiping them off, he placed them in his mouth.

  Perfect fit. Like they were made for him.

  He wobbled off, thinking: Man, but I'm hungry; gracious, but I sure could eat.

  BEYOND THE LIGHT

  It started about three months ago.

  We sat before Gardner's mammoth fireplace in his overstuffed chairs and drank wine. Gardner always kidded that the fireplace was large enough to roast a hog in, and it was. It was as large and ornate as the rest of the house.

  Gardner had the loot, you see. He was a paperback artist, and a successful one. He had an agent in New York and everything. Big-time fella. I sometimes wondered what he saw in me. I was pretty crude compared to him. Said himself that I had primitive tastes.

  An example is, I'm not really a wine man. I like beer. Any kind of beer. Ice-cold to piss-warm. Put it in front of me, I'll drink it.

  Gardner said that's because I'm a redneck and an ex-boxer.

  Time after time he's said that boxing is a hooligan's way to make a living, and maybe drinking wine will give me a little refinement.

  I doubted it at this late stage. Wasn't that much of a boxer anyway, just a payday fighter from San Antonio. I'd spent most of the time with my ass on the canvas, so about two years back I'd given it up. Moved here to Nacogdoches, Texas, where a lot of my relatives live, opened up a janitorial service with my uncle. He does the books; I supervise the folks.

  Anyway, Gardner has this sort of oddball Continental charm about him, and wine suits him to a tee. So we drank that.

  This particular night we'd had so much of the stuff, I was even starting to like it. He poured us both another glass, put the bottle by his chair, leaned back and said, "You believe in the supernatural, Rocky?" (Rocky's my nickname, after Marciano, of course.) "That sort of came out of left field," I said.

  "Just got to thinking. Do you?"

  "No," I said. "You know me, old redneck. If I can't see it, hit it or bed it, it doesn't exist."

  Gardner smiled and drank a sip from his wine. The fire sputtered in the hearth, lent some flickering shadow to his face, made his eyes look unnaturally bright.

  Meko, his scruffy black cat, strolled out of the dark — we liked to sit in front of the fire with the lights off — and leaped onto Gardner's lap. He stroked her head solemnly. "I do," he said. "I believe ... in something."

  "Not me. No spirits besides those in a bottle as far as I'm concerned. When you're dead you're dead. Just you and the worms for a while, and after a bit, just the worms."

  Gardner scratched Meko gently behind the ears. She purred. If there was one thing Gardner really loved, it was that cat.

  "Did I ever tell you what I used to do, Rocky? The work I did?"

  "No. Guess I thought you were always a painter."

  "Well, I've always painted, and I love it, but before I moved here from Houston I was a psychiatrist."

  "You're joking?"

  "No. I sort of got... drummed out of the business, I guess you could say." He smiled at me with those very white, capped teeth of his. "I enjoyed the psychiatric profession almost as well as my painting."

  "Why'd you quit then?"

  "I said I was drummed out of the business, and I meant that.

  My colleagues thought I was whacko. Don't smile. Lots of psychiatrists are nuts. But don't worry, I'm not one of them. It was my belief, in what we casually refer to as 'the supernatural,' that got me in trouble with the profession.

  "You see, Rocky, I thought the supernatural, or as I prefer to call it, the paranormal, was, and is, just another branch of science we've yet to understand or explain."

  Outside, the December wind had picked up, and the first tentative fingers of a cold rain scratched at the roof.

  "I don't believe in the supernatural," I said, "but I don't see how you believing in it would get you run out of the business."

  "It's witch-doctor stuff to them, Rocky. Doesn't mix well with the image. As a psychiatrist, I dealt with all manner of problems.

  For all the people who came to see me, who needed help, I was only able to really do a handful some good. That was depressing.

  "But what really bothered me were those sent to me by the state. Those that I call 'spontaneous psychopaths.' It was this type that directed me toward my theories."

  "Theories?"

  "These are the sort of folks that seem like normal citizens, show no sign of abnormal behavior, and suddenly they blow.

  They're the Charles Whitmans who climb in towers and rain bullets down on innocent people for no apparent reason. The Mark David Chapmans who step from the shadows to kill public figures against whom they have no grudge. Or the Gary Gilmores who kill and seem totally perplexed at what they've done, even insist that they be killed and put out of their misery, out of the way of society.

  These people are often glad to die, and I think there may well be a reason, a clue in that."

  "I think I slept through part of this," I said. "Or maybe it's the wine. You're not making sense to me." Gardner laughed. "That's what I like about you, Rocky. You're so damned down to Earth it helps me keep my feet on the ground, my head out of the clouds."

  "Thanks... I think."

  "What I'm saying is, these people often want to die because they realize that that's the only way they can get rid of ... this thing."

  "This thing meaning insanity?"

  "Not exactly. There's a lot of badness in the world, Rocky.

  Some of it stems from greed, hate... even love. There's badness that develops out of social problems, racial oppression, but what I'm talking about is something altogether different. I'm talking about true evil, Rocky."

  "I think maybe if I had another glass of wine this would all start to make sense." I tipped the last of the bottle into my glass.

  Gardner got up from his chair and put another log on the fire, took a poker from the rack and pushed it well into the flames.

  Outside there was an explosive blast of thunder that shook the house and charged the air with electricity.

  "What if outside this world as we know it, something waits,"

  Gardner said, hanging the poker in the rack next to the scoop shovel. "A force so elemental it's beyond our understanding. A creature. A thing. Something I've come to call the soul ghoul."

  "Soul ghoul?"

  Gardner returned to his seat.

  "These senseless murders. Why does a normal person spring off the deep end like that, without warning? That's what perplexed me, and I began to pursue the problem, turned to everything I could find for an answer. Even areas where my colleagues refused to look. The occult. I read up on it. Attended seances, examined it inside out.

  "A lot of it's crap, Rocky. No doubt. But I came away feeling that the basic belief that something lies beyond has been with us since the beginning of man, and for good reason. Exorcism and possession first led me to my conclusions. How I arrived at them is rather tedious, but suffice to say I began to believe there was a parasite of sorts that fed on the emotional trauma of men, the energy that one expends in the process of performing fearful deeds, and of course, in dying. The more traumatic the situation, the more energy we expend. And what more is the soul than energy from within?

  "The soul ghoul is like a mind without a body, a soul in search of a house. It uses a human being much like a rider uses a horse.

  "Voodoo has an element of this. When a believer lets down his or her barriers, a spirit enters them. They call it the loa. There are both good and evil loas. Perhaps these evil loas are in fact the manifestation of the ghoul. Call it hysteria if you like, I think not."

  "How could a person know what it was going to get? I mean, a good spirit or bad?"

  "He can't. But I believe this evil spirit, this ghoul of the soul, is attracted to
certain types of people. People whose emotions run deep. Not necessarily intelligent people, or even kind people, but people with odd emotional stirrings that are quite different from their fellows; stirrings that make them game for this... thing.

  "Once it possesses an individual it either uses them up until they are an emotionless, zombie-shell like Chapman, or the fear of it within them drives what remains of the persons personality to destroy it by destroying themselves. As in Gilmore's case."

  "Interesting theory, but a bit difficult to prove, Gardner"

  "Unless one were willing to extend himself, open the way for this ghoul, examine its actions from within."

  "If there is such a thing, and I don't believe it for a minute, wouldn't that be risky? Once it was hold of you..."

  "Maybe. But there are preparations. Things that have come to be called white magic; spells, diagrams and such for warding off evil spirits. It is my belief that there is some scientific reasoning for these things driving back evil forces, that it's not magic at all, just something we call magic for lack of understanding. Whatever it is, it must work, and I have considerable knowledge of these things."

  "You?"

  "Yes, I want to open the way."

  "All right, you want to open the way. How?"

  "Ever play with a Ouija board, Rocky?"

  "No. I know what it is though. Nonsense."

  "Perhaps." Gardner stood up and motioned to me. "Come, into the dining room. I want to show you something."

  Reluctantly, I got out of my chair and followed him to the dining room, which was about the size of my apartment over on Pearl Street. Gardner flipped on the light and except for a table and chairs, and a Ouija board on the far end of the table, it was bare. Of furniture, anyway. The place stank of incense. There were candles of incense in each corner of the room and they sputtered and flickered and gave off an odor like a dog's armpit. On the walls in bold, black lines diagrams had been drawn. A huge circle was drawn around the table in white chalk.

  "The candles, the diagrams, the spell I'll chant, they are the most important part of this. The Ouija is merely a doorway."

  Meko lazily followed us into the room, and Gardner bent down to scratch her behind the ears. "That'll hold her," he said.

  Gardner stepped inside the circle, took a chair in front of the Ouija, placed his fingers on the triangular piece of plastic that serves as the message indicator. I sat on his left.

  "Say this is real," I said, "what happens if we just get someone's Aunt Harriet, or one of those mischievous ghosts, what do you call them?"

  "Poltergeists. Hey, there may be hope for you yet, Rocky. As for Aunt Harriet, I've been experimenting for the last week now, and I've already made contact with this spirit, the one I call the soul ghoul. I feel certain that it's the ghoul; its evil weighs on me like a boulder"

  "Come on, Gardner."

  "Therefore, it's easier to contact each time. One thing, Rocky, will you get the lights?"

  I got up and turned them out, resumed my seat. I was getting a bit impatient with all th is. "Let's get on with it already," I said.

  Gardner began to chant. The words were all nonsense to me.

  Maybe it was Greek or Latin, or both, but after a while he said in English, "Are you there?"

  Nothing happened. There was only the sound of the storm outside, picking up in ferocity. Beyond the windows, lightning spread needles of gold fire across the sky; rain, whipped by the wind, sputtered against the window panes.

  "Are you there?" Gardner repeated. "I am opening the way."

  Truth of the matter is, I guess it was getting to me some. I looked at the window directly across from Gardner and saw eyes.

  Or what I thought were eyes. They were the beams of some car passing on the road outside, and in a moment they passed on.

  "Are you—" and then I heard the scrape of the indicator on the polished wood of the Ouija board. When I looked, the indicator, Gardner's fingers resting lightly on top, was moving toward the left of the board, toward the word YES. It stopped there.

  "Who are you?" Gardner asked.

  The indicator began to move again, tracing its way over one letter after another, gaining momentum as it went. I AM I AM I AM it repeated.

  "What do you want?" Gardner asked.

  YOU it spelled out immediately. THEM it spelled out after a short stall. Well, I thought. Ask a silly question, get a silly answer "What are you?".

  Suddenly the triangle of plastic slid across the board, stretched Gardner's arms to their full length. The plastic slipped out from beneath his fingers and jetted along the smooth expanse of the table, catapulted through the air and struck the window, shattering it. The tail of the storm slipped in and slapped the room from wall to wall. I hadn't realized it was that cold outside.

  "For the love of God," Gardner said softly

  I got up, turned on the lights and sat back down.

  "Now... now," Gardner said, "do you believe?"

  "Nothing to believe. Your subconscious did that, spelled out those words."

  "And tossed the indicator out the window?"

  "It slipped. You were tense and it slipped. The table is smooth, it skipped along it like a rock on a pond."

  "That little plastic thing broke the window by itself?"

  "Gained force as it went. Anything, if it's moving fast enough, can pack quite a wallop. Bantam weights for instance. They hit fast, and can hit hard because of it. It's not just weight and muscle, it's momentum."

  Gardner put his head down on the Ouija. "Just like them," he said.

  "Trying to tell it like I see it is all... I'm a friend."

  "I know, Rocky. Sorry."

  I sat quietly for a moment and then stood up. "Better get that window patched over. It's going to be a cold one tonight. I'll call you later."

  "Sure."

  Meko was in the den. She must have found the goings-on in the dining room too silly for her taste. I scratched her behind the ears in agreement and went out to my car.

  I'm not big on the sort of crap Gardner was feeding me, but it got me thinking. And besides, I was worried about the scrawny rascal. Thought maybe he was starting to cling to the rim. I even went so far as to go to the public library and study up some.

  ound books on ghosts, demons, ghouls, you name it. I went from occult explanations — which were downright silly — to scientific ones. What I got out of it from the scientific end was stuff like Ouijas and poltergeists — which as far as could be told from investigation — were the results of the mind, the subconscious. Which is just what I thought all along. A sort of mental wish fulfillment, I guess you'd say, or perhaps the results of emotional stress. It was a kind of self-hypnosis, and everyone knows strange things happen under hypnosis. Like a hypnotist telling a subject that they've just poured boiling water on their arm, and suddenly blisters pop up. Strange stuff.

  I worried about Gardner for a while, but finally decided he was just under strain. Besides, Gardner was a weird duck anyway. Next time I saw him he'd be off this ghoul stuff.

  It was about three weeks before Gardner and I got together again. I never did get around to phoning him, just went over there one night uninvited with a bottle of wine and a six-pack.

  There wasn't a light on in the house. At first I thought he wasn't home, but the Buick was in the garage poking its butt out shyly at the night.

  I parked, went up the walk and knocked, then remembered the bell. When I was growing up, we lived in the country, and it was rare to find a house with a bell. Everybody knocked. So I'd never quite gotten used to doorbells.

  I pushed the bell a couple of times, but no answer After a minute or two had passed, I yelled Gardner's name, and still getting no response, I tried the door. It was unlocked. I went in.

  The place had a musty odor, like maybe it had been shut up for a while without sunlight and fresh air. Silence crawled through the house like something alive. It was smoky too. A green log smoldered in the fireplace, churned out black
smoke like rubber burning. But that was Gardner. He didn't know softwood from hard, pine from walnut.

  "Gardner," I yelled, and my voice seemed to travel uncertainly through the house.

  "Rocky?" came Gardner's voice; it was weak and whispery, came from the dining room. I went on in there and found Gardner sitting at the table where I had last seen him.

  I turned on the light. The Ouija was in front of him again, only this time it was cracked half in two. Gardner had not fixed the broken window and cold wind whipped into the room and lashed at me like a wet crocodile tail. The hardwood floor in front of the window was warped up a bit from where the rain had blown in, and it looked to have blown away most of the white chalk circle.

  Even the diagrams on the walls looked to have faded. The candles were out and the odor in the room was not due to that nasty incense. It was something else. Breeze down from the fertilizer plant, I reckoned. Bad stuff.

  Gardner was a changed man. It was as if someone had bleached him. His face was as white as a starlet's teeth, his eyes had more red streaks than a chicken yard had scratches, and his hair had that combed-with-an-egg-beater look.

  I walked over to the table and sat down, reached out and touched Gardner's hand. My own hand came away damp... bloody.

  Gardner's wrist was cut up pretty bad.

  "What happened, Gardner?"

  "Meko."

  "Meko did this? Why she's as gentle as a..." and then I saw her.

  She was lying against the wall on Gardner's right. It was as if she had been flung there like a wet dishrag. Her head was dangling at an impossible angle, as if it had been screwed halfway off, and her tongue drooped from her mouth, looked a foot long.

  "What happened?" I asked.

  "The ghoul," Gardner said. "It made me do it... just a little cat's soul, but it wanted to feed; it wanted the energy of something alive.

  Couldn't help it, Rocky, I swear. I didn't want to, but the ghoul wouldn't leave me alone."

  "Take it easy."

  "The board... last time I summoned it, then tried to send it back, it split the board... It was showing me I no longer had control." He reached over and took hold of my shirtfront. "It's inside me, Rocky. Fought it all I could, kept it at bay, but it's getting stronger... The spells, the diagrams. They won't hold it."