Ghouljaw and Other Stories (36 page)

In the end, it was congestive heart failure. It was morning and Luther was the only one in the house with her. Luther’s father had called to see how she was feeling. Luther, groggy and fussy from being roused from sleep, went in to check on her. Sun streamed into her room, making the death smell something discordant, perverse. There was a wet clicking in her throat that he mistook for shallow breathing. He couldn’t get her to wake up.

A few days after the funeral, Luther weakened under the weight of curiosity about how much money remained in the toffee tin in his grandmother’s bedroom. Eventually, he grew eager enough and unforgivably desperate enough.

With the exception of the bed being stripped from where the paramedics had removed his grandma, everything in the room was the same. Without giving the strange sensation of compunction too much consideration, Luther strolled over to the mirrored vanity and carefully (
Why carefully? No one was home
) pulled open the middle drawer. Reaching in, his fingers did not touch the cheap metal corner of the toffee tin but something else. The papery corner of something. A large business envelope. He warily withdrew the swollen device, instantly imagining it bloated with money.
She must have cashed out the entire account,
came the reprehensibly giddy possibility.

Luther unclasped the envelope, widened the mouth with two fingers, peeked in, and frowned. Cautiously, he began removing what he thought must be financial documents. Instead, what he extracted was a stack of drawings. Up to this moment he hadn’t invested a second thought about what had happened to them: he’d simply discarded them, left them neglected on the kitchen table—a six-year-old boy’s pencil sketch of a statue in the city, a ten-year-old’s strangely detailed rendering of a bat, an adolescent’s wasp, a cluster of bare trees with leaves scattered around their roots. Art assignments from elementary school, projects from high school he thought he’d pitched. All painfully amateur.

His grandma Gladys had used jute twine to bind the thick stack of drawings and sketches together. Luther had never seen the envelope in the drawer before, and its mere existence now was a crystal-clear transmission that connected with gut-wrenching resonance.
She knew
.

Inside the envelope was one last thing, an index card with a single scrawled line,
Glory be to God for dappled things,
along with the initials
GMH
. He’d automatically assumed they were his grandmother’s initials. Luther had dismissed it, slid the contents back into the envelope, and hid the homemade booklet in his bedroom, thinking about the situation as little as possible during the following year. Liberal quantities of pot helped. Drinking proved to be a useful distraction. And Misty’s kinky physical allowances occupied the remaining space of his hollow conscience.

Now, Luther was recollectively yanked away from his grandmother’s empty room and back into Irene Crawley’s living room.

The old woman gave a ragged cough into her liver-spotted fist. After a while: “I know it may be difficult for you to discuss, but I understand you were with your grandmother when she passed on.”

From far away, Luther heard the echo of that boggy noise in grandmother’s throat, heard the panic in his own voice as he called his father, incapable of knowing how to help. He looked down at the dog tags. “Yes,” he said, “that’s true.” The ensuing silence urged Luther to add, “I couldn’t get her to wake up.”

The old woman’s voice sounded weird now. “She thought you were something speckled,” said Crawley, and then corrected herself. “I mean
special
. She thought you were something special. Did you know that?”

Again Luther wondered if the old woman was having some sort of health event, and he was about to ask if she was feeling all right when the old woman teetered, barely clinging to the fireplace mantel. Luther rushed forward, scooping one arm up under the woman’s armpit before she collapsed with too much momentum. She weighed very little. “Are you okay?” Of course she was not, but it was all he could think of saying.

Irene Crawley’s breathing had grown staticky with congestion. She let go of the mantel and sagged against Luther’s chest. “Not . . . feeling . . . as spry . . . as I used to.”

Something flared in Luther then—a lukewarm anger at Irene’s son for replanting her here in Deacon’s Creek and leaving her alone so that his family could go on some sort of trip. Why had he brought her home to fend for herself? The small old woman rested her scrambled white hair against Luther’s sternum. “You mustn’t . . musn’t . . . take your family for granted . . . no matter how small or insignificant it may seem . . .”

“No,” agreed Luther. “No, you can’t.” He began edging away from the fireplace with the intent of settling her on the sofa, the awareness was very real that he needed to call his dad or an ambulance or something. “You might feel better if you sit down.” His attention grazed the dog tags, but he just as quickly dismissed them. “We probably need to call somebody.”

Irene’s body sagged but, somehow, grew strangely heavier. Her voice quavered. “Someone’s calling right now,” she said. “Can’t you hear them? They’re talking about you and me this very instant . . . how you’re carrying a sick old woman to a sofa.” Luther didn’t respond as he continued carrying the sick old woman to the sofa. There was a moist clicking in her throat before she said, “Did you ever . . . pay me back?”

Though still hoisting the woman, Luther froze. “Pardon?”

Something else was in Irene’s voice now—something like mischief stitched with meanness—“Did you ever pay
me
back?”

Luther kept his eyes on the cushions of the sofa. A dizzying thought poured into him:
She’s been here the entire time—she’s been in the house while Misty and I . . .
“Pay you back”—he licked his lips—“for what?”

And then Luther angled his face down as Irene Crawley simultaneously looked up at him.

It was not Irene Crawley. Instead it was the exaggerated, gray-and-waxy deathbed face of his grandma Gladys—eyes rheumy and sunken in purple-rimmed sockets, her semi-translucent skin riddled with branches of dark-colored veins. Her lips were curved up in a giddy rictus, exposing glistening teeth, their stunted size and blunt shape resembling perverse, oversized baby teeth.

Luther was paralyzed, still cradling the thing in his arms when it started talking again, its mock-infantile voice twined with a vibrating buzz. “You should have paid me back when you had the chance.” A puff of compost-fetid breath escaped its chapped, rapidly moving lips. The corpse’s long-fingered grip tightened around Luther’s waist as he began to struggle. “I knew you were stealing from me, boy . . . boy . . .
grandboy
. . . I could have told your father, but
no no no
. . . I didn’t . . . I was charitable . . .” The thing’s voice began deteriorating into something high-pitched and keening, but its spoiled face and bugged-out eyes were still trained on Luther. “Your little talisman won’t help you now . . .” Luther didn’t care about the damn dog tags.
“And your whore is in for a pleasant surprise she finds what we’ve left of you . . .”
As a punctuation to this Luther felt the elderly thing’s arms constrict with scream-worthy strength, but the cry was stifled by the sensation of additional appendages coiling around his midsection. The septic tank smell worsened. The thing imitating his grandmother began to convulse and shiver as the bad-transmission flickering of her body resumed. But this time Luther could see what was underneath.

The rattle-shock sight of segmented legs momentarily slowed his struggling—caramel-colored appendages had extended through the grafted image of flesh and fabric along either side of her—
her?
—ribcage. But it really wasn’t a ribcage, was it? Luther saw now that there had never really been clothing or flesh. Luther continued a futile fight with the shiny, brown-shingled exoskeleton of the insect wrapped around his waist.

Still towering over the thing, Luther spotted a pronounced set of pincers at the ass-end of its pill-shaped abdomen, each curved pincer the size and shape of a large farming scythe. But that was not the worst.

His grandmother’s face remained as it was in its deathbed defilement, as if something had impishly undone all the work of her coffin presentation. That wasted mask—the bulbous, eager eyes, the sharp, incisor-stunted teeth—was fixed on Luther at a hungry angle, and an aroused cicada buzz swelled within the room.

As if pressing against aquatic resistance, Luther felt himself lift his leg and kick out toward the fireplace, solidly connecting with the stone hearth and heaving his weight backward.

The insect cleaving to Luther with its gray-grafted skin was still holding fast, and the momentum of the kick sent both of them to the floor, the hybrid horror of bug-and-grandma landing on top of him. Luther’s panic included everything except a scream as he wriggled and flung his arms—his knuckles struck the leg of the coffee table, he arched his back to stretch out toward it. In a desperate, wrestler’s lurch, Luther ground down his shoulder and pivoted his upper body to caterpillar-crawl away from the thing.

The dog tags slid off the coffee table, falling to the carpet with an aluminum jingle. Luther’s fingers clawed at the necklace, and with jittery coordination he got the ball chain wrapped around his fist, the sharp-edged plates protruding between his knuckles.

A well-placed punch may have done the trick, but a punch punctuated with a dull-razor laceration had a more pronounced effect. Clenching his teeth and again facing the exaggerated death mask of his grandmother, Luther struck out with several mad slashes, the thin blades connecting, one swipe in particular opening a ragged, diagonal gash from eyebrow across the nose and down to its lower lip and chin.

The noise it emitted was either pain or surprise, but it was not human—a sub-audible keening that filled Luther with images of lightless tunnels choked with oily, carapaced profusions of skittering, chattering, beetle bodies trampling one another along with the black soundtrack of clacking communication.

The thing rose up just enough for Luther to get his palm under its chin. He pivoted and shoved the thing off of him, sliding out and pushing himself up to all fours, his sneakers finding traction on the carpet as he raced out of the living room in an unsteady, headlong sprint, racing through the darkened corridor. But as he propelled himself across the hardwood floor of the kitchen, Luther slipped, his sneakers catching with a yelping squelch, flailing his arms to hold his balance and teetering toward the lip of the sink to steady himself. It only took a half-second glimpse, but it was sufficient. As though regurgitated from the garbage disposal, the sink contained a blossom-shaped stain and a dark streak of viscous liquid, as though a wide-bristled brush had been used to paint a single bar of foul-smelling, coffee-colored slime.

Luther sprang away from the sink and advanced through the threshold of the back porch just seconds before he heard the maniacal typewriter clacking of skittering legs on the kitchen floor. He was through the French doors and in several strides had reached the screen door, when he felt the pill-shaped form strike him low on his back, slender appendages wrapping around his torso. The momentous impact sent Luther hurdling forward, the unlocked rickety screen swinging open in a wide swipe. Luther careened off the porch steps and clattered to the concrete walkway surrounding the pool. He felt the metallic sourness of blood on his lower lip where he’d struck the concrete, his arms shot out to grab anything, and he succeeded only in knocking over the stack of chemicals and cleaning supplies, toppling them into the pool as he struggled to free himself from the segment-slender legs.

The thing on his back loosened its grip long enough for Luther to roll on his side.

The broadcasted illusion had ceased entirely, and now the thing attacking him was simply a slick-plated bug reeking of rot and clinging to his midsection.

The false flesh of his grandmother’s face had disappeared and was replaced by features honoring the insectile aspect of the rest of its body—the whirring antennae, the bulbous, obsidian eyes, the fine filaments and shivering feelers quivering within its moistly moving mandibles.

Luther made a final pivot-yank with his upper body and felt himself falling, registering descent a millisecond before being enveloped by water. The insect unclasped Luther, who bobbed out from the water with a violent swipe at his eyes, gasping for air and steering toward the edge of the pool, hauling himself out and ass-scooting away from the water.

With fluid fury the insect writhed to find purchase on something, but struggled too long where the chemical spill had been most potent. Finally, one of its numerous legs caught hold of the ladder, and it clattered out of the pool. Now—still catching his breath in sharp hitches—Luther saw the entire insect. About four feet long, the oily segments and caramel-colored plates of its exoskeleton reflected the summer sunshine with an almost hypnotizing luridness as it made a skittering retreat from the pool.

He pushed himself off his rear end and sprinted toward the tall gate of the privacy fence, looking over his shoulder to see the insect scuttling toward the bushes, disappearing near the crawlspaced foundation of the home.

Luther felt the self-preservative compulsion to run, sprint, scream, and swing his fists, but he faltered on the sidewalk outside the house, the lacy awning of overarching tree limbs shading him. He could still taste chemicals on his lips, smell them soaked in his clothes.

Luther skimmed the exterior house, looking from window to window; but his appraisal finally settled on the lower skirt of the home where the decorative shrubs surrounded the structure. He heard something rustling in the shrubs—heard something twitching the leaves in the trees all around him: normally he would have disregarded it as a squirrel or a bird, but he was now uncertain about the true source of the sounds. The thought of overlarge insects smoothly creeping along the limbs of the elms and sycamores urged Luther to keep moving.