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 odd-ball 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.
Found 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 soft wood 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 dish rag. 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 shirt front. "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."
"Easy, pal." I finally got him out of the dining room and into
the den, into one of those big chairs in front of the fireplace. I fixed up
the fire some, went out and got the beer and wine. After a glass of the wine
he seemed to calm down a bit.
"I’ve pulled it out of there," Gardner said.
"I’ve unleashed the goddamn parasite and it’s feeding on me.
I feel like I’m inside a husk looking out sometimes... like I
can’t control my actions. Actually saw it... me, take hold of Meko
and... God! It’s got me, Rocky." Suddenly he was keyed up
again.
"Have some more wine." I poured him another glass and he
upended it.
"It soaked up Meko’s energy like a sponge soaks up water. It
was terrible... exhilarating in a way... Evil, Rocky, very evil."
"You’re tired, Gardner. Meko scratched you... you’re not
quite yourself."
"I didn’t kill Meko," Gardner said at the top of his
lungs. "You’ve got to believe me, Rocky. If you don’t
I’ll lose my mind. It’s like that writer, Lovecraft... things are
out there, waiting, just waiting to slip through time and space into this
world. I’ve let one through, and my body is the gate. When the emotions
are up, the ghoul feeds, and then when the emotions die down, the gate
starts to close. It gets sucked back, back to the abysmal darkness beyond
this world.
"I was a fool to try and open the way to let myself be a sort of
human sacrifice, just because I was curious."
A horrible thing went through my mind: Curiosity killed the cat!
"Listen, Gardner. It feeds off emotional stress, right? Well, if
you take it easy, if you let the stress die out cold, can it
survive?"
"I don’t think so... It can at least be controlled."
"Then try and relax." I knew I was talking crazy, but Gardner
wasn’t going to listen to logic. He was too flipped out. I poured him
another glass of wine, and somehow we managed to slip away from the subject
and into other matters.
An hour later we were talking rapidly about anything and everything under
the sun – except the supernatural. When Gardner seemed to have himself
pretty well together, we buried Meko and cleaned the blood off the wall and
tossed the Ouija board out.
As I was leaving for home Gardner said, "Thanks, Rocky."
"All right," I said. "You’ve just been working too
hard. Stress. Get some rest."
He gave me a wan smile as I left him at the door. I drove away from there
with a chill at my back like the North winds blow.
You’ve seen those ads about problem drinkers. The ones that ask the
question: "If you let him drive home drunk, are you a real
friend?"
What the ad’s getting at, of course, is being a friend isn’t
always easy. It isn’t a great lot of fun to tell your old pal that
he’s a goddamned sot and he ought not to drive home; ought not to walk
home, for that matter, in a drunken condition. The good friend is supposed
to do the driving for him, or make him sleep over, offer help in some sort
of way.
That’s what I should have done, and I feel guilty now. I blame
myself for what happened to Gardner. Maybe I could have gotten him a head
shrinker, someone who could have helped him with his problems. I like to
think I didn’t do that because I don’t have much faith in those
folks to begin with.
Whatever the excuse, there’s no doubt I knew my friend Gardner was
losing his grip. I was just foolish enough to think it might go away, like a
cold or something. It’s hard to admit that a friend’s losing it,
that his dough isn’t done in the middle.
I laid low, didn’t call Gardner, didn’t go by. Deep down I
probably didn’t want to see him; didn’t want to look at that wild
look in his eyes, or hear him ramble on about elemental ghouls from beyond.
Truth to tell, if it hadn’t been for something I read in the papers, I
might not have gone by there the night it happened.
I’m not much of a paper reader, and I guess by the time I got to the
article it was a couple days old. Don’t really remember.
Out back of this lumber yard they’d found the body of a college girl
and her head was twisted on her neck like some sort of rubber doll’s
head. That made me think of poor Meko, the way she looked lying up against
Gardner’s dining room wall. The thing got to working in the back of my
mind like a dog scratching at a screen door, wanting to be let in.
But still, I didn’t go over there.
A few days passed, and like before, a couple days late, I read the
newspaper. Found out that there had been two more murders, each as ghastly
as the first. One of the victims had been a college boy, the other a little
girl. Same method of operation. No obvious motive.
I didn’t like what I was thinking, but I couldn’t put it out of
my mind. Five minutes after I laid the paper down I was in my car, on my way
to Gardner’s.
The house was dark again. I got out of my Ford, walked on up to the door
and started to knock. But didn’t. I just didn’t want to hear that
hollow rap of my knuckles bouncing around inside that big old house –
and maybe that wasn’t entirely the reason. Something deep inside me
seemed to say: "Boy, you better be quiet."
I went around to the back of the house and found a window that
wasn’t latched, pushed it up and crawled inside, just managing not to
castrate myself on a nail sticking up in the window sill.
The inside of that room was like being inside someone’s wool pocket.
Couldn’t even see my hand in front of my face.
Although I don’t smoke, I carry matches. You use them in odd ways in
the janitor business – checking corners for dust, that sort of thing. I
peeled one out of the match book I carried and lit it.
I was in Gardner’s art studio. I’d only been in there one other
time when he’d shown me a painting he was doing for a Western
paperback. Canvas made an alley wall on either side of me, and in the
flickerings of the match, I could see the door that led into the hall and
out into the rest of the house.
I started down between those canvases and something caught my eye. About
that time my match went out.
I lit another and held it close to the painting – for that’s
what had gotten my attention – and got a good look. It damn near turned
my stomach, and I tell you true, I’m not a squeamish sort of guy. It
was a painting of a woman, a man, a little girl and a cat. Each of them had
their heads twisted at a crazy angle, tongues hanging out of their mouths
and their eyes popping like huge pockets of puss.
When that match went out I lit another, moved it around to look at the
other paintings. They all seemed to be of the same creature, but in
different poses. The paintings seemed to represent some sort of huge
whirlwind that was equipped with a horrible, toothy mouth. I had an idea
what they were supposed to portray.
Poor Gardner had totally lost it. Those people, those horrible murders...
I lit another match and moved toward the door that led to the hall.
Gardner stood in the doorway, a poker in his hand.
"Gardner, it’s me."
He gritted his teeth and swung. I caught his wrist and pushed him into
the hall, up against the wall. His eyes burned into mine like blow torches.
But most amazing was his strength.
Gardner is a slight man, small boned and delicate, but he tossed me off
like a dog shaking rain from its coat. I went flying down the length of the
hall, smashed into the door that led to the dining room.
Gardner stalked toward me like some sort of great praying mantis, the
poker swinging at his side.
I kicked out at him and hit him in the abdomen, knocked him back about a
foot. Just enough to give me time to open the door into the dining room. At
a dead run I palmed the table and went over it, and behind me came Gardner.
He did the same, but with less effort. I didn’t wait to see him
land.
I went into the den and to the front door, but I couldn’t get it
open. Either the lock was jammed or I was fumbling.
I turned just in time to avoid the poker. The blow would have smashed my
head like a water balloon. It went into the wood of the door and stuck, made
an ear-shattering scrape that rocked me from head to heel.
Gardner struggled with the poker, but it was hung. I hit him with a left
hook to the gut. Once I’d hit Archie Malone like that in a hard bout in
Houston. He’d dropped to his knees like a five-dollar whore, but
Gardner, he kept standing. It just seemed to annoy him.
It did get him away from the poker though, and I gave him an overhand
right to go with it. Must have broken his nose, but it didn’t stop him.
He forgot that poker, and as I wheeled away from the door, he came after me
barehanded.
Gardner’s face was not his own. It seemed as if it had been remolded
by crude and uncaring hands. The eyes were like sparks flickering with the
firelight – for that ever-constant fire was blazing and smoking in the
hearth. The teeth were drawn back in a horrible, ear to ear grin.
For the first time in my life, I was really scared.
"Gardner, I don’t want to hurt you."
He came on quick and silent. I gave him another hook to the middle,
landed a right cross above his left ear. It rocked him, but he didn’t
go down.
"Gardner!" I screamed, and for a moment it was as if he
understood me, knew who I was. It was like something from within him was
trying to grab the reins and whoa back.
"Rocky," he said weakly, "help me." And then the
features that momentarily softened were washed away by a tide of fury and
insanity.
I backed away, got around in front of one of those big chairs in front of
the fireplace. Gardner reached out, grabbed the heavy chair and flung it
halfway across the room, palmed my chest and knocked me up against the
fireplace mantle. The flames licked at my back, scorched my hide through
jacket and shirt. I swiveled to the left, away from the fire.
My hand touched something metal, and when I looked down, saw it was
resting on the fire shovel in the poker rack. I jerked the shovel out of
there and laid it hard upside Gardner’s head.
Blood trickled down the side of his head, and those eyes blazed like
bonfires in the hollows of a skull. They seemed to freeze me.
"Gardner, for the love of God!"
He was on me, his fingers buried in the lapels of my jacket. I tried to
hit him with the shovel again, but couldn’t get in a good whack. Blood
streamed down his face, and that horrible mask of hate was inches from my
face, the teeth bared like some rabid dog... and then the face seemed to
fold down like a jerked blind, and there was Gardner’s face again, his
eyes. Maybe it was just the shadows there flickering in the firelight, but
the demonic face and that of Gardner seemed to shift from second to second,
and then Gardner pushed me from him and turned toward the great hearth. His
legs coiled, and by the time I realized what he was about to do, it was too
late. He leaped straight into the fire, and the flames, like fingers, seemed
to reach out and grasp him.
I tried to pull him out, but he fought me. The last thing I remember was
his face – Gardner’s – and in spite of the damage the flames
had done to it, it seemed at peace. But then maybe I’m just thinking
after the fact, being melodramatic.
The fire wrapped him up and took him away, and what I managed to pull
from there was hardly recognizable as a man.
That’s been a while now, but sometimes I wake up and see that face
Gardner wore, or worse yet, I see him looking at me out of those flames, and
then his blackened body lies before my eyes and I wake up.
No doubt about it, he wanted to die that way.
After the inquest a lot of stuff came out. Seems Gardner had been a lot
worse off than I’d known. Before moving to Nacogdoches he had been a
psychiatrist, but he’d also spent time in a mental institution; even
back then the idea of a soul ghoul had eaten away his rationality They
released him as cured eventually, but...
It doesn’t matter now. Those horrible murders stopped. I put his
paintings in the fire the night he died. Couldn’t see much use in
slandering the man’s reputation further. There was some hullabaloo
about me murdering him, but that didn’t stick. The psychiatric stuff
worked in my favor, and some others who knew him said he’d been acting
awful strange.
Poor Gardner, he was as crazy as a moth in a jar But the other day I read
the paper, and they think they got the Yorkshire Ripper, a fellow more
ghoulish than Jack ever was. Thirteen brutal murders to his credit.
What got me about the article was what was said by those who knew him.
"He was a model son, a perfect husband."
Why do normal people fall off the horse?
I don’t have any answers, but Gardner’s idea, the ghoul ...
just too fantastic. Stuff like that just couldn’t be.
Could it?
Come on back here Thursday, February 26, for another slice of Mojo
pie!
"Beyond the Light" originally
appeared in Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine under the title "The
Soul Ghoul." It was later included in A Fist Full of Stories [and
Articles], a collection published by CD Publications. "Beyond the
Light" © 1981 Joe R. Lansdale. All Rights Reserved.
