Ghouls Read Online Free Page A

chain. And did it ever enter that cement-filled head of yours that coming in here could get you killed? This place was due for a cave-in about fifty years ago… Get out of here, both of you. Find someplace else to make whoopee. I’ve got more important things to do than waste time arresting you two airheads.”
    Stokes leered in the brittle light. “You’re just a fuckin’ pig, that’s all you are.”
    “Yeah, and let this pig give you some sound advice. The next time I catch you in here, you’ll be in the county jail faster than you can say sodomy”—he turned to the girl—“and that goes for you too, Miss Nude America. See what kind of tips you get doing your striptease in the dyke tank.”
    “You can’t talk to me like that!” she shrieked at him. “Lenny, he can’t talk to me like that!”
    “Don’t worry, babe,” Stokes said, and turned to leave. “He’ll get his. Come on.”
    “Oh, Lenny?” Kurt said. “I haven’t seen your wife lately. Did you beat her into a coma again, or did she finally walk out on you?”
    “Vicky knows better than to walk out on me. But then that’s none of your goddamned business, is it?”
    “Sure it is, Stokes. And get this—the next time I hear of you beating up on that girl, I’ll personally shove this flashlight so far up your ass you’ll be able to flick the switch with your tongue.”
    “We’ll see about that, pig. Oink, oink.”
    In the narrow light, Kurt watched Stokes and the girl stumble away toward the mine opening until he could no longer see them.
    He remained in the manway for some time, standing detached and odd. He thought about Stokes and Joanne Sulley, tasting the acrid secret guilt of being pleased that Stokes was still openly cheating on his wife. How much longer could Vicky last with him? She must know of his adultery. That aside, Kurt’s behavior had been inexcusable. Police officers were to treat all people with professional objectivity, but by now he would not even bother lying to himself, or trying to rationalize his unacceptable conduct. When it came to Lenny Stokes, Kurt was simply not a respectable police officer. He knew this now; he’d known it for years. Stokes was more than just a typical town rowdy; it was a personal thing. Kurt hated Lenny Stokes. Hated his guts.
    More thoughts then, ugly, hurting thoughts of Vicky Stokes, and the things Lenny did to her, and must do to her, the beatings, the puffed eyes, bruises turning sallow-black, and the time at the Anvil when Stokes had hit her so hard that blood came out of her ear. It all made him sick, sick at the moving parts of this world, sick at himself. Too many times the daydream spilled round his brain like some rancid, luminous liquid, the vision of his own revolver pressed hard against Stokes’s temple. The hammer dropping…
    He closed his eyes, shook his head till the craze of edging thoughts and scenes had spun away. He continued to stand there, inexplicably, in this absurd mine. Darkness smoked over him from the right, the left, and behind. It chilled a hollow, lonely place in his heart, the silence thickening. He turned the flashlight on and off several times in rapid succession, eyes acclimating indecisively from the strobic exposures of white to black, white to black, and he dared himself, in the childish way, to leave the flashlight off and just stand there, but didn’t for the equally childish fear that something black, half seen, and hideous would reach out, snatch the light away, and crackle laughter.
    Still more thoughts came, weird, disconnected, impossible thoughts.
    The flash back on, he pointed its piercing beam ahead into the mine. From somewhere beyond, water dripped ticking clocklike; dust floated finely across the light. The shaft passage descended deeper and deeper, an endless bore into the earth. Abruptly he turned and began to walk out, the walk becoming a trot, and by the time he’d made it back outside, he actually had been running, because during