Ghouls Read Free Page A

town at all, really; it was a road—State Route 154—and all on either side of that road was called Tylersville. Route 154 cut a twisting dozen-mile path through the worst of Maryland’s woods and hills and swamps, and joined the city of Bowie to the south with an extremity of Annapolis to the north. The small, sparse homes and trailers which stretched along the Route, as it was called, did not total more than one hundred, and were it not for the shopping center and the apartment complexes at the south end, there wouldn’t be population enough to even constitute a town. Tylersville had its own police force only because it happened to exist along this sensitive access as a municipality between two sizable cities. The department itself was small, yet crime was barely evident at all save for the drunks and the rednecks and the motorheads who liked to think of Route 154 as a testing track for their hot rods.
    Kurt worked the four-to-midnight shift, and he assumed he’d continue to do so for the rest of his life. The work was tedious, the environment less than edifying, and the pay had never been known to urge him to jump up and down; but he supposed that the job suited him. Beyond his boredom, he found a redeeming function, slight but there. It was a job that had to be done, a job that even offered the chance to help people, and that at least seemed favorable to standing in line at the unemployment office.
    Sometimes it felt as though whole shifts were spent driving the Route back and forth, from one end to the other. He had done this hundreds or perhaps thousands of times, traveling the same miles and looking at the same unremarkable scenery over and over. The bulk of police work in Tylersville wound down mainly to traffic. Speeders ran rampant along the Route, its snake-twisted turns and clean, long straightaways a pronounced challenge for the droves of fast cars which inhabited Prince George’s County; running radar was Kurt’s favorite recreational therapy. The only nontraffic -oriented crimes to occur with any regularity were the weekly weekend fights which erupted at theAnvil (a topless roadside bar) and an occasional domestic flare-up, drunk husbands beating the piss out of drunk wives, though Kurt had known it to be the other way around once or twice.
    I wonder which access? he thought. He scratched absently at the back of his neck, smoothed down dark-blond hair, and then frowned because he knew Chief Bard would soon be yammering at him about a haircut. “The Soul Talk Center’s that’a way,” and “When are you going in for the rest of the sex change?” were two of Bard’s more amusing hints. “Cut your fucking hair or I’ll fucking fire you” was one not so amusing. The sideburns, too, were longer than they should be, but Kurt would put the blade to those without needing to be told; wild, bushing sideburns were consistent traits of all Tylersville’s redneck klan . The very last thing he wanted to look like off duty was a rube.
    The farther north he drove, the poorer the roadside residents appeared to be—their cars older, rustier, their homes more dilapidated, a few probably worth condemning. There were some trailer homes, he knew, recessed deep off the road and in the hills, where the people didn’t even have electricity. Poor white trash...
    The road darkened toward this end, the fir and pine and poplar forest denser here and so tall that the heavy, reaching branches cut off the daylight as the sun moved steadily off. Here there were no homes on the right side of the road, the trees spireing over swamps rather than hills. A glance to the left after another mile, and Kurt saw the wildly overgrown confines of Beall Cemetery occupying a short clearing in the midst of the wood. (It struck him oddly then that so many Maryland cemeteries and funeral homes bore the cryptic name Beall.) He’d always thought the cemetery to be forgotten, but as he looked now he made out a line of cars at the shoulder, and