The Ghouls

by Fred Crawley

  There was a space between the male and the female that he could still run through. Each step they took narrowed the gap and his chances of getting away diminished.

  He knew they weren’t real. They couldn’t be real.

  He knew that if he didn’t make a choice they would reach him in another two steps and he would only find out one way or another when they started tearing through his flesh.

  It didn’t really seem like a choice. An ancient survival instinct kicked in. His shoes slipped on the stony ground and he almost fell flat on his face. He managed to stay upright and ran. He couldn’t bring himself to look back to see whether the creatures were following him.

  CHAPTER 8

  NATHAN RAN WITHOUT THINKING ABOUT WHERE HE WAS going. Sooner than he had expected he found himself back in familiar territory. The memory of being lost in the dark streets seemed small and unimportant compared to the creatures that he had seen. All of the delusions he had experienced in the past had seemed obviously false once they were over, but now the ghouls were nowhere to be seen and the memory was still vivid and powerful. They still seemed real.

  Exhausted and out of breath he finally had to stop running. The high street was quiet but well lit. In the distance, he could hear people shouting in loud drunken voices. He stumbled along trying to catch his breath, attempting not to think about what he had seen and what it meant.

  He knew that he would have to go and see Dr. Romero again in the morning. He wasn’t looking forward to the conversation but, he supposed, it had been a long time coming. After leaving the hospital, he hadn’t stopped experiencing delusions but he had at least been able to tell the difference between fantasy and reality. Something had changed though because even though he knew that the ghouls couldn’t be real they still felt real and that seemed like the start of a slippery slope.

  If it had been earlier in the day, he might have gone to Dr. Romero’s office straight away. Even though there was a chance that he would be committed there and then. He didn’t feel as if he was mad, but he supposed he never had. But if he was seeing things that weren’t there then he had to be crazy.

  Without really meaning to do so, he found himself walking towards Gwen’s house. Although earlier it had seemed like overstepping the bounds of their new relationship to visit her unannounced, now it seemed like a necessity. If he was going to be committed in the morning, he wanted to see her at least one more time: to maybe touch her hand again as he had done in the pub or to have one last pleasant memory to accompany him to the loony bin.

  Nathan stopped outside the little mid-terrace house with the gravel facade that they had both hated so much. It seemed like a lifetime since they had lived together there. There was a light on in the upstairs bedroom and he imagined her sitting at her desk marking homework.

  He steeled himself for the look of discomfort and surprise that he was sure would greet him when she opened the door. He pushed the creaky gate and took two steps along the path. He stopped and wondered what he was doing. This was not a good idea. What if Marcus was there with her? What if she wasn’t marking homework at all? What if they were...

  Nathan turned away from the door, aware of what it would look like to any of her neighbours that happened to be watching, but he didn’t care. He walked back to the gate and stopped again.

  Fuck Dr. Marcus, he thought. Fuck him and fuck their stupid relationship.

  He turned back towards the door. Was his indecision a symptom of his madness or something else? He wanted to ask someone, but the only person he really trusted was behind those doors.

  “Fuck!” he swore aloud. Talking to himself was the least of his worries.

  With renewed purpose, he walked to the door and knocked: a definite action that he couldn’t take back.

  He heard movement in the house and imagined her pushing back her chair and walking across the room. He imagined her climbing out from under Marcus and putting on a robe. The two realities were both equally plausible and seemed to exist in tandem. Like Schrödinger, he had to wait until the cat was out of the box before he found out whether it was alive or dead.

  The stairs squeaked as she walked down them. A light came on in the living room. He could see movement through the frosted glass semi-circle at the top of the door. A bunch of keys rattled and then the door swung inwards.

  “Nathan?” she said. He could see at once that she had been crying. She wiped her eyes. “What are you doing here?”

  Whatever he had been expecting when she opened the door, it had not been this. Her eyes were red and swollen. Her makeup had run down her cheeks. He opened his mouth to say something, but no words came out.

  “I thought you were Marcus,” she said.

  “Are you okay?” Nathan said.

  “What do you... yes... I mean, no... I...” she sighed. “You’d better come in.”

  She didn’t seem pleased to see him, but he hadn’t expected her to. He followed her into the house and suddenly what he had come to see her about didn’t seem quite so important.

  The front door led directly into the living room. It still looked the same as it had done when he’d lived there, right down to the pictures of her family on the mantle-piece over the fire. The only difference that he could see was that the pictures of the two of them together were gone, but he was pleased to see that they hadn’t been replaced by pictures of her with Marcus.

  Gwen didn’t sit down. Nathan stood awkwardly by the door wondering whether he should make up an excuse and leave. But he didn’t want to leave. The house still felt like his home in a way that his current house never would and quite apart from that Gwen was obviously upset.

  “Has something happened?” Nathan said.

  Gwen shook her head and squeezed her fingers into her eyes as if to stop herself from crying. When she opened her eyes again, she seemed to have regained some measure of self-control. “What are you doing here Nathan?” she said.

  He had come to tell her about what he’d seen and that he was going to see Dr. Romero in the morning. He would probably be committed again and he wanted to tell her that he was being responsible and that even though the ghouls had seemed very real he knew that they couldn’t be. The best case scenario was that he’d only half lost his mind.

  “What happened?” Nathan asked instead.

  “It’s nothing,” Gwen said.

  “Something’s happened,” Nathan said. “Is it your mum?”

  Gwen shook her head. “Mum’s fine.”

  “Your dad?”

  She shook her head again.

  “Are you going to make me spend all night trying to guess?” he said.

  Gwen smiled for the first time since he’d arrived. She shook her head and then she was silent for a moment. Nathan didn’t interrupt.

  “It’s Marcus,” Gwen said.

  Nathan’s heart sank. Of course, it was Marcus, who else could have made her this upset? He wondered if this was how she’d reacted when she’d been told about his accident. He started to ask what had happened to Marcus but before he could get the first word out she told him.

  “We’ve broken up,” she said.

  If he had ever really been planning to tell her about the creatures he’d seen in the alleyway behind the shops, there was no way he was going to do so now. He felt his heart swelling, but he tried to keep the giddy look of joy off his face.

  Nathan closed the gap between them and put a hand on her shoulder. Gwen turned towards him and buried her face in his chest. He held her and she started to cry again.

  He sat on his old spot on the sofa and listened to her moving around in the kitchen. The kettle was boiling and cupboard doors were opening and closing. If he tried really hard, he thought he could forget everything that had happened between them over the last few months and believe that this was any other weekday evening. They would drink a cup of tea together and then go up to bed. They would get up in the morning and dance around each other while they got ready for work. He would drive them there and
they would separate for the better part of the day to teach in their separate classed: her in year three and him in year five. They would see each other in passing but not get a chance to talk until the drive home.

  It was a life that he had never fully appreciated at the time but now would do anything to get back. If there was a chance, any chance at all. He knew that there was no way he could go back to teaching but maybe the rest of it...

  His thought was interrupted by Gwen coming back into the room with two cups of tea. She’d made his in his old Transformers mug and handed it to him.

  She sat down on the sofa opposite with more weight than her slight size should have made possible. She didn’t say anything and Nathan was free to wallow in the fantasy that was just as false as the creatures he had seen before. But this was different; this was something that he wanted to believe and had no intention of fighting.

  “Why did you come here?” Gwen said at last.

  Nathan held the giant mug in both hands and looked at her. He could see that she was tired and still fighting tears, but she didn’t sound angry with him anymore.

  “I wanted to see you,” he said. It wasn’t an entirely false statement. He wasn’t very good at lying, but he thought he might get away with concealing the truth.

  Gwen smiled, but it didn’t reach her eyes. She sipped her tea which must have scalded her mouth if it was as hot as his.

  “What happened?” Nathan said. “With Marcus.”

  “You don’t want to hear about that,” Gwen said.

  It was true, he didn’t, but she looked like she needed to talk about it and he was the only one there to listen. He glanced at the clock nestled between photographs of her family and saw that it was just after nine. It seemed much later.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Tell me.”

  Gwen sighed and he wondered if he’d made a mistake to ask her about it. He didn’t want to upset her but at the same time he did want her to think she could talk to him about anything and he couldn’t deny a sneaking curiosity about what Marcus had done to lose the most perfect woman in the world.

  “It’s been coming for a while,” Gwen said. She looked into her cup rather than at him. “He was...” She closed her eyes. Nathan could practically hear her encouraging herself just to say it. “He didn’t want to have children.”

  It was not quite the explanation that Nathan had expected, but it made sense. He knew that Gwen wanted to start a family more than anything. He suspected that it had more than a little to do with why she had ended things with him. After his accident, there had been no way of knowing whether he would be able to have children.

  Nathan let her cry for a moment and thought that a moment was all she would need. Instead, her tears became sobs that racked her body like a fit. He put his cup down on the arm on the chair and then got up and took hers from her shaking hands before she could spill hot tea all over her legs. He hadn’t intended anything more than that but once he was close to her, she put her arms around him and pulled him close. He barely resisted.

  He sat with her in his arms on the sofa and listened to her crying. He rubbed her back and she buried her face against his t-shirt. He didn’t know what to say, but she didn’t seem to want him to say anything at all.

  Nathan was conflicted. He had never stopped loving Gwen and knowing that she was with Marcus had broken his heart. It had been his deepest wish that they break up and he get his life with her back. But he hadn’t expected it to happen like this. Regardless of that he felt a terrible sense of guilt for taking any measure of joy in her sadness. He loved her and he didn’t want her to be upset, but he was also jealous and angry that she had ever broken up with him.

  Eventually, she stopped crying but Nathan had not managed to settle on what emotion he should be feeling. He played the part of the concerned friend, but he couldn’t stop the bitter ex-boyfriend thoughts from swirling around in his head.

  She held his hand even though she’d stopped crying. He didn’t understand what he was feeling. The day, especially the evening, had been long and confusing and he wanted nothing more than to close his eyes and for it all to be over. The clock above the fire said that it was now gone ten.

  “Do you want to stay over?” Gwen said.

  He turned to look at her and he knew that he should say no. Nathan wanted to be with her more than anything, but this was not the way it should happen. He couldn’t be a rebound for the love of his life. When they got back together, he wanted it to be perfect.

  But what if that never happened? He still remembered why he had come to see her in the first place. The faces of those creatures he had (not) seen in the alleyway were still as clear as if they were standing in front of him. He might be losing his mind.

  On the other hand, he had come to see Gwen one last time. Maybe it was good and right that they be together for one last night. He could still go and see Dr. Romero in the morning and have himself committed.

  Nathan nodded. “Okay,” he said.

  Gwen smiled, but there was still sadness there. “I’ve still got some of your things,” she said.

  “Like what?” he said.

  “Some pyjamas, spare underwear. There’s a new toothbrush in the bathroom cupboard.”

  Still holding his hand she stood up and he followed. Their old bed time routine was still there like a muscle memory and he tried not to wonder if she had done the same things with Marcus. They walked into the kitchen and he filled two glasses with water while she went to the toilet. They brushed their teeth together and then she went upstairs while he went to the toilet.

  He locked the front door and turned off all the lights. Still wondering whether this was the right thing to do but not sure he would stop himself even if it wasn’t.

  When he got into the bedroom, she was already in bed. A pair of his old pyjamas were neatly folded on his side. He took off his clothes and felt strangely awkward about it. He couldn’t remember whether she had seen the scars that covered his legs and torso. He wondered whether the sight of them would spoil the moment.

  “Will you hold me?” Gwen said. Her voice was small and timid.

  Nathan climbed into bed next to her. He tried to ignore the smell Marcus’ deodorant on the sheets. He put his arms around her and she moved into him. He held her tightly and thought that if he died then he would die happy. Something else that he knew was that he wasn’t going to call Dr. Romero in the morning.

  CHAPTER 9

  NATHAN WOKE WITH A START. THE HOUSE WAS quiet and the room was bright. He had been dreaming about his night with Gwen, which had only been three days ago but felt like a life time. In a half-dream state, he could still feel the weight of her in his arms and as he came fully awake, he missed her being there.

  Someone was pounding on the front door. He was at the top of the house at the back so it must have been loud to have woken him.

  He sat up and rubbed his eyes. Since their night together he hadn’t phoned Gwen and she hadn’t phoned him. He wasn’t sure which of them should have been the one to make the first move (or the second, really) but he didn’t want to let her slip away from him again. He climbed out of bed and thought that he would call her that evening when she would be home from school.

  The pounding on the door continued and he could hear a faint voice. Nathan picked his jeans up off the floor and stumbled into them without bothering to put on underwear. He put a dirty grey hoody on over his pyjama top and went to find out what was going on.

  There was no one else in the house. He didn’t know where they had all gone and he didn’t much care. If everything went according to plan, he wouldn’t be living there for much longer anyway. After that night, he and Gwen had woken together in the first light of day and made love. He had known then, that everything was going to be how it should have remained all along.

  On the second floor landing, he heard shouting again and this time he could make out what was being said.

  “Open up! I know you’re in there Nathan. Open the
damn door.”

  He didn’t recognise the voice, but it would have been difficult to do so through the door and up the stairs. Whoever it was sounded angry and he didn’t know why anyone would be angry with him.

  Could it be Dr. Marcus? Maybe he’d had a change of heart about wanting children with Gwen and he’d gone back to her only to find out that he was too late. Nathan felt no sympathy for the man who had practically stolen his life while he was in a coma and couldn’t do anything about it. At the same time though he did feel a little scared: Dr. Marcus was a lot bigger than him, he looked like he probably went to the gym and everything. If he wanted to hit him, there was nothing Nathan would be able to do to stop him.

  He paused at the top of the stairs and briefly considered finding something he could use as a weapon, but he shook his head. It was a ridiculous idea. Marcus was a doctor, not a thug. He didn’t go around hitting people, no matter how upset he might be. Besides, the idea that he would come to his house didn’t make any sense. The few times he could remember seeing the man (they had been in the same room plenty of times, but mostly Nathan had been unconscious) he hadn’t struck him as angry or violent. No, if he really had changed his mind about wanting children, Marcus would be crying to himself in some corner of the hospital.

  “Open the door, Nathan,” shouted the voice. “I know you can hear me.”

  He walked down the stairs. He could see a dark shape distorted by the frosted glass in the top half of the door. He didn’t recognise it. The pounding came again, hard enough to shake the glass and send fragments of refracted light skitting across the narrow hallway.

  Nathan wondered whether he should call the police and tell them that there was a maniac at his front door trying to break in. Whoever it was didn’t look as if they had tea and conversation in mind.