by Fred Crawley
Nathan nodded.
A second figure appeared out of the darkness beside the first. It was not the female that he had seen that first night, but it was a woman. She was still bigger than Nathan and fat. She had long white hair and a grey face. She looked about a hundred years old. She was dressed in rags which were adorned with bits of jewellery that looked like scrap metal.
“Who are you?” Nathan said.
“Why can you see us?” the woman said. “What do you want?”
“I don’t...” Nathan had to stop and pull himself together. This did not feel like talking to a delusion. He was beginning to believe that these things, whatever they were, were real. “I don’t want anything,” he said.
If anyone was looking at him would they see the two creatures? He wondered. They seemed to think that they couldn’t be seen, but he wasn’t sure how they expected to hide. They were as real and solid as anything else he had encountered, without the dreamlike quality of a delusion. He took a step backwards, but they didn’t move.
The old woman seemed to be thinking, but Nathan couldn’t be sure. They both stood on two legs like a human and they had a pair of arms and legs each, but they were different. Their faces were lumpy and swollen as if they had been bruised. Their mouths were too wide and their eyes too close together. They looked like a blind man’s drawing of a person.
The woman raised her eyebrows and Nathan noticed how thick her forehead was.
“Where is she?” Nathan said.
The man smiled. He looked like a shaved gorilla and Nathan bet that he was just as strong.
“You’ve done something too her, haven’t you?”
The old woman turned towards the man and said something to him in a short series of grunts and moans. The man seemed to know what she meant and when he turned back towards Nathan there was murder in his eyes.
Nathan took another step backwards and the man matched it. He knew that he didn’t stand a chance against the creature in a fight so he didn’t stick around to have one. He took a final look at the two ghouls and then he turned and ran.
He could hear the man behind him, but he didn’t dare turn back to see how close he was. He hoped that its size made it difficult for it to run, but he couldn’t count on that. There were plenty of things that were bigger and faster than he was.
Nathan ran along the length of the alleyway, but he didn’t turn left at the end to go to the main road. He took a right and ran up the street towards the gate that led into the church.
He could still hear the lumbering footsteps behind him which meant that, even if the ghoul wasn’t faster than him, it was fast enough. He didn’t think the church itself would protect him but the gate that led into the carpark was narrow and made out of thick iron bars. He squeezed through and hoped that the ghoul would have to at least slow down to navigate the tight space.
The bushes on either side of the path shook as he ran past them. At the top of the hill, he could see the road and more cars parked alongside it, but there was no sign of anyone there. There was a light on in the church, but he didn’t dare go towards it regardless of how much he wanted to be around other people.
He ran onto the road and stopped. He was panting for breath and he didn’t know how long he would be able to keep running. Nathan turned back and saw that the ghoul was still coming, but it was twenty metres behind him now, still squeezing past the prickly bushes that lined the path. He started running again.
At the bottom of the hill, there was a roundabout and still no cars on the road. It seemed strange that the streets were so empty because it wasn’t really that late.
He ran towards the shops that he used to visit to buy milk and bread when he’d lived with Gwen. He could see lights in the distance and told himself that there would be people there and that before he reached them the creature would have to give up and go away.
The footsteps continued behind him but as he approached the shops, they seemed to change. They became less lumbering and more steady. When he heard steady breathing, he turned around and saw that the ghoul was gone and the person behind him was a jogger dressed in a high visibility vest with a phone strapped to his arm.
Nathan slowed down outside the shops. His heart was racing and he couldn’t catch his breath. He didn’t know whether he was having another breakdown or not but he didn’t believe it. The creatures were gone but he was sure they were real and they were somewhere out there in the darkness, watching him.
He went into the shop because he needed to be somewhere brightly lit. It was full of students picking up dinner and smiling Asian women at the counter serving them. He stopped at the magazine stand and pretended to be browsing while he caught his breath and tried to work out what this encounter with the creatures meant.
They had taken her. He was sure of it now. But no one would believe him if he went to the police and told them. Maybe it had been stupid to think that he could find Gwen when the police had failed to do so but now he didn’t see any other choice. He alone seemed to know about the ghouls.
“Can I help you?” said a small man dressed in a white shirt with a red tie. He looked about sixteen years old and his face was covered in acne, but his name badge said he was the assistant manager.
“I’m fine,” Nathan said, but he was about as far from fine as he had ever been.
The man nodded and he took a few steps back. He pretended that he was rearranging the magazines but, Nathan realised, he was really watching him because he looked like a shoplifter in his dark hooded top and scruffy jeans.
He didn’t need to give the police another excuse to get involved with his life so Nathan made an equally lame attempt to show that he wasn’t stealing anything. He patted his pockets and glanced at the man. “Forgot my wallet,” he said.
The man smiled, but it was clear he didn’t believe it. Nathan turned away from the magazines and walked out of the shop. The assistant manager followed him all the way to the door.
CHAPTER 15
IT WAS TOO EARLY TO BE AWAKE. SINCE he had been released from Happy Trails Nathan had fallen into a nocturnal sleep pattern, but he was doing his best to break it now. So far he had only encountered the ghouls at night so it seemed logical to believe that he could avoid them if he only went about his business during daylight hours.
The street was filled with mothers and children making their way up the hill to the school. He stood on the road a few metres back, pretending to be on his phone but clearly making a few of the parents nervous. They didn’t recognise him, but he wasn’t surprised. He didn’t look like the same man who had taught at the school for more than a year.
He waited until 0840 when the stream of people going through the gates thinned to the last few stragglers who would have to sign in and give an excuse for being late. For the most part, it would be that their parents weren’t organised enough to get their children to school on time. After enough late slips, a letter would be sent home that they would never read.
Nathan put his phone away and snuck through the gate before it could close.
It felt strange to be back in the playground. He wondered about his old life and what had happened to it. How different would things be if he had never been hit by that car and he was still teaching?
“Can I help you?”
Nathan looked towards the sound of the voice. A middle-aged woman wearing a long black dress that clung to her fat was walking across the playground with a look on her face that he recognised from the man at the shop the other day.
“Can I help you?” she said again.
“Ummm...”
“Do you have a child in the school?” she said.
“No,” Nathan said.
“Then I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”
“I used to work here,” Nathan said.
The woman didn’t look as if she believed him.
“My name’s Nathan Custer,” he said. “I used to teach year five.”
“Miss Flower’s class?”
she said. That was the name of the woman they had brought in to replace him when he’d had his breakdown and it became clear that he wasn’t going to be teaching again.
“That’s right,” he said.
“I’m not sure you should be here,” she said.
“It’s okay,” Nathan said. He smiled. “I’m not going to hurt anyone.”
His awkward attempt at humour didn’t seem to persuade her. It seemed to have the opposite effect. “You’re going to have to leave Mr. Custer.”
“No really, it’s fine,” Nathan said. “I just need to speak to Susan. She knows me.” Susan was Gwen’s best friend and Nathan’s last hope of finding Gwen without admitting that the ghouls were somehow involved. He really hoped that she knew where Gwen was.
The woman shook her head. “There’s no one here by that name.”
“Susan Reeves,” Nathan said. “She teaches reception.”
The woman looked at him blankly and for a moment Nathan began to wonder whether Susan really did work there. Maybe she didn’t exist at all. Maybe, and he found it scary how easy this was to believe, the woman was right about him. He could just be some psychopath who had wandered through an open school gate. He might never have taught here and she might need to call the police to keep everyone safe.
A figure appeared at the door.
“Nathan?”
He turned to look at the person calling his name. It was Susan. She started walking towards him. The woman turned around to see who it was.
“It’s okay Miss Caldwell,” Susan said.
Miss Caldwell frowned.
“I can deal with this,” Susan said.
Nathan was relieved to see her and to realise that he wasn’t quite as mad as that. Lumpy faced ghouls he could deal with, but the idea that he had imagined every minute of his past before the accident was enough to make him consider throwing himself in the river.
The woman looked at Nathan a final time. She snorted and walked back to the door and out of his life forever. Nathan had already forgotten her name.
“What are you doing here,” Susan said. She hadn’t stopped when she reached Nathan and he found himself walking with her towards the bright blue gate which was now closed and locked.
“I need to talk to you about Gwen,” Nathan said.
Susan nodded. She had her key fob in her hand and held it up to the reader on the gate. There was a quiet beep and then the clunk of a lock opening. She pushed open the gate and held it for Nathan.
He walked through expecting Susan to follow him out, but she didn’t. She closed the door behind him and stopped on the other side.
“I’ve got a class to teach Nathan,” she said. “I don’t have time for this.”
“Please,” he said. “It’s important.”
She looked at him defiantly for a moment and then sighed. Her head fell and she examined the floor between her feet for a moment. Then she looked back at him. “I know you miss her,” she said. “We all do.”
Nathan wondered how much he could tell Susan. Certainly not about the ghouls, he couldn’t tell anyone about them. “Please,” he said. “Just five minutes?”
Susan shook her head. “Not now Nathan.”
He thought that was the end of it and in truth he wasn’t surprised. Coming here had been a long shot. There was absolutely no reason why Susan should know anything more than he did. He had been the last person to see her (alive?) and the only reason he had come at all was to delay what he now saw as inevitable.
“Come and see me tonight,” Susan said.
Nathan looked at her. She was examining one of the bars in the gate.
“I should be finished here at five. We’ll go somewhere for dinner.”
Nathan nodded.
“I’ve got to go,” she said. She turned and walked away.
Nathan stood at the school gate and watched until he could no longer see her. He could hear children shouting and laughing and running around. One of the classes must have been in the sports hall. He listened to them until he started to think about his life before the car crash and then he walked away.
CHAPTER 16
NATHAN DIDN’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO UNTIL FIVE o’clock, but he couldn’t spend the next eight hours hanging around the school. He was exhausted and thought that he might be able to get some sleep now that he had a plan for how he was going to find Gwen.
He didn’t really think that Susan knew where Gwen was, or that the police hadn’t already interviewed her. But he thought that he would know the right questions to ask better than they did and even if Susan didn’t know where Gwen was he would be able to rule out that last possibility and go after the people who had really taken her.
The ghouls.
He didn’t know what they were and he didn’t know why they would have taken Gwen. They were things he was bound to find out because the more he thought about it, the more he became sure that they had taken her. He wasn’t crazy, at least not that crazy. For the first time in what seemed like weeks, he felt perfectly sane.
He walked slowly along the street and realised that the police car wasn’t parked outside. He dared to hope that the police might finally have gotten bored of staking out his house and decided to put their time to better use. That was good, he thought, that would make it much easier for him to come and go as he began his investigation.
Nathan stopped at the bottom of the stairs. The front door was open a couple of inches. He could see the dirty white paint on the hallway wall. That didn’t seem right, but it would hardly be the first time someone in the house had forgotten to close the door behind them. Nevertheless, he climbed the steps with a growing sense of unease and pushed the door open gently.
There was no sound in the house which wasn’t unusual in itself. It was perfectly possible that everyone had gone out or that they were all still in bed. But there was a stillness to the air and he could smell something cooking.
He closed the door behind him and crept along the hallway. His footsteps sounded obscenely loud. The house had the feeling of a church mid-prayer.
The kitchen door was ajar. Nathan stopped outside it for a moment and wondered whether he should go in at all. Maybe it would be better to try and ignore the strangeness and just go straight up to his room. But he knew he wouldn’t be able to rest until he found out there was nothing to worry about.
He pushed open the door, wincing as it creaked and echoed around the silent building. He couldn’t even hear the sound of cars driving by outside.
He saw at once what the smell was. There was a frying pan on the hob and a bright blue flame underneath it. Smoke filled the air but for some reason it hadn’t set off the smoke detector.
Nathan walked to the oven and switched it off. He picked up the pan and dumped it in the sink. He turned on the tap and the water hissed and added steam to the white smoke in the air. There were two barely charred eggs stuck to the pan. He left it there, no way was he going to spend an hour scrubbing that off. Whoever had done it could buy a new frying pan.
He turned away from the sink. The same stillness pervaded the room. Even waving his arms around in a lame effort to clear the smoke didn’t help much, so he walked to the window and opened it.
Nathan leaned against the work surface. As the smoke cleared, he began to make out the dark shape of someone at the table. He couldn’t see who. They were bent over, apparently asleep.
Anger suddenly flared up in him. Whoever the mystery cook was they might have burned the whole house down. They might have killed everyone.
“Hey!” he said.
They didn’t wake up.
“Hey!” Nathan said again. He reached out and pushed them. The smoke cleared enough for him to recognise Aaron. He didn’t stir. “Aaron,” Nathan said. “Hey!”
The anger that had been so quick to appear faded slowly and was replaced with concern. He didn’t know much about the other people in the house, even with Libby he had only scratched the surface, but he knew that Aaron had been an alcoho
lic. Whether it had been his drug of choice to cope with the psychosis or the cause of it, he didn’t know.
He pushed Aaron again. He didn’t offer any resistance. A third push and he overbalanced slid from the chair and landed on the floor with a meaty thud.
“Oh shit,” Nathan said. He bent over Aaron and tried to help him back up but he was a dead weight and Nathan wasn’t strong enough to lift him. “Aaron?” he said.
No response.
He raised his voice and tried again. “Aaron are you alright?”
Still no response and now he was starting to get scared. He had heard plenty of stories about alcoholics who got clean for a while and then went back to drinking. Their bodies couldn’t handle it and everything shut down. He thought about the drink he and Libby had shared the night before. Had they left it out somewhere? Had Aaron seen the bottle and not been able to resist it. Shit, had they killed Aaron?
“Aaron wake up!” he said. He was practically shouting now and he expected everyone else in the house to come running to see what was going on, but no one did.
He knelt down beside Aaron and wished that the air would clear already. He didn’t know what he was doing, but he thought he would be able to do it a lot better without the funhouse smoke getting in the way.
“I’m just checking your pulse,” Nathan said.
He had seen them do it on television plenty of times, and, of course, he had done it to himself. Nathan took two fingers and held them against Aaron’s throat just beneath his jaw. He closed his eyes and started to count, but he couldn’t feel anything at all.
“Shit,” he muttered to himself. He wasn’t cut out for this. He didn’t know what he was doing. He reached for his phone but then remembered that he didn’t have any credit. He was pretty sure that it was free to phone 999 but because he had no credit he hadn’t taken it with him when he’d gone out. There might not be time to go all the way up to his room to get it. If Aaron was dying, then every second counted.
