The Ghouls

by Fred Crawley

  He stopped in front of Courtney’s bed.

  “I wondered when you’d come to see me. Sit down.”

  Nathan sat down at the end of Courtney’s sleeping bag. He stretched his bad leg out in front of him and tucked his good one beneath.

  “You want a drink?” Courtney said.

  Nathan shook his head. “No thanks.”

  “Suit yourself,” Courtney said.

  He wasn’t sure where to begin.

  “You want to ask me about them things,” Courtney said.

  “The ghouls,” Nathan said.

  “That’s what you call them?” Courtney said.

  “That’s what they’re called,” Nathan said, although he didn’t know how he knew it.

  “So what do you want to know?” Courtney said.

  Nathan wasn’t sure. He wanted reassurance, but he knew that Courtney couldn’t give it. He would settle for more information, though. “You can see them too?” Nathan said.

  “Have done,” Courtney said. “Not for a long time, though.”

  “What happened?” Nathan said.

  “Son, you do not want to hear my tragic story and it ain’t nothing compared to yours.”

  Nathan thought that he did want to hear Courtney’s story. He was sure it would explain a lot about the man, but it was clear that he didn’t want to tell it.

  “What do I do?” Nathan said.

  “Not a whole lot you can do,” Courtney said. He picked up a bottle. Nathan could smell vodka.

  “You don’t see them anymore?” Nathan said. “They aren’t trying to hurt you?”

  Courtney put the bottle back down and sighed. “Now I didn’t say that, did I?”

  Nathan didn’t speak.

  “They aren’t out to get you, Nathan,” he said. “Least, not as far as I can tell, but I’m not exactly the world expert on the things. I reckon they’re just looking after themselves. They think you’re a threat.”

  “How can I be a threat?” Nathan said. The idea was ridiculous. He couldn’t hurt them, he couldn’t even make anyone believe they were real.

  “Because you can see them,” Courtney said. “They’re trying to hide, but you keep noticing them.”

  “I-- but...” Nathan didn’t know what to say. The idea settled over him and it was as if he had worked it out for himself. He knew that Courtney was right, but he couldn’t say why. “How did you stop seeing them?”

  Courtney was quiet for a moment. Nathan didn’t interrupt him. “Because I don’t leave this place,” he said, his voice quiet and thoughtful. “As soon as I go into the city they’ll know I’m there and that I can see them. They’ll come for me.”

  “So you’re hiding here?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you think I should hide as well?” Nathan said.

  “That’s up to you son,” Courtney said. “But if I was you... well, I was you and here I am.”

  “I can’t-- I can’t just spend the rest of my life here,” Nathan said.

  The bottle scraped across the floor again, but Courtney didn’t say anything.

  “They’ve got my girlfriend,” Nathan said. “They’ve killed my friends.”

  “Your girlfriend’s dead,” Courtney said. “You won’t get justice for her or your friends.”

  “The police think I did it,” Nathan said. He couldn’t contemplate the idea of just giving up. Whatever had happened to Courtney he had said himself that it hadn’t been as bad. Nathan was a wanted criminal, but he hadn’t done anything wrong. He had no intention of spending the rest of his life living on the streets.

  “You’ve got to make your own decision,” Courtney said. “But you can’t un-see them. If you want my advice, you’ll give up, try and make a life for yourself here.”

  Nathan shook his head. He’d come to Courtney looking for advice, but this wasn’t what he’d wanted to hear. He refused to believe that there was no way out of this. “You’re wrong,” Nathan said. He started to stand. In the short time that he’d been on the floor, his bad leg had seized up and he stumbled as he stood.

  “That’s for you to decide,” Courtney said. He didn’t sound angry that Nathan didn’t believe him. He didn’t sound anything at all except drunk. “But don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

  Nathan was still shaking his head. “She isn’t dead,” he said. “I’m going to find her.”

  He wanted Courtney to tell him that he was wrong. He wanted him to argue back so that he could shout at him and tell him that he was a coward but even while he thought it he knew that it wasn’t true. Courtney might have given up, but he wasn’t a coward. Nathan thought that he had sacrificed a lot and probably kept a lot of people that he loved safe by hiding from the ghouls.

  “I’m going to find her,” Nathan said. His voice slightly raised but far from a shout.

  Courtney sucked on the bottle in his hand. He didn’t say anything.

  A moment passed and then Nathan accepted that he wasn’t going to be stopped. He turned away from Courtney and limped along the great warehouse towards the door on the other side.

  CHAPTER 25

  THEY WERE EASY TO FIND NOW. STILL BURNING with anger after his discussion with Courtney, Nathan found himself at the station. He hid in the shadows on the other side of the road behind a bus stop, in front of the old brown building covered in scaffolding. There were bright yellow police jackets everywhere and cars with flashing sirens parked on the road.

  It was crazy for him to have gone there, but a part of him knew it had been the right choice. He was sure that the ghoul’s lived somewhere nearby and now that he was there he saw that he was right. There were a dozen of them moving around in the darkness behind the police officers who didn’t seem to notice them at all.

  Nathan watched and waited. Neither the police nor the ghoul’s seemed to notice him and he intended to keep it that way. He was there to observe and nothing more. He wanted to know where they lived because that was where he would find Gwen. He needed to believe that she was alive and when he closed his eyes at night he needed to know where she was.

  A man passed behind him, talking in a loud voice to someone on his phone. Nathan turned, but the man didn’t even glance in his direction. He seemed to be as invisible as the ghouls to some people.

  He turned back to the station, but nothing had changed. The two groups that he was desperate to avoid, but had come seeking, swarmed around one another. Nathan leaned back against the railing that surrounded the brown building and waited.

  Nathan watched one of the ghouls break away from the others. He clutched the knife and stepped away from the railing. As far as possible he stayed in the shadows but the ghoul was moving quickly and he had to stumble across the middle of the road to keep up with it.

  Nathan followed the ghoul along the side of the station. It passed a bus driver who was walking in circles smoking a cigarette. The man didn’t even glance at the creature in the same way that the man with the phone hadn’t glanced at him.

  The bus driver turned away and Nathan hurried past him, not wanting to let the ghoul out of his sight.

  There was traffic on the road ahead and the booming sound of music coming from a bar on his right. There were people standing outside a door smoking and talking in loud, drunk voices. The ghoul hurried past them and Nathan followed.

  The ghoul turned left at the end of the road and then down a slope towards the subway.

  They were holding Gwen down there, though, he thought. If he could rescue her then by this time tomorrow he could be washed and clean and sleeping in a real bed. He could have her back and all of this would be over.

  Nathan took a deep breath and, for the hundredth time, reached into his pocket and checked that the knife was still there. He felt the cool wooden handle under his palm and he took it out. Nathan followed the ghoul down the slope.

  The subway station was closed. The only light he could see came from neon signs that had been left on by shop owners. Even when they were closed, they want
ed to remind people that they existed.

  He looked around for a sign of where the ghoul had gone, but the place seemed deserted. Something squeaked on the shiny plastic floor and he turned towards it. He saw only the merest glimpse of a shadow moving away from him, but it was enough. Nathan gripped the knife handle more tightly and went after the ghoul.

  At the end of the passage, he reached an old metal gate. The black paint was cracked and peeling. The gate was ajar, but the gap wasn’t big enough for him to get through. Nathan tried to squeeze through but was forced to put his knife back in his pocket and open the door wider. It squeaked horribly, announcing his presence, but he wasn’t going to turn back now. Once he was through he left the gate open and took his knife back out.

  It was dark, but he could see the faded remains of old movie posters on the walls and adverts for products that no longer existed. Ahead of him there was a short tunnel and then the ceiling sloped downwards at an alarming angle. It was yet more proof that he had found the place where the ghoul’s lived.

  Cautiously Nathan followed the passage and stopped at the end where the ground seemed to vanish. He leaned a hand against the wall and looked downwards into the abyss. It was as dark as night, but there was the phantom glow of light coming from below. There were steps leading down, but they looked old and had begun to crumble.

  He turned back to the passageway and looked at the gate he had just climbed through. He couldn’t see anybody there. There was no sound except for his own breathing and then the silence was torn apart by a loud scream. He couldn’t identify the owner of the voice, but his heart told him that it was Gwen. They weren’t just holding her here they were torturing her.

  Nathan climbed onto the first step and expected it to fall away beneath his feet, but it didn’t. He kept a hand against the rounded wall and climbed down into the darkness.

  He was as scared as he had ever been. Firstly of the steps giving way and plunging him down into the abyss where he would hit the ground at an awkward angle and probably break his neck. But that death seemed preferable to finally meeting the ghoul’s face to face in their own place.

  He wondered how many of them would be down there. He had counted six outside the station and one of those had shown him the way. There was at least one of them, but it sounded like a lot more. He wondered what they would do to him when they saw that he had found them, how quickly it would all be over. He shook his head, he couldn’t think like that because his death would mean Gwen’s death and he couldn’t stand to think of that.

  The stairs seemed to go on forever in a steep straight line. The light came and went, but he could never see more than a few metres in front of him. There were lightbulbs beneath glass domes built into the walls, but they were switched off or else no longer working.

  The smell of rotting meat struck him like walking into a brick wall. He could actually taste it. Nathan raised a hand to cover his mouth and nose and carried on going, doing his best not to think about what he was going to find.

  At the bottom of the stairs he stopped. It looked as if he had come down some sort of maintenance tunnel because he was not in a place that looked like an underground station. There were three unmarked doors on the short corridor.

  The first two doors led to small empty cupboards. The third led to another corridor. He went through it and carried on walking, letting the foul smell of meat lead him onwards. The floor was littered with bits of rubbish. He saw a child’s toy but quickly turned away, not wanting to think how it had ended up down there.

  At the end, he came to a final door which stood ajar. He stopped briefly to compose himself and then went through.

  The air was warm and moist. There were several small fires burning and filling the air with thick black smoke. After the darkness of the passageway, Nathan found it shockingly bright and it took several moments for his eyes to adjust. He could hear scraping and a deep rumbling sound that he didn’t know the source of.

  Thick blocks of concrete stretched from the floor to the ceiling. He couldn’t see any colour other than the flickering orange flames. Dark shapes moved around the place and it was easy to identify them as ghouls by their awkward, jerky movement.

  Every instinct he possessed told him to turn around and go back up the stairs. That the best he could hope for now was to get back outside without passing one of them on the stairs. Instead he stepped away from the door, knowing that this was his chance to find Gwen and prove that he hadn’t killed her or anyone else.

  Nathan moved slowly from pillar to post. The ghouls didn’t see him, but he had become used to keeping himself hidden. He didn’t know where to begin looking, but he knew that she was there somewhere, waiting for him to find her.

  The heat from the fire was intense. He knew that the throbbing sound he could hear was his own heart.

  Nathan kept going until he could smell nothing but rotting meat. He turned away from the platform where most of the ghouls had gathered and looked behind. The underground platform seemed to stretch out further than was possible. The pillars mirrored in every direction he looked except one.

  He stepped away from the pillar and walked towards the smell. After a few moments, he reached a wall. He turned right and walked further away from the door he had come through but reached another one at the end. It was closed but not locked. He opened it and found the source of the rotting meat smell.

  There were more than twenty human bodies hanging in front of him. They were suspended from dirty meat hooks in the ceiling, their soft flesh drooping like baggy clothes.

  His whole body seemed to shudder with the beat of his heart. He closed his eyes and tried to tell himself that he hadn’t seen what he thought he had seen. The body at the front was Dr. Romero, stripped to his waist with a rusty hook protruding through his neck.

  Nathan made to close the door. He told himself that Gwen couldn’t be in there because that was a room of dead things. Nathan had seen the ghoul’s kill, but they wouldn’t have killed her. They had taken Gwen for another purpose, hadn’t they?

  Dr. Romero looked at him reprovingly from his hook. His dead eyes watched Nathan and asked their silent questions: What made him think that Gwen was different? She meant something to Nathan but what did the ghoul’s care? If they had wanted to hurt him or warn him away, then they would have killed her.

  Nathan shook his head. His hand was still on the door and his feet were still on the ground though he felt weightless and inconsequential. The stink of the place was making his eyes water and he had no idea how he was going to get out. Surely the luck that had allowed him to get down there in the first place wouldn’t hold out.

  Gwen had been missing for months, but he had been so sure that she was alive. But what if she wasn’t? What if he looked far enough into the room and found her hanging there, as dead as the doctor?

  Nathan stepped towards Dr. Romero. Dead flesh brushed against his face. The swollen corpses moved as he passed between them. Nathan tried not to think about what he was doing. He repeated her name to himself. He was doing this for Gwen. If she was there, then she deserved to be seen and mourned.

  He found her at the back of the room. There was barely enough light to identify her by, but he knew it was her. The small butterfly tattoo on her left shoulder was all that he needed to see. Her flesh had begun to sink towards the floor like it was made out of dough. They had left her naked as if she was no better than a piece of meat.

  An unknowable amount of time passed. It occurred to him that, if he stayed there for long enough, the ghouls would find him and string him up next to her. The thought was appealing in a way that made him feel sick. But what would be the point? Gwen was gone, his sacrifice couldn’t bring her back.

  Nathan didn’t turn around until a soft growl from behind made him jump. He could see two figures silhouetted at the door, turned towards one another they appeared to be speaking in their strange language.

  He watched them for a moment, casually discussing something as if Dr. Ro
mero and Gwen and all the others didn’t mean anything. He felt his chest swelling with the bitter, rotten taste of anger.

  With no thought for the consequences, Nathan ran towards them. The two creatures hadn’t seen him beside Gwen. He caught them off guard and one of them fell to the floor while the other limply attempted to grab hold of him.

  Words that meant nothing to Nathan passed between them. It sounded like animals growling and grunting. The sensation of their warm, breathing bodies against his gave Nathan a moment to consider what he was doing. Away from the sight of his dead girlfriend he was able to think more clearly and to realise the impossibility of his situation.

  If he stayed to fight then, he might as well have curled up at Gwen’s feet and let them find him. At least then he would have died with her in sight. The two ghouls were quick to compose themselves but before they had a chance to grab hold of him Nathan had started to run.

  He ran towards the door and made no attempt to keep quiet. The pain in his leg flared, but he ignored it. He could hear the two of them coming after him and shouting in their strange language for others to follow.

  When he got to the door, Nathan turned back. More than a dozen of the horrible creatures were charging towards him and narrowing the gap between them quickly. He pushed open the door and ran up the stairs.

  He made it to the top without them catching him but as he turned onto the access ramp, he saw more dark shapes ahead. They were swarming around him now and his eyes were playing tricks on him. They seemed to multiply before his eyes, splitting apart like shadows.

  The knife banged against his leg, but there were too many of them to fight. If they caught him, he would try to take out as many as he could, but that was a last resort. Something inside him wanted to live. He didn’t want to end up as a swollen corpse in their trophy room.

  At the top of the ramp, the other ghoul’s had stopped moving. They were waiting for him to come to them and they wouldn’t have to wait for long. Given a choice between dying outside or below ground in their chamber of horrors he knew which he preferred.