The Ghouls

by Fred Crawley

  Her gaze flickered for a moment and then returned to the cold-eyed glare that he was growing used to. “Did you?” she said.

  Nathan shook his head. He wondered how much he should tell her, but something about Audrey told him that it would be unwise to lie or embellish the truth in any way. She would know if he wasn’t being completely honest with her and that would hurt his chances of... what? He wasn’t sure what he wanted or expected from her, but he needed her to know about him.

  “It wasn’t me,” Nathan said. “But I know who did it.”

  “So go to the police,” Audrey said. “Why are you telling me?”

  “Just listen, all right,” Nathan said.

  Audrey shrugged moodily. “Seeing as how you aren’t giving me any choice.”

  Nathan looked at her and she crossed her arms. He wiped his eyes and his fingers destroyed the scabby sleep that had formed in the corners. He was just going to have to tell her everything.

  She listened impassively. Nathan explained everything that had happened to him from the moment that the car had hit him several months ago right up to being in the underground station just a few hours earlier. When he came to that part he fought the involuntary shakes that seemed about to overcome him and he managed not to vomit on Audrey’s carpet, but it was a close thing.

  When he finished, he looked at her. He couldn’t tell what she was thinking. She stared at him with dark glassy eyes and her lipstick slightly smeared but still bright red. The room seemed unnaturally quiet.

  “You’re telling me there are monsters?” Audrey said. “Just to be clear.”

  Nathan nodded and wondered if she had heard anything he’d said.

  “And you’re saying the monsters killed your girlfriend?” Audrey said. She spoke in the slow, careful tone usually reserved for small children who needed a simple concept explained to them because they were too stupid to understand it. Like ‘don’t put your hand in the fire’. Or ‘don’t run out in front of traffic’. Audrey seemed to be resisting the urge to smile, but the corners of her mouth flickered slightly. “There’s no such thing as monsters.”

  Nathan opened his mouth to argue but what was the point? Audrey was now looking at him with simple dislike which, he had to admit, was an improvement on the fear and anger she had shown when she’d first seen him in her flat.

  “I think you’d better leave,” she said.

  “But...” Nathan trailed off. He didn’t know what else to say to her. He’d told her the truth and she hadn’t believed him. He didn’t know why he had expected her to. Nathan stood up. He could feel the cold draft coming through the broken window.

  “I hope for your sake you’re imagining all of this,” Audrey said. “Because if...”

  Nathan stopped at the door and turned back around to look at her. She hadn’t stood up to see him out. He could see her knees pressed firmly together. “Because if what?” he said.

  Audrey shook her head sadly but kept her red lips firmly closed. Nathan stared longingly back into the flat and wished that he had taken a shower when he’d had the chance. He had been so sure that Audrey would believe him and that she wanted to help. It seemed impossible that he could have been so wrong about that.

  He heard the front door close behind him and didn’t look back as he made his way along the balcony towards the stairs and down to the street.

  CHAPTER 28

  THERE WERE CARS AND PEOPLE EVERYWHERE HE LOOKED. After weeks of living in the darkness, when few people seemed to venture out, the noise and the movement was overwhelming. In daylight, people looked at him as if he was a piece of dirt they had picked up from the ground if they looked at him at all. He found that most of the people who he passed were quite happy to pretend they didn’t see him.

  He walked the long way back into the city. Despite the way, his meeting with Audrey had ended he had, at least, been able to enjoy a period of undisturbed sleep and he felt better for it, stronger and able to think more clearly.

  Now that Gwen was gone (he closed his eyes and forced himself not to cry) there was no reason for him to stay in the city. He had only stayed as long as he had because he’d thought there was a way to save her and clear his name. Both were now impossible. If he wanted to, he could leave and never come back. The ghouls, he thought, wouldn’t follow him and the police would stand less chance of finding him. Where would he go, though? What would he do? He wouldn’t be able to get a job or start a new life, would being homeless be harder or easier in a new place? At least in the city he had friends and a dry place to sleep at night.

  Nathan reached the city. There seemed to be more people together than he had ever seen. A brass band was setting up in the middle of the high street outside the Marks & Spencer’s shop. Although usually he liked to keep to himself he found that he had to jostle shoulders to get through the crowd. He wondered if this meant it was the weekend.

  He thought about Courtney. Nathan had no idea what his encounter with the ghouls had meant, but he’d seen what it led to. Did he really want to spend the rest of his life living in the warehouse, too afraid to venture out in case the ghouls saw him and took their revenge? Revenge for what, though? Nathan hadn’t done anything to them except notice they existed. Maybe if he just pretended that he could no longer see them, they would leave him alone. But that was clearly ridiculous.

  He walked to the pedestrian crossing next to the railway bridge. The gentleman’s club was no longer playing music and the big man in the tuxedo had gone. Nathan pressed the buttons and waited for the lights to change. He told himself that there was no need to make up his mind now. He could lay low for a while, recover from his injuries and hurt pride, and decide what to do in a few days.

  The lights turned green and he crossed the road. Maybe he could go to the police and tell them about what he’d found in the abandoned underground station. Show them the room full of dead bodies hanging from the ceiling. Surely there would be enough evidence there to prove he was innocent.

  Even as he thought it a dark thought occurred to him that he quickly pushed away: what if there was no evidence of his innocence?

  The rough path that ran alongside the railway tracks seemed longer than ever. Once the terrapin buildings were gone and all he could see was uncut grass he considered stopping and resting. He kept going though and told himself that once he was inside he could close his eyes and never wake up.

  There was no one standing outside the building, but that wasn’t unusual. The homeless and the desperate had little need to wake up early. Or perhaps they all knew it was the weekend and they were stationed around the city with their cardboard signs and looks of desperation.

  Through the rubble-strewn corridor and down the spiral staircase, Nathan walked into the great open space filled with people and pieces of machinery. He didn’t notice that anything was amiss. He might have walked right to his bed and gone to sleep but something niggled at him and he began to realise that something wasn’t right.

  He walked more slowly after that, barely moving forwards at all. Something played on the edge of his consciousness, something that told him to be careful, that this was no longer a safe place. All desire for sleep seemed to leave him. Nathan stopped next to the twisted metal arms of the machine in the middle of the floor.

  Something was wrong, but he couldn’t tell what. He stopped and listened and then he understood what it was: nothing. Nathan couldn’t hear a single breath other than his own.

  Cautious, his senses alert for anything out of the ordinary, he walked towards the nearest bed. His heart was racing but he was determined to believe that he was wrong, that really everyone had left the warehouse together and there was some other reason why he was sure he was the only living person there. Before he could reach the bed, however, he saw movement out the corner of his eye and turned.

  A dark shape stood in the middle of the floor twenty metres away from him. It was hunched over, as wide as it was tall. Nathan waited for it to act, but it seemed content just to wa
tch him. Cautiously he turned away and continued to move towards the bed. When he turned back to check, the creature was gone.

  He found the first bed empty and the second was the same. Relief swept through him but when he checked the third bed, he found a dead body, a twisted neck and a head facing in the wrong direction. The same in the second. There was little sign that a fight had been made, desperate or otherwise.

  Nathan checked a more dozen beds and found seven bodies. He felt relieved that not everyone had been killed and disgust that any of them had. These people had been innocent, just as Gwen and Libby and all of the others had been. Their greatest crime had been knowing him.

  He stood at the end of the building beside Courtney’s empty cot. He couldn’t bring himself to count how many people had been killed. He sat down and stared into the darkness, unwilling to believe what he could see but knowing that, whether he believed it or not, all of the people who he cared about were dead.

  CHAPTER 29

  THE WAREHOUSE FELT HAUNTED. THE GHOULS KNEW HE was there, but the police wouldn’t find the scene of the crime unless someone told them where to look. Nathan wondered whether they would even care that a bunch of tramps had been murdered in their sleep.

  He stared into the darkness. There was no sign of the creature that he had seen there and he thought that it must have been on its own. Maybe a straggler left behind after the killing, or maybe one that had been sent to confirm he had returned and realised what had been done.

  He sat on Courtney’s bedroll until the weak sunlight that made its way through the cracks around the roof disappeared. He sat in complete darkness for a while and wondered what he should do next. He felt a paralysing sense of fear. Numbed by the amount of death, he needed something to rally against.

  Audrey had told him that there was no such thing as ghouls and he wondered what she would say if he brought her here and showed her all of this. Would she still believe he was crazy? Would she still insist that there were no monsters lurking in the shadows intent on killing?

  He could imagine waiting outside the block of flats where she lived and grabbing her. She wouldn’t want to go anywhere with him but he was still stronger than her and he could make her. He smiled as he imagined dragging her past the gentleman’s club and down the dirty path to the warehouse. When she saw it, she would probably think he was planning to kill her and dump her body. The fight in her would be renewed and renewed again when he brought her inside and saw the dead bodies.

  The thought made him laugh and his voice echoed horribly in the vast space. As if he was hearing someone else laugh and surely dragging an unwilling woman to a place like this was someone else’s idea of a joke. It wouldn’t be funny to see the look of terror on her face.

  Nathan tried to push the idea away and think about something else, but all he could come up with was the girl who he’d chased through the park. He wondered if Audrey carried a knife and, if he brought her here, he thought she would be perfectly justified in stabbing him. It would be a cruel and nasty joke and she had already suffered enough. Perhaps she wouldn’t even be able to see the ghoul. The girl in the park hadn’t.

  He felt as if he had swallowed a stone. Something deeply unpleasant was rising in his chest like a bag of hot air. His throat seemed to swell and his mind refused to acknowledge the ugly little thought, but it was there.

  Once upon a time he’d thought that nurses were trying to kill him. He’d broken into a secure storage room full of medical equipment and broken a woman’s nose when she’d tried to help him. They had put him in Happy Trails and sent him to Dr. Romero for therapy.

  Shapes seemed to move in the darkness, but Nathan knew there was nothing there. He was imagining it and that was proof that he knew the difference between reality and fantasy. Fantasy couldn’t hurt people, it was all in your head.

  Except that the nurse with the broken nose had been hurt by a fantasy; she had just been trying to help Nathan up and get him back to bed. But he’d thought she was trying to kill him and so he’d defended himself.

  The thought popped like a bubble and Nathan could no longer deny its existence. He tried to ignore it but it was there now and before seconds became minutes he told himself that it was okay to think it because thinking something didn’t make it true. If he thought it then he would know that it wasn’t true:

  What if there were no ghouls?

  In the dark warehouse full of dead bodies, Nathan sat on Courtney’s bed and waited for the thought to seem ridiculous but it didn’t. Audrey had told him that there weren’t any ghouls and the more he thought about it, the more sense it made. How could there be ghouls? There was no way that creatures like that could exist without people knowing about them.

  Nathan stood up suddenly and his leg throbbed. He tried to push the thought away through painful action. He marched along the corridor more quickly than he could really manage. His leg ached as if the wound had reopened.

  He refused to believe that the ghouls were all in his head. It was impossible. If they weren’t real then who had killed all of those people?

  When he reached the door at the other end of the warehouse he stopped. The problem with letting in one thought, he reflected, was that thoughts rarely arrived on their own. Once the door was open more would follow and you had less control over them. Like an alcoholic who thinks that he can have just a single drink, Nathan found that he had lost the ability to say ‘no’ and the next thought came unbidden:

  If there are no ghouls, then there was only one person who could be responsible for all of the murders. What if the police were right and he had killed them?

  Nathan swallowed and found his mouth dry. It was impossible, wasn’t it? If he had killed someone then he would remember it, wouldn’t he?

  He thought back to the last time he had seen Gwen alive. She had been upset and he had comforted her, but he had also been angry. If she hadn’t left him when he was in the hospital, still recovering from a terrible accident, and taken up with one of his doctors... the anger rose again suddenly and Nathan doubled over. He vomited on the floor between his feet.

  He had been angry with Gwen, but that didn’t mean he was capable of killing her. He loved her.

  He tried to remember something (anything) that proved he was innocent but nothing came. They had gone to bed together and in the morning she was gone. He had been asleep beside her all night but what if he hadn’t really been asleep? When he’d been at the hospital, he had sleep walked but that didn’t mean he was capable of...

  The smell of vomit rose and he felt as if he would be sick again. Nathan hobbled towards the stairs, he had to get out, he had to outrun his doubts.

  He climbed the spiral staircase and felt it wobble and shake just as it had the first day he had arrived. But it wasn’t just the staircase that was wobbling now, his whole world seemed to be on the brink of collapsing. He told himself that he wasn’t a murderer, that he just wasn’t capable, but all he could see was the nurse with the broken nose and the drunk girl running through the dark park to get away from him.

  Nathan burst out the door and into the night. The cold air didn’t help. He turned suddenly and vomited into the long grass. He felt as if he was tearing up his sole with each heave. This wasn’t happening, it wasn’t possible.

  He wiped the last dribble of yellow vomit from his mouth and started to run. The lights of the city were ahead of him. Surely if he was around people, he would see sense and realise that it couldn’t be in his head. The ghouls were real and he was not a murderer.

  A car swerved and beeped at Nathan as he stumbled across the road. The world was a violent mix of colours that blurred and swirled. He walked with his arms out like a man in a nightmare. People were looking at him, but he no longer cared. He turned right to avoid the station, an automatic response rather than a reasoned one. He walked up the hill towards the town centre with no plan or purpose other than to get away from the ideas that he couldn’t face.

  It was dark, but the high
street was filled with people. Strange faces turned to look at him as they marched together in the same direction. Their smiles were so wide that he thought their faces would split in two. He knew that they were laughing at him, but he couldn’t work out why.

  They knew, of course, that had to be it. Nathan wiped tears from his eyes. Of course, they knew. Just like Audrey had done, just like everyone except himself. They knew that there was no such thing as ghouls and that could only mean one thing.

  A blond woman with her hair sticking out in tufts from her head came towards him. She didn’t seem to see him at all. Her dark eyes looked dead, like marbles. She wasn’t smiling. Her face was slack and emotionless.

  Nathan expected something to happen when she reached him, but it did not. She still didn’t look at him but why should she? Gwen knew what had happened, just like Dr. Romero, who was walking beside her. The pair of them hobbled along because their necks had been broken. Their flesh pale and raw from being hung on the rusty hooks for so long.

  Nathan didn’t need to hear either of them speak to know what they would say. ‘You killed me’ and ‘You killed me’.

  ‘You came into my office and said you needed to talk. You closed the door and took out a knife. You cut my throat while my back was turned.’

  ‘I let you into my bed. You killed me while I slept.’

  “No!” Nathan said.

  He couldn’t take it. He stopped walking and put his hands over his ears. He closed his eyes and turned away from Gwen and Dr. Romero. They weren’t really there. None of them were.

  “You’re not real,” he said. “None of this is real.”

  He turned and turned. When he dared to open his eyes again, he saw that Gwen and Dr. Romero had been joined by Libby and Alex and David and Aaron and Richard and everywhere he looked there were people who had been killed. Who he had killed?