The Ghouls

by Fred Crawley

  “No, I didn’t,” he said. “I didn’t kill them and you can’t make me believe it. I know I didn’t. I wouldn’t hurt Gwen, never.”

  But he was arguing with the voice in his head. The other part of him that knew it was all true. Of course, there was no such thing as ghouls, weird creatures that only he could see. They were the same as the nurses who he had thought were trying to kill him. It was all in his head.

  He closed his eyes tightly and pressed his hands against his ears until the only thing he could hear was his pulse. The world seemed to vanish and when he looked again he was unsurprised to see that the street was empty.

  Nathan shivered. It suddenly felt very cold and lonely, but it wouldn’t be for long. If he really had killed all of those people, and he believed now that he had, then there was only one thing that he could do.

  A life in prison was more than Nathan deserved, but it was the worst that would happen to him. Unless he took matters into his own hands.

  CHAPTER 30

  THE CITY WAS EMPTY, BUT NATHAN COULDN’T TAKE that for granted. He knew that it might just be another delusion, just as the high street full of people had been. If he could make people appear then, it stood to reason that he could make them disappear as well. He couldn’t trust any of his senses now.

  A part of him understood that he might not even be walking down the street at all. That the glass fronted department store on his right might not be there. That the black sky above might he all in his head. He might not be walking at all. Right now, Nathan realised, he might still be asleep.

  It would be nice, he thought, if this could all just be a dream. It would be nice if he opened his eyes and found himself still in bed with Gwen beside him. Even to wake up in Happy Trails and to be told that everything he had experienced was due to a new cocktail of drugs they had tried him on, and which he would refuse to try again.

  Nathan considered the possibility that this was all a dream with a numb lack of curiosity. Maybe he had never woken up from the coma after the car crash. This might just be a Life on Mars hallucination. Maybe when he jumped in the river, he would wake up in a hospital bed and Gwen would be there holding his hand. Maybe it hadn’t even been long enough for her to worry that he was never going to wake up and start dating that prick of a doctor.

  “I should have killed him too,” Nathan said, but then maybe he had done. He hadn’t known about any of his victims until he’d gone looking for them and he certainly hadn’t made any attempt to find the doctor.

  He hoped that Audrey was alright.

  Cold air and spray hit him as he approached the river. It was a dark mirror that rippled and reflected distant orange lights and the cold white moon. Ahead of him it widened and he saw the bridge.

  Nathan had never consciously considered how he would kill himself, but it turned out that a part of him (perhaps the same part that had killed all those other people) had. He walked along the bank of the river without needing to think about where he was going. His body knew, another part of him was in charge now.

  The iron bridge stretched across the water. There was no one around to see him and no one left who would show the slightest inclination to try and stop him. The only people he was hurting now were the police officers who wouldn’t be able to arrest him.

  Nathan walked along the footpath, his hand on the railing that separated him from the river. To his right the road was empty as he’d known it would be. The world had the quality of a dream and his fear of death was tempered by the growing conviction that he wasn’t alive at all, at least not here. None of this was real because it didn’t make sense. He couldn’t be a murderer so the whole thing had to be a delusion.

  When he hit the water and woke up, he would find out how much of the last few months had been in his head. His secret hope was that he would wake up in bed with Gwen, before even the car crash had happened. He would hold her and tell her that he loved her and that he never wanted to let her go. But it might be earlier even than that and he felt a stab of fear that Gwen might not even be real and that made sense. She was too perfect to exist.

  He stopped in the middle of the bridge where it was at its highest. Nathan leaned against the side and looked down into the water. It was at least twenty metres below and he knew that it would feel like concrete when he hit it. The throbbing in his leg told him that, even if this was a dream, he was capable of experiencing pain.

  Nathan looked down at his hands. They looked like his hands but what if they weren’t? If he had dreamed all of this then maybe he had dreamed himself as well. He might wake up as a completely different person. He could no longer pinpoint the moment when it had all begun.

  That was just an excuse, though, a way to make himself feel better about being a murderer. This wasn’t a dream he just wished that it was. The ghouls were the only part of it that couldn’t be real and if they weren’t real, then he was the only person who could have killed all the people he cared about.

  Nathan gritted his teeth and grunted as he swung his bad leg up. He wasn’t going to make excuses for himself. He knew what he had done and he had to stop himself before he did it again.

  CHAPTER 31

  THE WIND WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO LEAN AGAINST. In the distance, he could see the dim lights of boats bobbing up and down on the water and beyond them the city. The air seemed to vibrate with music, but he couldn’t tell where it came from. It all seemed so real and, suddenly, so precious - a gift that he had taken away from every single one of the people that he had killed.

  He could have cried, but he had nothing left inside him. He was numb. A monster. He had killed all of those people and invented a story that painted him as the victim. There was nothing he could do now except end it before the monster that was inside him decided to kill again.

  Nathan leaned towards the water and waited to fall.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Garrett said.

  Nathan opened his eyes. Garrett had grabbed his coat and was stopping him from plunging into the river.

  “Get down from there,” Garrett said.

  “Let go of me,” Nathan said.

  “Not until you turn around and get down.”

  Nathan did not know how Garrett had arrived without him realising it. That didn’t seem to matter. Maybe he wasn’t really there, maybe he was a part of Nathan’s psyche now trying to convince him not to kill himself. If he had ever been real at all.

  “Get down,” Garrett repeated. “I’m serious.”

  Nathan turned around to look at him. Garrett looked worse than ever. His face was lumpy with angry bruises and his nose crusted with blood. His right eye was so swollen that he couldn’t have seen anything through it.

  “Down,” Garrett said.

  Nathan nodded and climbed down. He supposed that it couldn’t hurt to wait a few minutes. At least Garrett was still alive.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Garrett said. He let go of Nathan once he was firmly on the ground.

  “What happened to your face?” Nathan said. He wondered if he had done that when he’d gone to kill everyone in the warehouse. Had he fought Garrett and, if so, why was Garrett so keen to stop him killing himself now?

  “You know what happened to my face,” Garrett said.

  Nathan nodded. It seemed to confirm everything that he had feared. What else could it mean?

  “You knew about them, didn’t you?” Garrett said.

  Nathan frowned. “Knew about what?”

  “The ghouls,” Garrett said. “You knew they were after you?”

  Nathan shook his head. He didn’t understand what Garrett was saying. It didn’t fit in with his new world view of being a murderer. If the ghouls existed then... “Wait...” He grabbed hold of Garrett, suddenly afraid that he would vanish in a puff of smoke. “You’ve seen them too?”

  Garrett nodded.

  “Tell me what happened. What did they do?” Nathan said. Then he looked at Garrett and he could see what must have happened. “Ho
w did you get away?”

  Garrett looked around as if there might be someone else with them but, as far as Nathan could see, it was just the two of them on the bridge. “Come with me,” Garrett said. “We can’t talk here.”

  Nathan followed Garrett across the bridge and down the other side. The wind remained with the river, the air became so still that it felt as if they were indoors. The buildings on their left were all old houses that had been converted into small shops. Ahead there was a grand looking hotel and another bridge.

  “Tell me what happened,” Nathan said.

  Garrett nodded. Nathan gave him a few moments to collect his thoughts and then listened without interrupting. “There was a dozen of them at least,” he said. “They came into the warehouse. Killed the first couple of people before we even knew anything had happened. Nobody screamed until they saw them.

  “They killed pretty much everyone, but they took some people too. They took Courtney.” Garrett paused and Nathan tried to work out whether or not he was crying, but he couldn’t tell. He knew that Garrett had been close to Courtney so he didn’t tell him about the room where he had found Gwen and Dr. Romero.

  “How did you get away?” Nathan said.

  Garrett shrugged and Nathan didn’t ask again. He’d managed to get away from the ghouls often enough so it didn’t seem strange that Garrett would have been able to as well.

  They stopped and sat down on a bench by the river. The ground was sticky with bird droppings and the little black heads of ducks bobbed up and down in the river without making a sound.

  “We can’t go back to the warehouse,” Nathan said.

  Garrett turned to look at him. “What are you talking about?” he said.

  Nathan shrugged. “Just that we can’t go back there now. The ghouls know--“

  Garrett was shaking his head. “Don’t you get it?” he said. His injuries were apparently fresh as the more he spoke, the more his voice became distorted by swelling lips. “We have to leave. We have to get out of here.”

  “And go where?” Nathan said.

  “I don’t know,” Garrett said. “Fuck, who cares. Let’s go to France or fucking Timbuktu. We just need to get away from those fucking monsters.”

  “Okay,” Nathan said. “What do you suggest?”

  Garrett stared at the ground in front of them, into the black river water. Nathan began to wonder if he was in shock and what you were supposed to do for someone who was.

  “Garrett?” he said softly. This was, after all, the man who had stopped him jumping off the bridge less than twenty minutes ago and who had introduced him to the warehouse in the first place. Nathan knew that he must be feeling some degree of guilt for that as well. “Are you alright?”

  “Fine,” Garrett said, suddenly sitting up and turning to look at Nathan. “Have you got money?”

  “A few quid,” he said.

  Garrett nodded. “Let’s get on a train and get out of here, okay?”

  Nathan nodded. He didn’t have more than ten pounds to his name and he didn’t think that would get them very far, maybe not even out of the city, but at least it was a start, a plan that they could focus on rather than the terrible things that they had both seen.

  “The station will be closed,” Garrett said. He had turned back to look at the river. “We’ll go first think in the morning, alright?”

  Nathan nodded. “Maybe we should wait until a bit later, though,” he said.

  “Why?”

  “First thing in the morning there will be people everywhere checking tickets and stuff. If we go later, we can buy a cheap ticket somewhere and then get on a train going to Scotland or something.”

  “Yeah,” Garrett said. He turned back to look at Nathan, a greedy look in his eyes. “Yeah, that could work.”

  “I mean they’ll probably chuck us off before we get half way but it’s better than nothing,” Nathan said.

  He shivered in the cold. Nathan turned to Garrett and saw that his eyes were closed. He doubted that he was asleep, but he clearly didn’t want to talk about it anymore. Nathan closed his own eyes and he no longer saw the faces of the people who had died. Now he saw railway tracks and a train speeding him towards freedom.

  CHAPTER 32

  NATHAN SAT ON THE COLD BENCH AND WATCHED the sun rise like the golden syrup across the water. Beside him, Garrett continued to sleep. Nathan hadn’t closed his eyes for more than five minutes all night. The situation was too precarious, the chance of a ghoul or a police officer finding them was too great.

  Nathan waited for Garrett to wake up. It was still early despite being light. He could see all the way across the water into the city, but there were no people. Not a single car had driven past, not a single person had left their house. For a moment, he wondered if there was something important he was forgetting. Was it Christmas day or something?

  In the distance a clock chimed and he saw that he wasn’t missing anything. It rang five times. Despite the light, it was still too early for anybody to be awake.

  Garrett mumbled something and tried to roll over. Nathan looked and saw him wake up. He stared into the distance for a moment, his dark eyes haunted by what he had witnessed the night before. For a moment neither of them spoke.

  Garrett stood up and Nathan wondered if he was supposed to follow him. Then he heard a zip being undone and a moment later Garrett was pissing into the river. When he was done, he stumbled back to the bench and looked down at Nathan.

  “I’m starving,” Garrett said.

  Nathan nodded. “We need to get going. We can find something to eat later.”

  Garrett grunted in what Nathan assumed was agreement and turned away. At the moment he didn’t present the most desirable travelling companion but, Nathan reminded himself, he had just woken up and, even if he turned out to be a moody asshole for the entire journey, he had earned his companionship by saving his life at least twice in the last six months.

  “Come on then,” Garrett said.

  Nathan stood and followed him.

  They walked along the river towards the city. In the distance, Nathan could hear the rush of cars but they were too far away to see. Painfully bright sunlight reflected off glass buildings and the water and he had to squint in order to see where he was going.

  They stopped beside a bin and Garrett plunged his hand in up to his shoulder. He looked like a vet trying to help a downwards facing cow give birth. Nathan watched him rummage around and then stand up shaking his head. He turned back towards Nathan and said: “Not unless you fancy eating old noodles.”

  Nathan shook his head as if he had actually said the thing that Garrett seemed to think he’d said. For the first time in a very long time, Nathan found himself wondering about someone else’s sanity. He continued to follow Garrett along the river towards the city while Garrett stopped every few metres to plunge his hand into another bin and look for something to eat. It made for slow progress.

  After a while, Nathan decided to try and take Garrett’s mind off his apparently desperate hunger. He hobbled ahead of him while he searched in another bin and when he came out empty handed Nathan said: “What made you come and find me last night?”

  Garrett looked at him as if he’d just been slapped in the face. Then he smiled and scratched his nose. “What makes you think I came to find you?”

  Nathan frowned. “I just thought...”

  “I’m just kidding man, of course, I came looking for you. We’re friends, right?”

  Nathan nodded.

  “You were in trouble so I came to help. That’s what friends do.”

  Nathan nodded again and they kept walking. Garrett gave up on his search for food and they made quicker progress for a while. They crossed another bridge and Nathan had to put up with snarky comments from Garrett about whether he was sure he wouldn’t prefer to swim to the other side. It was good humoured, but Nathan couldn’t help wondering whether, if he had jumped into the river, they would have found his body yet. He didn’t really
have anyone left to miss him.

  On the other side, they walked up the hill towards a restaurant whose name was obscured by dirt and wear. It looked as if it hadn’t opened in a year and the windows were covered with a thick layer of dust. When they reached the top of the hill Nathan stopped.

  “What is it?” Garrett said. They were almost at the station now and there were a few people walking through the street, early morning commuters dressed in smart business clothes.

  “There’s somewhere else we have to go first,” Nathan said.

  Garrett walked back to him. “Well, why didn’t you just say that instead of getting all dramatic and stopping in the middle of the street.”

  “I’m not being dramatic,” Nathan said. “I’m just trying to figure out which way to go.”

  “Well, where is it?” Garrett said.

  Nathan shook his head. “It’s alright, I’ve got it.” He started walking. His leg was stiff and sore and he couldn’t move quickly. A moment later, Garrett caught up with him.

  “Are you going to tell me where we’re going?” Garrett said. “Or am I supposed to guess?”

  “There’s someone else coming with us,” he said.

  “What?” Garrett said. He did not sound pleased.

  “There’ll be food at her house,” Nathan said and that seemed to soften the blow.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” Garrett said. “Lead the way.”

  Nathan walked as quickly as he could and hoped that he wasn’t already too late. Everyone he had met recently had ended up a victim of the ghouls and he had every reason to believe that they knew where Audrey lived. She hadn’t believed him, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t in danger. Whether she liked it or not Nathan was going to save her life.

  CHAPTER 33

  THE DOOR TO THE BUILDING WAS OPEN WHICH seemed like an ominous sign.