Everyone talks about scary stories set in the Fall. When the days get shorter and we talk about graveyards and monsters and ghosts. The haunting season. But no one sees that the truly wicked days come in the early months of the year when the Winter is old and the earth is dead. When friends and family have long since gone home and the jollyness and joy has been replaced with emptiness in our hearts.
The wind howls around you when you step into the night. The earth does not shelter you with her leaves and her life so you are hit with the brunt of the rage and hunger of the storm.
We speak life in the Fall as we watch things change and die around us. We mourn. We come together. And then we are left all alone.
The Winter’s edge creeped into my soul, eating into the little warmth I had. It was making me morbid. Unfortunately, it would be too long before I could step back into the warmth of my home. I looked at the small pit I had already dug.
Much too long.
Graves took longer to dig when the ground was frozen.
Of course, that was my own fault. What had I truly expected would happen when I traveled up to Maine in search of the truth in the stories going around about mysterious disappearances?
Hunting monsters in the dead of winter, knowing you’ll need to bury the body after as soon as possible was a fool’s task. That was like, page 2 of the monster hunter playbook. Something about working smarter not harder.
Page 1 was all about ‘Not all monsters are bad’ and ‘Don’t kill someone just because they’re different’ but that was a story for another time. This one was clearly not in that category based on the cave filled with half eaten corpses. The nail marks and dried blood scratched into the cave floors told enough of a story about this particular monster’s cruelty.
The wind howled around me cutting through my coat like it was nothing.
Fucking winter.
Fucking ghouls.
The story I had heard around town went that a gorgeous woman had shown up in town about a month ago. Mid December. They knew she wasn’t from around there because the town was all of 400 people and fairly isolated. It wasn’t the kind of place that drew people to it, even in touristy seasons. Certainly not when the temperatures dropped to the teens like it had that winter.
Her shiny blonde hair and sweet smile hadn’t distracted many people from the fact that she had shown up without a car either. But she had spun a story about an abusive boyfriend and shed a few tears and people were pretty willing to forgive the irregularity of it all.
When the first man had gone missing 3 days later, they didn’t immediately blame her. As far as anyone could tell, Morris Clemens and she hadn’t run into each other. Which isn’t to say it wasn’t possible they had, town this size and all, but no one could say they had any ties. And Morris was a big man, used to be a body builder in his younger days till he had hurt his back and stopped doing steroids. Once that happened, Morris stopped depriving himself. The man loved food, carbs and sugars and cheeses. It showed too.
No, a little thing like her couldn’t have done much to Morris let alone hid the body after.
The thought was that he had gotten turned around in a storm. A lot of people thought they’d find his body come Spring time run off into a ditch on some back road.
In my mind they were all basically back roads. But who was I to judge.
Then Martha, Camille, James, William, and Seth disappeared too.
There had been a trail of blood in James’ house and not his either according to the local lab.
Ghouls were insatiable sometimes. They had all disappeared in the space of week.
And that pretty blonde? Well, she was the only difference people could see. They were terrified of her. Someone started sharing her picture online, asking if anyone knew of her. If maybe the same thing had happened elsewhere.
There wasn’t a big response, as you can imagine.
People just kept disappearing too. The police tried, but in a town that size there wasn’t much of them either. 3 men and a dog. The dog was on loan from a bigger town.
The community fell into three camps. Those who thought it wasn’t her, the coincidence group. Those who thought it was and barred their houses up to make sure she couldn’t get in. You know, every man for himself. And those who started following her around, our vigilanties.
Our online poster fell into that last group, they were the ones to catch my attention too. It was a constant stream of pictures of her in the room she was renting looking more and more stressed out.
By the time I got out there, the missing people were up to 28. The town was in a panic and they were not delighted to see another new face, even if I claimed I was from another police department here to help out. My fake credentials were pretty decent.
I had followed the woman in question around for the first few days. Or I tried to at least. She never left her room. I had a constant video going through her window too. I know, I’m a creep. There was another camera pointed at her door from the outside. She had access to one room with a bed and a bathroom that I did not monitor but also had no outside access. I sped through the footage each day and she was on camera for all but maybe 30 minutes where she was in the bathroom. Most of the time, that woman just sat in the bed and did nothing.
Half the time someone was banging on her door shouting threats at her. She stared into the eye of my camera through the window as it happened each time.
A silent call for help, for someone to step in and do something.
A few people brought weapons. Two men showed up with rope and a crowbar but hadn’t managed to get in.
Meanwhile, person number 29 had went missing and the town was growing more and more hostile.
This time, I got to the scene early and noticed a footprint. A bare foot footprint. Toes and everything dented into the snow. I brushed the ones closest to the house off so no one else would see and pretended to help look with the rest of the people gathered.
At night, I went back and followed the prints. I followed them all the way to a cave 2 miles out. And there sat a man. Well, not a man. A ghoul. There sat a ghoul consuming the arm of a man connected to a half eaten body. Bites missing from all over, the stomach eaten all the way back to the spine..
The thing about ghouls is they’re strong but they aren’t that hard to kill if you know what you’re doing.
I was lucky this wasn’t my first walk around this particular block.
One quick bullet slowed it down, combined with the human food he had eaten with his latest meal’s stomach. Then I removed the head just to be safe.
So here I was, digging a hole. The cave full of human remains would need to be gotten rid of too. As much as closure would have helped the people here, this kind of closure might not be great. Massive traumatic serial killer mojo.
A second shovel dug in nearby.
“He was my ex.”
“So not a coincidence that the bodycount started piling up as soon as you walked into town?”
“No, not a coincidence. I had really hoped he wouldn’t be able to find me but you know how us ghouls are. We can scent what we’re looking for from quite a ways away. And we just consume consume consume.”
“I’ve seen the cave, yeah.”
“Yeah.”
We dug in silence for a while, she was making quite a bit more progress than I was.
“I hope you won’t try to kill me too.”
“I haven’t yet.”
“I’m useful to you at the moment, there’s a lot of graves to dig.”
“Did you kill any of them?”
“No, I wanted to. But I keep my food to the already dead.”
“Then no, page 1 of the manual. I’m only here to kill what’s killing.”
We finished up as the sun began to climb. The ghoul, Janet I had learned her name was, and I stayed a few more days before disappearing into the night. I gave her a lift out of state, bigger cities have better morgues and it was better to put some distance between ourselves and what had happened.
I headed back home, ready to write my adventures into my next novel. Killing monsters pays the bills.