Page 5 of Waste
“How are you doing, Shelley?” Jo asked with mock concern.
“I’m okay, thanks.” Shelley tried to move past Jo, but Jo blocked her path.
“Shelley, we’re all worried about you. You… experienced a traumatic event that led to you being injured,” Jo pushed.
“I’m well aware of what happened, Jo; I was present,” she muttered. Shelley self-consciously touched her face where John Saville, Mr Black Americano’s name, had broken her cheekbone.
“Shelley, the offer of therapy remains on the table. The company will pay,” Jo offered.
Shelley knew why they would pay. The purpose was to prevent her from suing them. John Saville had found and stalked her through her workplace. The company had failed to notice a problem, and he’d also sabotaged her car in the staffcar park behind the shop. Their security guard yet again spotted nothing. It turned out he enjoyed playing an online game that captured dinosaurs more than doing his job.
In a hard-pitched effort to stop Shelley from suing, there were safety issues they’d overlooked; Shelley had been paid for the three weeks she’d missed working. They’d even hired a plastic surgeon to examine her broken cheekbone. She was aware that her eye socket had dropped slightly, and it was noticeable. Shelley was scheduled for a surgery appointment in a couple of weeks.
At work, Shelley started wearing glasses with plain glass to prevent people from staring at her eyes. If she were outside, she could wear sunglasses, and at home, there was nobody to care.
“I know, and I’m fine. Thank you for caring,” Shelley said the words, but didn’t mean them.
She smiled listlessly and moved past Jo. There was nothing more to say. Shelley was well aware she wasn’t the bubbly, positive, friendly person she had been two months ago. John Saville had beaten that out of her. Now she was coldly professional while she provided good customer service.
There was only one thing that got her ass moving lately, and that was researching her rescuer. After he—she assumed it had been a he—had disappeared, she’d called the cops. Silently slumping against her car, Shelley had collapsed in a daze. Unsurprisingly, it had taken the police twenty minutes to arrive. By that time, Shelley’s face had swollen to unbearable limits and had closed her right eye.
She was barely conscious as she was loaded into an ambulance with an officer escorting her. The dead guy close to her had obviously caused great concern. Shelley had kept her mouth shut while she tried to arrange her thoughts. Even so, when she arrived at the hospital, she was no clearer. In the end,Shelley had told a partial truth. She claimed she’d no idea what happened to John Saville.
She recalled, sobbing, him punching her and falling against the car and raising her arms to defend herself. Shelley then alleged that everything was going dark, and then suddenly she was collapsing on the floor and staring at his dead body. The police, needless to say, didn’t believe her and returned repeatedly, but her story never changed.
If she claimed… what? That some monster that had saved her life, they would have locked her up. Shelley knew when to keep her mouth shut, and this was one of those times. Even now, the police would randomly contact her asking if she had remembered something. There was no way Shelley would admit anything. They’d lock her up and throw away the key.
Instead, Shelley returned to work and carried on with daily life. However, she was far more wary and alert.
Once home, she buried herself in her research, and she thought she’d figured out what had saved her. It was something straight out of a fantasy book or a horror novel, but it certainly shouldn’t exist. The creature that had appeared from nowhere like a knight in shining armour was called a ghoul.
Chapter Two.
Shelley
On arriving home from work, she locked her front door securely and checked that everything else remained secure. After confirming her windows and doors hadn’t been tampered with, Shelley made a quick meal of chips and sausages before sitting down with her laptop.
There was scant information regarding ghouls. And what was available was unpleasant. Shelley had to filter the search results to ignore games and fictional lore, which left relatively little. Shelley had determined that ghouls came about because they consumed the flesh of the lifeless. But it didn’t say whether they ate it when they were alive or after they were gone. That then raised the question of whether they were deceased and how they managed to eat it.
Did they return as ghosts and consume dead flesh, and if so, how? Too many questions were unanswered about their origins. However, she had discovered a site late last night that mentioned an old, abstract, little-known legend. Shelley had been falling asleep when she’d found it, so she bookmarked the page, intending to research it today.
She clicked the link, and it opened. It opened onto a homepage about monster legends, featuring a list that Shelley could click on. Hitting the ghoul tab, Shelley began reading.
The site claimed that there had only been one ghoul, and he’d been a warrior of God thousands of years ago. But he had become corrupted by evil, and his body changed, and he was cast out of Heaven. It continued by saying that Ghoul consumed those who were sinful so that his wickedness could survive and be suppressed. From him sprang a line of ghouls. The legend continued that he’d bitten someone and believed them dead. However, they’d survived, but Ghoul had infected them, and they’d turned into ghouls too.
Shelley scowled. The story seemed far-fetched, but so did a living ghoul, and she’d certainly seen one. Another thing the site mentioned was that Ghoul was insatiable; it would feast—and not stop. It would even kill people to ensure it could feed, hiding their bodies in graveyards.
That was mildly disturbing. Shelley frowned as she clicked on a second link and gasped at the image that appeared.
It was an artist’s rendering, very well drawn, of a creature with white skin and pronounced muscles. His head was oblong-shaped, with red eyes and dangerous, pointy teeth. No doubt to enable Ghoul to tear flesh from bones. Overlarge hands dangled from extra-long arms. There was a close-up picture of unusually sharp nails on its hands and feet, and another shot of it bent over backwards.
The citations claimed Ghoul was incredibly bendy, almost rubbery, and Shelley remembered the touch of its skin under her hand. That was how her saviour’s arm had felt that night. It had saved her life. It hadn’t dragged her off to a graveyard to kill her and let her body moulder so it might eat her. No, it had also spoken. There’d been intelligence present.
Shelley had a gut feeling that possibly part of the tale was true. She tapped her nails against the table and frowned. Now that she had information, what next?
Drew/Ghoul
“I hate that,” Drew said as he came through the portal.
