Ghouls

“I’ll put it as plainly as I can,” Willard said, still wearing his pedant’s smile. “Since the beginning of time, mankind has been marked with its lore. There’s so much to dissimulate, you know? Legends, myths, superstitions…” Smoke rose up and blurred his face. “Some of them are true.”

Kurt frowned, reminded of Melissa’s theory. “I suppose you’re going to tell me that werewolves have been killing all these people.”

Willard laughed gustily. “Oh, no, Kurt. Not werewolves. It’s something worse than werewolves, something much worse—”

I knew it, Kurt thought. Poor bastard’s elevator doesn’t quite make it to the top.

“—because werewolves don’t exist in any legendary sense,” Willard went right on saying. “There are no men who change into wolves on nights of the full moon, just men who think they do, and that is where you separate the superstition from the fact, where science shines. Lupinic hebephrenia, a simple and not terribly uncommon psychiatric disorder, explains the roots of the werewolf legend, just as an array of phlebotomanic psychoses explain vampirism. There’s an answer for everything, a logical, scientific answer. All myths and legends evolved from some web of truth. Bigfoot, UFO’s, spontaneous combustion— in time, science will have an answer for them all.”

Kurt began to care less and less about what Willard had to say. The pistol seemed rather large now, a miniature cannon.

There was fire in Willard’s eyes, the madness of too much knowledge, too much thinking. He was looking over Kurt now, and up, as if addressing some huge vigilant entity in the air. “Imagine the excitement, the triumph, of true discovery,” he said. “Imagine what must have been felt by Fleming, Bell, Van de Graaff, Peary… I’m an inch away from such triumph.”

“Don’t tell me. You’re about to discover the North Pole.”

But Willard ignored Kurt’s sarcasm. His eyes grew even more refulgent. “When I was in the Army, my final permanent duty station was Riyadh, Saudi Arabia. That’s where it began.”

“We don’t have any military bases in Saudi Arabia,” Kurt said.

“Bases and combat units, no. But there are quite a few United States casernes which house American military personnel, mostly Air Force trainers and technical advisers, Marines for the embassy. Logistics and medical support are handled mainly by the Army. In 1978, I was the commanding officer of one of the Army garrisons.”

“Why don’t you command this garrison?” Kurt suggested, pointing to his crotch.

“Do you want your explanation, or don’t you?”

“My apologies, Doc. There’s something about having a gun in my face that brings out the comedian in me.”

“And it was near this garrison,” Willard drew on, “that I first encountered the ghala.”

Kurt yielded to a smirk. “What is this ghala shit?”

“The ghala,” Willard said, his voice hanging in the air like an incantation. “Mythological ravagers of graveyards, eaters of the dead. Ghala, or ghul, are Arabic derivatives of the word ghoul, which today takes on many confusing connotations, everything from Hollywood zombies to human beings obsessed with death. Comprehensive analysis, though, unveils even more indeterminate denotations; it seems that the transposition of the initial myth becomes less accurate with the more updated sources. Some surprisingly reputable mythologists insist that the ghala are shape-shifting creatures which lie dormant by day in the graves they’ve invaded, and at night transform themselves into the living identities of the corpses they’ve consumed. Other texts claim that the ghala are corporeal composites of the djinn, another better known Arabic myth; in this depiction, the ghala are female semihuman demons that pose as harlots and lure men off to eat them alive; while still more sources affirm that the ghala are sexless spirits with no substance at all. These modern transliterations are endless as well as useless—Europeanized codswallop, not at all honest renditions of the original myth.”

“So what’s the original myth?” Kurt egged.

There seemed no end to Willard’s willingness to run on at the mouth. “The earliest Moslem mythology abounds with references of the ghala, and these references are quite specific: the ghala are vicious, manlike things, whose only priorities are to terrorize the living and consume the dead. But little attention has been paid to this particular facet of Eastern lore, which accounts for the unrefined definitions of Western comprehension. Most Arabic folklore was brought to Europe at the same time, the early 1700s, and translated almost entirely by one man, a French archaeologist named Antoine Galland. Galland’s translations, which include the Thousand and One Nights, were hugely successful in Europe; they were also immediately pirated, bootlegged, and revised. Experts agree that these translations were made faultily; even without considering the bootlegged copies, Galland had a reputation for suiting his translations to Western taste—it’s even likely that segments of the original manuscripts weren’t translated by Galland at all, but by hacks. And for those reasons, the ghala legends were dismissed as fabrications, simply inept reworkings of European werewolf lore…”

Kurt wasn’t listening. Sweat began to run down the inside of his shirt. He knew Willard intended to kill him.

“I accepted these conclusions myself,” Willard continued, “but gradually things started to bother me, things that I had heard, and things I saw myself.”

Keep him talking, Kurt thought desperately. Let him jack his jaws. “What kind of things?”

“For one, an unbelievable number of incidents of missing persons. I actually had AFSS personnel look into it, and although the Saudis tend to maintain crude crime statistics, that much is more than obvious. Innumerable reports of missing persons, unsolved, unexplained. And all of these disappearances seem to occur after dark.”

“Most people are abducted after dark. That’s not what I would call proof of the existence of these things.”

“True, but that’s not all. It seems that many of the smaller and more remote Arabic villages, especially those along the mountainous western edge of the peninsula, practice the same bizarre burial customs. There are no conventional cemeteries. Graves are uniformly unmarked and scattered. And worse, throughout the centuries, similar towns and villages reflect a staggering history of grave robbing, despite the deliberate efforts of the populace to hide their dead. All of this, even today, is blamed ridiculously on the Bedouin tribesmen, sheep- and camel-herding nomads. But I know better now.”

“Ghouls, huh?”

Willard’s smile grew dull. “You’d be advised to take me seriously.”

“Whatever you say, Doc.”

“You’ll see,” Willard said, a jocose warning. “The proof is closer than you think; the ghala exist. Most of them were killed off by the Wahabis in the first part of the century. Until then it had been strictly a technical problem—the ghala are fast enough to dodge low-velocity bullets. But in 1902, in preparation for the wars which eventually unified Saudi Arabia, King Ibn Saud armed his forces with European-made long rifles, Mausers, I think. These were what brought the ghala to near extinction.”

Does he really believe this? “How come I’ve never heard anything about this legend?”

“Obscurity, distance, time. But chiefly the reluctance on the part of the Islam people,” Willard replied. “The reality of the ghala is long-since forgotten, but the legend will remain forever. Ask any Arab about his county’s history of graveyard vandalism, and he will answer you with silence, as though smitten. Much in the same as asking a German about the death camps, or a Mexican about dysentery.”

Kurt’s inside seized up; he’d forgotten about Vicky. Willard must not have noticed her when he’d come in.

The third walkie-talkie was on the cruiser’s front seat. The second was still on his hip. If Vicky had the foresight to turn hers on…

And there was a shotgun in the car.

“Then the rest of the legend is true?” Kurt asked. He let his hand slide down very slowly, very naturally, and he depressed the transmit button on his walkie-talkie. He knew he must continue to humor Willard and his madness. “These things actually rob graves and eat dead bodies?”

“It’s true, yes, but you’ve still too much a bent toward the superstitious treatment. When you separate the