To Make a Ghoul by Paul Wilson
People are disgusting.
You know it as well as I, but the difference between us is that while you’re sitting there nodding your head, you’re also one of the disgusting creatures that drops your filth all over this planet.
Yes. You.
What? You never threw a napkin out of your car window? How about a paper cup after the soda is gone? Apple core? Or maybe you’re one of those special assholes who punishes their child by throwing a toy out the window? Something that makes noise they won’t stop playing with? Or maybe a favorite stuffed animal just because their being difficult and you’re a miserable turd who isn’t over their own childhood trauma.
But the worst—the absolute fucking worst of the offenders, of the low bastards that drop their pollution—are the smokers. These nasty, gross, defiling idiots who are either so accustomed to dropping the burnt cigarette butts out their car window that they no longer realize they’re doing it, or these privileged princesses who don’t want to get the car Daddy bought them dirty by using the ashtray. Who is worse? The ones who have flicked their ends so much they no longer notice they might start a forest fire, or the ones who do it willfully and don’t give a shit?
Both. Both are putrid fucking animals.
And yes, I have every right to say so, because I clean it up.
I’m one of the poor bastards you have never heard of and have never seen—if we do our job right. Oh sure, occasionally someone gets lucky and catches us in a grainy picture or phone video, but the one caught on camera is never left intact to make the same mistake again. Demons have rules, never you doubt it. There is a hierarchy. Punishment is dismemberment, destruction, and worse than death. Offenders are torn apart and live, nerve endings sizzling and leaking and screeching for all time.
Is it any wonder? Those of us down here on the clean-up crew are already being punished at the lowest possible level. We are released at night to rid garbage from the world: streets, sidewalks, gutters, forests, even roofs. Every seen someone dump their car ashtray in a Wal-Mart parking lot? Ever see a huge mound of those disgusting chewed ends? Then you come back the next day and its gone. Who cleaned it? You never think too much about it do you? Ever see an exploded animal corpse on the highway? Not to the side, but one mashed into the asphalt? Ever see a McDonald’s Happy Meal box with half the food congealing in the sun? But these things are always gone the next day, aren’t they? And who cleans it? Someone you think—if you ever give it thought at all. But it’s not someone. It’s me. It’s me and the other unlucky souls like me who are released from Hell every night to crawl along the earth and clean. It’s funny. I had to die to become an environmentalist. I’m green whether I want to be or not!
You never see us. You never appreciate us. We are no better than the orange-vested inmates picking up trash that you pass and quickly look away. We are the same as them only they have it so much easier. They have bags and sticks. They have hands. They have arms. Not us. Do you know how we pick up the trash? You do. Your lips are thinning, turning down, your guts are rolling because you know. It’s torture. It’s Hell.
We pick up everything with our mouths. We eat the world’s garbage every night, no matter what it is. Chomp, chomp, chew, chew, swallow. And if you throw up a maggot-encrusted animal corpse or some kid’s molded stuffed monkey that has been stuck in the bushes for weeks—well, that’s just more garbage, isn’t it? And we clean that too. Chomp, chomp, chew, chew, swallow.
#
I was a bank president. Swindled? Yes. Cheated? Yes. Stole? Of course. But I did more. I cheated on my wife. When she caught me, I lied. Then I beat her. I enjoyed doing that, so I kept doing it. Then I started beating my mistress. Why? Because I wanted to. I enjoyed it. Do you see the pattern? Do you see the core? Me, I, it’s all selfishness. I did what I wanted over someone else’s needs. The same way people throw their shit all over this planet because it’s what they wanna. It’s what’s convenient. You know what else was convenient? Leaving my mistress in Rio and returning home solo because it saved money on a plane ticket. Ditto denying my wife a divorce because I needed someone to do the laundry and cook the food. I treated these people like garbage.
But my wife got back. That food I made her cook? She poisoned it. And I ended up here, in Hell, eating the world’s garbage as my eternal damnation. There’s an irony in that, I’m just in too much fucking pain to work it out.
#
As I said, there are rules. We can’t be seen. We can’t leave anything behind. We can only use our mouths. Demons cut off our arms every night before we get released. They grow back during the day so we can experience the agony of amputation each night. Hell— what fun it is. We slither along the ground, over asphalt, grass, rock, mud, whatever, fading back if a car or person comes. It’s . . . well, it’s Hell. It makes you insane. But that’s the point, isn’t it?
But I should come to the point. I should talk about why I’m putting this down.
I made a mistake. I broke a rule. I was seen. But that’s okay because the woman who saw me is dead. But . . . I broke the ultimate rule. I killed.
We’re not allowed to kill. In Hell it is a privilege to take a life. In my circle we are so far below a perk like that, to even consider killing . . . well, it’s a rule. And I broke it. Hell does not allow deviation.
She was vaping, standing under a tree, blowing strawberry clouds of poison in the air. This silly, fluffy bitch had the goddamned vape pen on a string around her neck. A cellphone was glued to one hand. She would drop the vape-pen long enough to sip from her coffee. She finished her drink and dropped the cup on the ground. Never looked, never considered, just dropped it. A little splashed out. I knew I would have to lick those remnants up. And just like that it was too much. I was hiding in a sewer grate, waiting on her to continue down the street so I could finish this section’s work, but suddenly I couldn’t stand it anymore. She littered, but more, she was so flippant about it. Do you know how long those damn cups last? Do you know how hard they are to swallow?
I launched myself at her. She tried to get away, but I bit through the back of her ankle, severing that tendon, and she went down. The bitch. The piece of trash. Trash. So, I did my job. I ate her. I ate her alive and screaming and I fucking loved it.
Now I’m waiting on my punishment.
#
I thought it was bad before. This is so much worse.
I’m still eating trash. Just not above anymore.
Below.
Did you know that Hell considers corpses trash? The corpses of the damned are just lying in the ground, in rotted pine boxes, in cracked caskets. Their souls are in Hell and their bodies are just . . . trash.
At least they let us have our hands down here. We need them for the digging.
Chomp, chomp, chew, chew, swallow.
People are disgusting.
