Roadside Ghoul

The wind along Highway 17 always smelled of rot. Not the clean, dry scent of desert decay, but something wet, like a landfill left to ferment. That was the smell that hung in the ditch outside Silver City the night Clay Brenner’s life came apart at the seams.

He’d been driving back from Dayton, headlights cutting through a steady drizzle that had turned the shoulders into black soup. His wipers fought a losing battle, smearing the rain and grime into grease streaks.

When the first shimmer of green caught his high beams, he thought it was just another tarp, plastic sheeting caught in the scrub. Clay slowed.

There was a lot of dumped junk out there: torn grocery bags, hubcaps, a mattress or two half-sunk into the mud. But something about the shape; it bulged wrong, too symmetrical, too heavy.

He told himself he was just tired. Still, curiosity made him ease to a stop.

The tarp wasn’t still. It fluttered once, as something beneath had exhaled.

Clay stepped out, boots sinking an inch deep. His flashlight beam jittered with the tremor in his hand.

“Hey,” he muttered, more to fill the silence than to call out.

The air was thick, humming faintly from the power lines above. Then a car came up the opposite lane, its headlights sweeping across the ditch.

The light hit the green mass dead-on, and it moved. The “tarp” unfurled like a wet umbrella, its folds peeling back with a slurp of mud.

Something within it rose, slowly, deliberately, until it stood as tall as a man. Its surface glistened, green and gray, like cabbages rotted by rain.

A bulbous head rolled forward from a stalk of matted tendrils, and beneath that head, faces. Not one, but dozens of human-like visages molded into the flesh, half-dissolved, their mouths stretched wide as if gasping for the last breath they’d ever take.

Clay stumbled backward, the beam of his flashlight catching on the creature’s eyes, if that’s what they were. Two milky orbs blinked open amid the folds, reflecting the light with a wet sheen.

The thing made a noise then, a drawn-out hiss that began deep in its throat and ended as a chorus, a dozen whispering mouths all speaking at once.

“Road…side…”

Clay didn’t wait for the rest. He ran.

The mud clutched his boots and tried to pull him down. He half-climbed, half-crawled up the embankment and flung himself into his truck.

The headlights showed nothing but churned sludge. Clay slammed the door, jammed the gearshift into drive, and tore down the highway, heart clawing at his ribs.

Behind him, something thudded against the rear bumper. He didn’t stop again until he hit the lights of Virginia City.

By morning, Clay convinced himself it was a hallucination. He hadn’t slept, the rain distorted everything, and he’d been drinking the night before.

He told no one. But he couldn’t shake the sound, that whisper made of too many voices.

A week later, a local sanitation crew found a body in that same ditch, or what was left. It was a man stripped of his clothes and hair, his skin patterned with greenish lesions that looked like plant growths. The coroner couldn’t explain it.

Then two more disappeared along that stretch. A hitchhiker. A woman searching for her lost dog.

Each time, all they found were scraps, bits of clothing, clumps of hair, and a few personal effects scattered amid the trash. The sheriff blamed coyotes.

Folks in town whispered otherwise. They said the ditch was alive.

Old-timers started calling it Pollutus sapiens, a local biologist’s term that made its way into the papers for a week before being quietly forgotten. “The Roadside Ghoul,” they said, a new species born of human neglect.

The idea was that all the waste, plastic, oil, rotting food, and the chemicals from decades of litter had seeped deep enough into the earth to wake something ancient. A self-aware colony of decay, mimicking the shapes it had consumed.

Clay knew better. He could still see those faces, all pressed together like reflections in a dirty mirror. One of them had looked familiar, cheekbones like his former boss, and the jawline like the man who owned the junkyard out by the interstate.

It wasn’t just a mimic. It was a collector.

He stopped sleeping after that. Every time headlights swept across his window, he saw the shape again, the slick folds, the green sheen, the whisper of the word “roadside.”

Weeks later, when the county finally sent a team to drain the ditch and pave it over, the workers found nothing. There were no bones, no fibers, no hint of the mud-born thing, but the asphalt refused to set properly; it bubbled, exuding a faint smell like sour cabbage.

People still drive past that stretch. Most don’t notice anything, not unless their lights catch the right angle. But sometimes, in the wet season, a driver will swear the puddles move, or that the heaps of trash look almost human in the rain.

And if you stop, if you slow down, just for a few seconds, something might rise, thinking you’ve come to stay. That’s how it feeds, how it learns your shape.