Random Circus

9-21-08 edit 03-06-09
By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

When I was younger my grandfather would come to visit and he would tell me this story every time. According to him it happened in the town where he was born.

The circus was neither the largest nor the best that anyone in town had seen but you were sure to see a show and anything could and sometimes did happen when the circus came to town. In fact any circus was always worth the price of admission. This was the town of Random and the only thing that Random was known for was that it was the place where the circus elephant died.

You see, many years ago, before cars and trucks, the circus walked from place to place and horses along with other work animals pulled the circus wagons. And Random was the place that the old elephant decided to up and die. She just stopped in the road and wouldn’t move and two days later she was dead. The circus moved on without even looking back at her and the towns people had to bury the carcass themselves. So right there where she lay getting all foul and smelly next to the town square, they dug up the square park and heaved the elephant in. It took all of eight days and every man and boy was needed to help. Using every shovel and even boards they moved the earth and stones with wheelbarrows, carts and even sacks. Mothers and wives made soothing ointment for the blisters on the men’s hands. It took three teams of oxen to pull the elephant into the hole. They didn’t even stop for Sunday services either because the smell on a hot summer day was just awful.

Eventually the mound of earth sunk back into place and people kinda’ forgot about it in their day to day lives. But every year when the circus came back to town it was all that they could talk about. Strange things started to happen with every circus show from that day on. Nothing you would expect, like hearing an elephant trumpet in the still of the night or seeing an elephant walking down the street by itself. No, they experienced things like high wire performers that would fall from their tight ropes but not get hurt, falling far too slowly to be in real time. Tents would blow up into the air like a cyclone had picked them up but not one thing inside the tent would be disturbed. Wild animals would get loose and be found sleeping in someone’s chicken yard with all the chickens accounted for and not one person harmed. You just didn’t know what would happen but it would certainly be a head scratcher.

After a while the circus’s didn’t come around as often. Going to the circus wasn’t as popular as it had been and it was too hard for most of them to turn a profit so a lot of them just closed down. And the ones that did still travel weren’t coming to small towns anymore. The town of Random was down to a small third rate circus every five years or so.

No one thought about the elephant buried under the town square anymore. Some kids didn’t even know about the story of its death or the circus mystery miracles. Old folks sat on the park benches and dozed in the afternoon sunlight over the elephants bones as bees buzzed over the summer flowers planted in the park.


Marcus Williamson was the first to realize that the trucks and vans driving around the square were from a tired, run down, fourth rate, one ring circus and that they were heading for the empty lot next to the supermart store.

Not one word had been forwarded of their coming. They just showed up like it had always been that way and acted like they should have been expected. In fact that is just what they said when someone asked. That they were supposed to come here again but no one in town could remember that particular circus ever being in town before.

Mr. Warner owned the empty lot and let the circus park there but didn’t want them to set up their tents on his property. The lot had recently been black topped and he wanted the macadam to settle without large tent pegs being driven through it. The only place left with room for the tents was the town square itself, so they set them up there.

The people on the square scrambled home to tell the others and to get their money ready for a ticket. By the time the show started the next day almost everyone in town was crammed into the large, well worn, patched up circus tent. Some bought tickets for both the afternoon and evening performances. Word had spread like wild fire that this wasn’t a show to be missed. The old stories were being told in every house and on every street corner. No one wanted to miss a chance at seeing an elephant miracle for themselves.

Everyone was on pins and needles wondering just what would happen this time around, flying people or tame tigers on the loose? Maybe it would be something never seen before.

People strained to see around the people in front of them as all the performers came into the ring and lined up in a circle to start the show to the sound of trumpet music over the loud speakers.

Jumbo’s circus had a lot of things but mostly it was full of used up circus people and animals. It did not have an elephant. The first circus to be without an elephant since the day the old elephant had died on the road around this same square.

As the fanfare music ended, the ground started to rumble and tremble under the tent as the circus people bowed to the applause. The tent pegs slipped out of their moorings. The rigging came down first, only moments before the tent canvas itself and the earth belched the smell of sulfur. People were coughing and their eyes were tearing as they scrambled to safety.

When the towns people finally make it out from under the tenting and pulled it back to try to rescue the circus people trapped under it, what they found instead was a crater with a dead elephant. The elephant was wearing the word Jumbo printed on a tattered and faded material sash on it’s back laying at the bottom of the hole. Not one circus performer was ever found. They had disappeared. Their belongings on Mr. Warner’s lot were searched to find someone to inform of the calamity. The only information they could find were some very old papers that told Random that the circus people were the direct descendants of the circus that had left the elephant behind for the towns people to bury so very many years ago. And now all the town could do was to bury the elephant in the hole again for it to rest in peace.

The mayor got up a collection for a one fourth scale statue of an elephant to be placed on the center of the square and the children in the town of Random play and ride on it’s back to this day. Only they don’t know that it is anything but a plaything to keep them happy on a summers day, and the elephant in the ground underneath them doesn’t seem to mind. Just to be on the safe side the town of Random doesn’t have a circus come to town anymore. But no one misses going to the circus when it comes to a town close by, because it just might be close enough to see an elephant miracle for themselves.

Out of the Blue

8-29-08
By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Andy had left work for the day and walked down the street without a care in the world. The sun was shining and the breeze was just the right temperature. Birds sang in the trees while squirrels ran up and down the bark. He couldn’t help himself and started whistling a tune, something he hadn’t done since he was a boy. In fact he felt like a boy again on this golden afternoon.

Harriet had the day off and was walking down the same street to shop. She was going in the opposite direction and could see the storm clouds on the horizon coming towards them. The sheer dreariness of the coming storm made her sick inside. She grumbled under her breath as she made her way toward Andy waiting for the light to change so he could cross the street.

As the sun shown down on the corner of Main Street and Park Avenue they met crossing the street. Harriet growled at Andy’s whistling and Andy gave Harriet a friendly wink. Flash Crash! Lightning out of the blue. They were both hit and knocked to the ground. People ran up to them and tried to revive them.


Andy found himself in a strange place. It was a dark and misty forest like place. There were forms just out of range that he couldn’t quite make out that watched him and skulked about. He hoped, wished, wondered about the small weak light in the sky, wanting it to grow into the beautiful warm sun again and burn away the darkness all around him. He screamed and shouted at the things on the periphery to no avail. He felt cold and scared. He didn’t want to move but felt that he had to follow the light.

Harriet was now looking up into the sunshine. It hurt and her flesh felt like it was burning. The people around her looked like they had halos from the brightness. She closed her eyes to the glare. She could hear them trying to help her, she just couldn’t answer back. The pain was too much. She only wished that they would leave her alone and stop hurting her.


The ambulance driver told the police officer on the scene that only one of them seemed to be making it so far. The police officer held the crowd back so the paramedics could do their jobs.


Andy waited for a long time before he felt up to moving and to look for some shelter in the mist for the night that must soon be coming. At times the light in the sky seemed to be getting larger, at others he was sure it was smaller than at the start. He told himself that the mist was making it look that way. He walked through thick brush and briers, all the time keeping the weak light in sight.

Harriet could feel the cold shaking start from deep inside her. “Shock” she heard someone say. She had her eyes closed against the brightness and the pain. The shaking was making the pain turn into agony. She tried to stop the shaking but she couldn’t control anything any longer. The siren started to wail and it strangely calmed her, like it was doing the screaming for her.


Loaded each into separate ambulances, they made their way at top speed to the nearest hospital with a burn unit. The police had cleared the road for them.


Andy was getting tired of fighting the brush and slowed his movement toward the light. He used all his strength and concentration to make a narrow path. He was hurting and tired but he just had to get closer to the light. Small as it was he knew it was where he needed to be. When the greenery opened into a clearing he ran for all he was worth for the other side, afraid that the light would fade into night.

Harriet was bathed in white warm light. The shaking had stopped. They must have given her drugs for the pain because she couldn’t feel anything any longer. Her eyes were still closed and she let them do whatever it was that they needed to do to her. It felt like floating and she just let her body ride the waves of warmth. The voices didn’t concern her any longer. The words didn’t make any sense to her anyway. If only the light would fade and she could sleep like this.


The stretchers were brought into the emergency room one after the other and a separate team of doctors and nurses worked on each of them with all the skills and equipment they had. The young adults in their care were going to get every chance to regain a life to live in full.


Andy heard the bugs of night starting to make noise. It sounded kind of like beeping in this strange new world he found himself in. He checked to see if it was his cell phone, but he had lost it a while back. The light was getting closer and lower in the sky. Night would be falling soon and he still hadn‘t found a place to stay. He didn’t want to. All he could think of was getting to that cool pale light.

Harriet was getting a headache. The meds must be wearing off. She tried to open her eyes but they wouldn’t work. Nothing worked in fact. Everything she tried to move on her body stayed still. She started to panic but couldn’t make a sound. Would they think she was dead and send her to the morgue, then bury her alive? ‘No, they gave her meds and that was what was keeping her from moving. It would wear off any minute.‘ she told herself.


The gurneys were moved one to the morgue and the other to a room in the intensive care unit of the hospital. The families and friends gathered in the waiting room were told of their respective conditions. Unable to visit, they were left crying and clutching to one another. They drifted off to make arrangements according to their loved ones status.


Andy waited holding his breath as the last of the light faded from view. In the darkness he sat where he had stood and cried in sheer frustration. When he was done crying out all his anger and pain he was resolved once again to try all the harder in the morning. He sank into the cold darkened greenery and slept.

Harriet was in a drug induced coma but her mind dreamed on. She found herself with a lantern in her hand looking down at Andy sleeping on the forest floor. After a while she got tired of waiting for him to wake on his own and poked him with her hospital slippered toe.

Andy woke with the light of the lantern just inches from his face. He could feel the warmth of it on his cheek. His body was chilled with the damp into his very bones but he didn’t want to move and frighten Harriet away.

“I’m not standing here all night.” she said to him and waited for him to rise before pushing the lantern into his hands. “You can carry this for a while, I’m tried to death of the brightness of the thing. I hope I never see it again.“ And she turned and walked into the darkened misty woods.


In the doctors lounge, two very tired doctors sat and talked about the day they had encountered. The two people from the same lightning strike had them both too busy to talk before this.

“I still can’t believe what a day I had. We tried to keep her alive, we really did, but she just stopped trying and died despite the fact that she had the lesser injuries of the two. I just came from finishing the paper work. Twelve o’clock midnight was the time she expired. Now that doesn’t happen often.” said the first.

The second shook his head. “That is funny. But I can do you one better. The guy I had was dead and sent to the morgue when he woke up on the table and scared the devil out of the coroner getting ready to prep him for autopsy. I had to pass him on to the next shift because I was swamped with paperwork for sending him down there in the first place but I know for certain he was gone when I pronounced him and signed the papers.”

The door opened and the still white lipped coroner slumped down in the nearest chair. All he said was, “Midnight! It had to happen to me at the strike of midnight.”

Molly’s Train

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

Molly Ferguson headed to the bus station. Her short hair was sticking to the back of her neck on her small frame as she struggled to carry the bags. All that she now owned was in two beat up suit cases and a tote bag. Once she had almost everything she needed and some extras to feel good about. Now all that was left was here in her hands. This latest flood had taken all the rest.

She had wanted to take a train out of town. Molly had dreamed about it for most of her school years, but the trains weren’t running yet and wouldn’t be for a while but the buses were. There was nothing left for her here and it was time to leave town.

She had lived with her grandfather until he broke his hip then she was sent to the Foster Homes. After that she had her little apartment and a job in the local video store.

The flood had washed away her past and Molly was off to start over some place new, maybe in the mountains above where it could flood. As soon as she could find a moving train she was going to get on and keep on going. Molly was tired of waiting. With all the money, which wasn’t much, that her grandfather had left to her when he died and his little house on the edge of town was sold, she was made to wait until her eighteenth birthday and that was the day of the flood. So she was forced to wait some more.

When Molly was younger and lived with Poppop in his little house, she could hear the trains from her bedroom. Their rhythmic clickity clacking on the rails, the low rumble of the engine and the wailing whistle as it left town. Molly liked it all like a lullaby in the night. She wanted, thought about and dreamed of traveling on a train. She wanted it even more when she found out that her parents died on a train. Molly never knew the whole story, Poppop told her that he would tell her the details of how her parents died when she was older but that day never came. So all she had was a faded picture of them and her dreams of trains in her sleep feeling the rumble of it under her in her bed.

Whenever she felt sad or bad as a child she would tell herself that a train would answer all her questions and it would calm all her fears. To the child that she once was a train was all she needed. Molly didn’t believe that any longer but she still wanted to take a trip on a train away from the only town she ever knew but was the loneliest place on earth for her now. The picture of her parents was gone with everything else when the muddy water came through.


The bus traveled through the devastated flood zone. Mud and muck painted everything with the same dead looking gray brush. What once must have been beautiful countryside was ugly caked with muck and piled with debris. Having nothing to look at out the window she read from the tattered novel she had gotten at the shelter from one of the Volunteer workers. It was about a boy named Johnny and his dog, Rufus, trying to get home. Not her type of book but there was nothing else to do. She didn’t even know the title or author because the cover and first few pages were missing and the binding was falling apart it was so old and yellowed. Once she got to someplace that sold new paperbacks this one was getting tossed she told herself.

Once the landscape started getting green again and showed signs of life Molly started looking for train tracks and train stations. At one town she found out that the nearest passenger train was in the next state north and she changed buses to get herself in the right direction. To Molly’s surprise it had worked. There was a train at the station as she got off the bus.

Molly hopped on the train just in time. She wasn’t even sure what direction she was heading in, but she paid for her ticket and just sank into her seat, sighing all the weight of the last few months away. She closed here eyes and absorbed it all into the space where the tension had been inside or her. Molly filled herself up with the smell, feeling and sounds of the train. For the first time in years she felt the feeling of home. Everything else that had once been her life was left behind at the station.

Happy for the first time in a long time Molly set about making herself comfortable for the duration. She changed her clothes and headed for the dinning car. She hadn’t eaten a good meal since the flood and she was finally hungry.

On the way through the cars she smiled and nodded at the other passengers that looked her way. She found the dinning car and ordered her first meal by train. While waiting for her food to be prepared she pulled out the old book again but another couple started asking her about herself and her destination. After she told them she wasn’t sure where she was going they moved over to her table to talk better with her.

They made helpful suggestions and told her that they hoped to see her again in the days to come as they traveled and they left her to eat her meal in peace, but not before Jacky told her that the book she was reading was one of his favorites. “Some day I’ll get myself a dog and name him Rufus too.” he said.

Molly slept so well in her folded down train bed that she felt like she had never known what real sleep was before this.

The next day she looked around for her new friends but the conductor wasn’t sure just who she was talking about when she asked about them. Finally she saw them in the observation car. Helen and Jacky were sitting looking at where they had been instead of where they were headed. Helen shrugged and said, “Just looking for another perspective.”

Jacky asked Molly if she had thought about what they had told her about good towns to get started over in along the way.

Molly told them both ‘yes’ and she asked a lot of other questions to try to narrow the list down to a reasonable few. They chatted most of the afternoon away before leaving her to watch the sunset colors forming in the sky by herself.

Molly sat wondering about them, Helen and Jacky. Did she like them because they were friendly and helpful or because their names were so much like her parents? Hellene and Johnny. They looked a lot like her parents too, but most people of that age did to her. She didn’t remember them much at all only the picture. She was too young when they died, only two. They of course were too young to be her parents. They were almost Molly’s age, just a little older she guessed. But you couldn’t miss their enthusiasm about trains.

They knew the whole line. Every suburb and hallow, town and city, burg and watering hole. She was impressed and a little confused by it all. She couldn’t remember where they said they lived. But that didn’t really matter since they also said that they spent most all their free time riding on the train. Most of the places on the line didn’t interest her much at all. She needed to get a job and find a place to live first. But Molly couldn’t help hoping to be able to hear the train go by at night wherever she found to call home.


On the third day she was nearing the end of the line. Molly had decided with the help of her new friends to start at one end and work her way up the line until she found a place that worked best for her. She went to bed early to rest up for the new world she would be finding waiting for her in the morning and her stop was coming early in the day.

The clickity clacking of the wheels under her and the soft swaying of the train car lulled her into another deep sleep despite her nerves. When she woke in the morning she was surprised to find herself sleeping in her clothing on the ground between the tracks. The tracks themselves were rusty and obviously unused. Brush and grasses grew and died there undisturbed. Nothing she could think of was missing from her belongings when she looked at them.

She collected her bags and walked into the nearest town. It was where she wanted to be but according to he people she asked not one train came through town for many years but a number of them had heard a train early this morning.

Molly got a newspaper to find a job and a place to live only to discover that the date was three days earlier. The day after she had stepped onto the train in fact. June 21st. Somehow she had traveled hundreds of miles on a train that didn’t exist any longer in one night. She knew things about the town and the people here that she shouldn’t have known if her train ride and the people on it weren’t real. Molly knew where most everyone lived and where most everything was in town from what Helen and Jacky had told her.


Molly started to work in the video store because the owner’s son had just decided to take off on his motorcycle to see the world the day before. Soon she was the night manager. She liked her new apartment and made friend easily so she stayed. There was a stray dog that had adopted her and walked her home from the video store each night. Molly named him Rufus like in the book and felt safe here in her new home town.


A year later while walking the dog in the early morning Molly heard a train for the first time since the day she arrived. She followed the sound until it stopped and she found herself on the tracks further down from the spot on the day she arrived. The dog pulled her along until she was off the tracks again and into some over grown bushes.

The dog stopped when he got his leash tangled around a broken stone pillar. By the time she got the dog untangled she had to flip the broken part of the stone over. The writing carved into it said. ‘Hellene and John Ferguson died on this spot in the train wreck of 1992. Helen and Jacky loved their daughter Molly and the cross country train she was born on. May they rest in peace. June 21, 1992’ Now Molly understood all of what had happened to her in the last year. Molly’s parents had helped her find her way back to them. On the anniversary of their death Molly’s train had brought her home.

The Trouble in the Closet

By Lady Euphoria Deathwatch

9-12-08 re-write 1-18-09

Benny had a problem. Not a common problem and certainly not the kind of problem he was going to try to get much help with. He had learned when he was small that no one believed him about this conundrum. Benny had a Ghoul in his closet.

When Benny was small there was no Ghoul. The family lived in a house with no yard to speak of down the street from the cemetery and when Benny went outside playing he would run very fast around the grave stones in a kind of race with himself to see how fast he could run.

One day when Benny was about eight he tripped and skinned his knee on a low stone in the cemetery and bled all the way home. He didn’t run for a few days because his knee hurt, but by the time he was ready to run again something smelly had moved into his closet.

At first he thought it might just have been a ghost from the cemetery that had followed him home and that it liked to frighten him. It looked rather nasty but Benny called him a ghoul because this ghoul told him that he ate the rotting flesh of the dead. And then there was the foul odor of something rotting that always seemed to be coming from the thing. He found the definition in the large old dictionary in the bookcase by the stairs when he was ten. Benny’s mother thought the smell was Benny’s old shoes because his father had a foot odor problem.

Once, when Benny was feeling a bit brave, round about the age of eleven, he asked the ghoul what it’s name was? The ghoul didn’t seem to understand the question and Benny wasn’t feeling brave enough to take the time to explain. So Benny never did have a name to call him, he just called him Ghoul.

At thirteen Benny poured a bottle of his mothers best perfume into the closet to try to stink the ghoul out but the Ghoul stayed. Benny had to stay in his room for a month and the kids at school teased him something fierce for smelling like a very stinky girl.


Benny had hoped that when he was old enough to move out of his parent’s house he would leave the ghoul behind. But soon after he had his own apartment, the ghoul was in the new closet again. Since no one else seemed to be able to see the ghoul or rather the ghoul didn’t show itself when any one else was there, Benny had himself checked out for being nuts.

Dr. Navorski was an older gentleman with glasses and a mustache. Benny went to him for a few weeks before bringing up the ghoul. It was hard to admit that you thought you had something following you that most children stop worrying about ‘round about the age of fourteen if not before. Benny was now nineteen and had long since graduated high school by then.

The session when something like this.
Benny: “I’ve been having trouble sleeping lately. I need to have music on or I hear noises coming from my closet and they wake me up.”
Dr. Navorski: “And what do you think these noises are from?”
Benny: “Well a Ghoul that has been following me since I was a kid.”
Dr. Navorski: “When did you start hearing this ghoul?”
Benny: “When I was eight and I used to run around the headstones in the cemetery for fun.”
Dr. Navorski: “Did you feel guilty about running and playing in a place of grief and mourning? Disturbing the dead so to speak?”
Benny: “Well no, I was a kid and didn’t care as long as I was having fun and using up that extra kid energy. You know?”
Dr. Navorski: “Well there you have it. You were feeling guilty underneath your happy exterior and this is the way you have dealt with it all these years. Give yourself the permission to have once been a thoughtless child and your ghoul will go away. You are as sane as anyone walking the streets. You are just having a little trouble letting go of a childhood fantasy. But now that you know where it is coming from you won’t be needing it any longer and it will go away.”

Benny told the shrink that fantasies were nice things and the ghoul was definitely not nice. He didn’t go back for any follow up sessions.


The Ghoul was not a good house guest. It made his closet smell offal. He couldn’t keep his clothing in there. As a kid he had a free standing wardrobe and a dresser for his clothing and a shelf for his books and games. There was also a toy box for his toys. Nothing but broken, unused and outgrown items ever went into the closet. The ghoul made noises at times and also left things in the closet himself, the smelliest of these Benny buried in the small back yard at night.

The ghoul complained a lot about being so far from the cemetery, any cemetery, once Benny moved from home. Benny did tell the Ghoul he could always move out, but the Ghoul chose to stay.

Finally Benny couldn’t stand it any longer and he moved to an apartment house just across the street from the largest cemetery he could find in the area, only to find out that it was also one of the oldest so there was rarely any new meat. The ghoul was not happy about that at all. Benny started to collect road kill and bring it home for the ghoul.

He would stop at the side of the road whenever he saw a dead animal there. Benny kept some rubber gloves, a shovel, some plastic bags and a great big plastic storage box in the trunk of his car. His friends thought he was a bit goofy but liked the fact that he was so civic minded and felt that if someone had to do clean up of that kind of thing it should be someone with a iron nose like Benny with his foot problem.
The Ghoul didn’t exactly like the road kill and was picky about the condition of the carcass’. If they were too fresh he would throw them back out into Benny’s bed room and make a mess of the carpet. The meat had to have an odor of rot to it for the ghoul to even consider eating it.


All this time Benny wasn’t worried that the ghoul would want to eat him because Benny wasn’t dead. But despite it all, Benny had a fairly normal life. He dated, had friends, and liked to go hunting and camping. Mostly he liked camping because the ghoul generally stayed at home. Benny was moving on with his life.

And then there was Julia. Julia liked everything Benny thought a good girlfriend should like. She could drink beer with the best of them. She had four older brothers and they had taught her everything from burping the alphabet to car maintenance. They had met at one of the hunting trips he went on with his friends to get more meat to leave to rot for his closet guest and it was love at first sight. And what a sight. Julia was one good looking woman.


One night Benny opened the closet after knocking on the door and had a talk with the ghoul. Benny wanted to marry his girlfriend Julia and he needed some answers. Would the ghoul stay hidden when his new wife was in the room? No, came the answer. At first Benny was dismayed. He didn’t want her to be frightened by the ghoul. Then it turned into elation. Someone else would know about the ghoul and it wouldn’t be his secret to carry all by himself any longer.


When he told Julia about the ghoul she got all soft and smiled like his mother had so long ago when he told her about the ghoul. Julia thought it was something from Benny’s imagination like his mother and the psychiatrist. That or a strange excuse for the smell of his old shoes in the closet and she thought she could live with foot fungus. The store isles were full of no end of deodorizers and medications for just such things.

But the ghoul was real and since she had already agreed to marry him anyway, Benny was sure she would soon find out that fact for herself. He only hoped she would still want to stay married to him once she met the ghoul.


On the night they came home from their honeymoon Julia thanked Benny for having the closet in the bedroom cleared out for her and she proceeded to fill it with her belongings. He tried to talk to her about the ghoul but she just pushed him out of the room telling him to let her take care of a few things in peace.

Benny was nervous by the time he heard Julia call his name in that way he knew meant she was ready for some fun. And for the first time in the week since they were married he didn’t feel like answering her call. Benny got up and walked to the bedroom wondering just how long it would be before the ghoul showed up.

Things went better then Benny had expected. The ghoul hadn’t bothered them thou the smell in the closet made Julia move her clothing to the new larger freestanding wardrobe he had gotten for her. Every morning she would spray a new product into the ghoul’s closet just before she left for work and Benny would leave a half an hour later with the ghoul cursing loud and long from behind it’s door.

After a few weeks of trying to get rid of the smell herself she called in a professional cleaning team. One whiff of the smell coming from the ghoul’s closet had them calling in the authorities. After a thorough search including tearing open the walls of the closet itself, nothing was found. But they were keeping an eye on Benny in case he was involved in something they didn’t know about.

Julia was sure that if they just moved they could leave the smell behind. Benny tried to explain again but the closest he came was in having her believe that he had a smelly cheese loving ghost following him around. They moved and the smell moved with them. She wanted to try an exorcism. Benny finally relented, but after the priest left and the smell didn’t Julia was so upset she was ready to leave Benny and the foul smell that followed him. She begged him to stop bringing home the road kill because she thought it just might be adding to the odor in the closet.

Benny showered her with gifts and told her they would buy a house so large that she would never have to go near or smell the ghoul again. All she needed to do was wait until the right house could be found and they would start the search right away. He went to the computer and started looking for a large house close to a fairly new cemetery and Benny found that another newer cemetery had opened up close to a large old Victorian house on a hill in an older section of town. This new cemetery had once been the side gardens of the house.

Benny had been storing all the gold jewelry the ghoul had been leaving behind in the closet. He had just enough to buy the place outright. The price had been lowered because of the amount of repair the old house needed.

It was a longer commute to work, but worth it. Julia was happier in the new house as they fixed it up together by themselves and a baby was coming along in the spring. The ghoul happily resided in an attic room of it’s own. It didn’t like the smell of sweet soft baby products coming from the small bedroom off the master suite anyway.

One night Benny found the Ghoul in their bedroom and sniffing around Julia’s side of the bed. Benny told the Ghoul to go back to it’s own room. The next day that Julia had a doctor appointment they found out she had lost the baby. Benny should have guess.

A month after Julia came home from the hospital Benny had gone up to the ghouls attic room to see how the ghoul was doing. He kind of missed the Ghoul after always being there after so many years. The Ghoul was telling Benny what he had been up to since the baby died and they had last spoke. That was when Benny learned that the ghoul had feasted on his own son in the cemetery.

Benny couldn’t believe it. The ghoul he had come to think of as almost a brother had eaten his child. Benny only saw red and just lost it attacking the Ghoul with his bare hands. Being one of the undead the Ghoul didn’t die but he did killed Benny by pushing him out the fourth floor window and Julia too because she had tried to come to Benny’s aid after hearing the noise up in the attic were Benny had gone.


The police never did find the killer of the new couple living in the big old house up by cemetery hill but they never stopped trying because they could never get the picture or smell out of their heads of the two half eaten bodies found in the house a few weeks after they went missing. And no one could ever live in the house again because of the smell. But the Ghoul didn’t seem to mind. He now had the house to himself.