Ghoul

An evil spirit or phantom especially supposed to rob graves and feed on dead bodies. A person morbidly interested in death or disaster

The Ghouls are up in arms this week as they have finally realised that the human population is forgetting what a ghoul actually is.

It all started with the son of the vicar of Tidbury who had been out late, ‘canoodling’, as a local witch put it, and was cutting through the graveyard on his way home. As he took a short cut to the vicarage he came across a ghoul, one Fastus Diggum, at work.

The insult started when he cheerfully greeted the late-night exhumation artist without any appropriate fear, or at the very least, horror. Mr Diggum was, at that time, snacking on the first toe of Gregory Under, recently deceased. Startled by being greeted so happily, Fastus Diggum pointed out the young man’s lack of horror.

This led to the second insult when the young man stated that he had assumed Mr Diggum was merely a newly employed digger of graves for the local church and before Mr Diggum could disavow this mis-identification, the young man cheerfully went on to ask whether Mr Diggum was enjoying his sausages.

This latest mistake so horrified the mid-hundreds ghoul that he rose from him perch on top of a comfortably wide grave stone and stalked towards the young man and identified himself as a ghoul. The young man merely blinked and asked if a ghoul was the official name for a late-night grave digger.

The ghoul then limped around the young man in an attempt to intimidate him and explained that he dug up, rather than buried, bodies, and that he then went on to eat them and waved the remaining piece of toe to prove his point. This turned out to be unfortunate as the half-eaten toe no longer looked much like a toe and was much closer to looking like a lightly cooked sausage which the young man was quick to point out. He then went on to say that he had never heard of a ghoul before and was Mr Diggum sure that such fanciful creatures existed.

Mr Diggum is supposed to have exploded in anger at this point and pointed out that he, himself was a ghoul and should know that they existed.

The young man still unafraid shrugged and said conspiratorially that he understood role playing, although it wasn’t his thing, and if the man wanted to be a goth then that was fine with him. The young man then proceeded onwards by skirting around Ruby Sapphires mausoleum and warned the very experienced Ghoul to make sure the graveyard was tidy by morning as his father didn’t appreciate visitors leaving the sacred ground untidy. Fastus Diggum is renowned for never being caught due to his tidiness.

When Fastus held out his hand to stop him, unfortunately the hand still clutching the last piece of toe the young man added more insult to injury by assuming he was offering him a piece of his nights takings and took the piece of toe, thanked him, ate the fine morsel, commented in passing that it was a rather grisly textured sausage and left Mr Diggum to what had initially promised to be a pleasant night of feasting and foul thinking.

When Mr Diggum reported this unfortunate encounter to his chapter house, the Grand Mausoleum Level of exhumation artists, they, concerned, passed it on to the Ghoulish Lower Necropolis the underworld ghoulish government.

The Necropolis then set up a census and found that most of the modern human population didn’t know the definition of the word ghoul and didn’t react with quite the horror to the ancient art as they should.

The ghouls put the blame for this second phenomenon smartly at the gravestones of the zombie nation, their former prey, blaming their fascination with the movie industry for desensitising and not educating the modern human in the finer fears.

In quick reaction to this latest attack from their erstwhile hunters the zombie nation stated, ‘The name ghoul just doesn’t stab at the heart of modern terror. We merely moved with the times. The name ghoul has become old fashioned’.

As Mr Diggum stated worriedly, ‘I have never in all my five hundred years, ever encountered someone so utterly unhorrified at meeting a true ghoul. He even ate my first bite! What will happen to us in another century?’

By line, Quothe, the raven.