The winner of today’s Strange Sunday Story Prompt is N.L. Moon with his three words: Ghouls surround me. Thanks for the inspiration N.L.! Please check out his Substack at https://substack.com/@nlmoon
At four feet tall, Barnaby Wallace was very small for an 11-year-old, nowhere close to filling out the green pea coat and blue corduroy pants his mom and dad had dressed him in that day.
Mom on one side, dad on the other, Barnaby squeezed their hands at the intersection of North Street and Old Steine, waiting for the tall red bus to whisk him off to the Preston School for Promising Children. The blue sky sparkled with sunlight as it should on a first day of school. And then came a yellow ball bouncing past him. An errant throw from someone’s front yard. A brother and sister’s gleeful dodgeball miss.
As the tall red bus lumbered toward its stop, Barnaby pulled away, a joyful instinct taking hold.
I’ll get the ball and give it back to them.
The brother and sister never got their ball back.
The Wallaces said goodbye to their only son three days later at the Brighton and Preston Cemetery on Harrington Road.
For Barnaby, the space between wrapping his arms around the yellow ball and the bus’ tire became a vast feeling of floating down, everything shimmering around him in curtains, like sunlight passing through the prism of a thin waterfall.
Lower and lower he drifted, deep under North Street into what looked like a mining cart with plush pillows and a furry brown blanket.
It was cold, freezing there, all the sunlight withheld above ground.
Shivering, Barnaby pulled the blanket over him and rested his back against one of the pillows as the cart took off along the track, twisting, rising, dipping, rising again, nearly leaping off the track as it raced through narrow tunnels and navigated sudden turns.
When it came to a stop, he stood up to find himself surrounded by a group of boys and girls who looked not too much older or younger than him, wearing ripped sun dresses, shirts with large holes in them. They had ruffled and dirty hair. Their faces were black-and-blue or pale yellow, some with long wounds. Many had bits hanging off their stomachs or legs or sides in exposed places.
For the most part, as one would expect, they had flat and grim expressions, eyes like small glass vases empty for years.
One of the taller boys in a muddy undershirt and frayed summer shorts, with an out-of-place jaw and bald spots on his head, extended his hand and helped Barnaby out of the cart.
“I’m James Cotter,” he said in a broken and coarse voice, “and this is the Grenfell Greeting Committee. We’re here to welcome you.”
A small girl with a missing nose and only one pigtail strode forward and pointed her finger at Barnaby.
“There must be some mistake. He doesn’t look like one of us at all.”
A boy with smashed glasses and auburn hair and a bandage around his head chimed in. “Bernadette’s right! He’s not mashed up or tousled about in the slightest. How do we even know he’s got a ticket?”
“Seems more like an apparition, doesn’t he Ollie,” said another girl in a maroon sweater, half of it anyway, her bottom lip hanging almost down to her chin.
James held up a hand. “What’s your name, friend?”
“I’m…Barnaby.”
“Barnaby. That’s quite a smart name. Were your parents librarians?”
Barnaby looked down and felt his feet growing heavy, his trousers looser around his waist. He shivered and wished he had that blanket from the mining cart wrapped around him.
“No…” he said. “My dad’s an architect. My mom’s a dance teacher.”
“Well, Barnaby… do you have a last name?”
“Wallace.”
“Well Barnaby Wallace. Have you got your ticket?”
Barnaby searched his corduroy pockets, but came up empty.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t. Am I supposed to have one?”
“Everyone who comes to Grenfell has a ticket,” James said, frowning a little, though it was hard to tell it was a frown amid his solemn black-and-blue face. “But no matter. Sometimes there are mix-ups, right?”
“Mix up? Are you mad?” huffed Bernadette, arms locked across her chest.
Barnaby noticed one of her ribs was showing.
“We should send him back up,” Ollie said, coming forward to stand beside Bernadette, who seemed pleased by the support.
“Don’t mind them,” James said, taking the brown blanket from the cart and wrapping it around Barnaby. “They get shaky knees when they think of having any extra ounce of competition. Besides, just because you don’t look like a ghoul doesn’t mean you aren’t one. Isn’t that right, friends?”
A grudging murmur of assent rippled through the group.
“We’ll get the missing ticket sorted once we get to the Crypt Conference. See if we can nab a chat with Dontel before it starts.”
“Crypt Conference? Dontel?”
“He’s our Academy LS,” explained James. “Lead Shrieker and Head of New Student Orientation.”
Barnaby felt his eyes fill with tears. One dripped onto his cheek.
Bernadette stiffened and pointed. “Look! He’s crying! See? He can’t be one of us.”
James guided Barnaby off to the side of the track and said in a low voice, “I know this is probably confusing and not what you were expecting when you stepped out your house this morning. But if you’re here, it means you’re a ghoul now, Barnaby, and if you’re going to get on all right, like us, you need to learn how to become a proper one. Otherwise, this afterlife can feel like a long slog, with no clear place to go or sensible order of things to do.”
Barnaby nodded, wiping his tears with his pea coat sleeve while keeping the blanket as tight as he could against his chest. He followed James and the group to a connected chain of mining carts around the curve. They could see their breath in the air by the faint illumination of a small candle on a metal post in the corner.
Some walked normally. Others limped. Some hopped on one foot. Others had to drag a non-working leg or support a dangling arm or wrist at the risk that it might catch on something and get pulled off.
Barnaby noticed a wood sign with jagged letters burned into it, suspended by a rusty wire over the chain of carts.
It said Grenfell Ghoul Academy with a small arrow underneath directing them into the darkest part of the tunnel.
Once everyone had found a spot in a cart, as if on cue, the cart line groaned and creaked to life, accelerating into the dark as if pulled by an unseen hand that would not allow them to go backward or up into the daylight they remembered, the kind that fell everywhere and on everything above ground.
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