“It’s supposed to be highlight reel. There was no audio…” I hear Grandpa Ghastly whisper, and see the way even through the pancake makeup his skin grows pale.

  The face of Maulie is at once familiar and yet…heightened in some way. Her features are pointed, tightened, drawn and stretched in ways the human body is not meant to. The speakers crackle and hiss, and underneath the sound of static comes something low and baritone. Voices chanting.

  I try to make out what they’re saying, but I can’t. It’s the same kind of deep speech the Ghoul made a few minutes ago. Parthenia, I think he called her. But she and her sisters are fixed points, unbothered by the escalating tensions of the display.

  The only person who seems to be reacting is Grandpa Ghastly himself. “Maulie?” he whispers, and he sounds so old. So broken.

  “John Brown,” the image in the televisions says. Her voice and her mouth don’t match up. I can’t tell if there’s a delay in one, or if there’s a translation error. Sometimes when I watch foreign films, I like to pay attention to the way the dubbing doesn’t match the actors’ mouths. It’s like that.

  “John Brown?” Winter says quietly.

  I see Ghastly’s flinch. Even if I didn’t know the truth, that John Brown is his real name and it’s a secret he kept fanatically, I would see it in his reaction now. Winter doesn’t seem to be paying attention to him, though, she’s more focused on the creature in the television. Because it is a creature of some sort, that much is certain.

  Or is it? This could be a haunting. A true haunting is when a ghost wants revenge on a living soul, and not even being separated by death is enough to quell their rage. But there are also mystical hauntings. More commonly they’re known as curses. Pump enough energy to the right malevolent entity and they’ll haunt someone on your behalf until they get bored or go back to sleep.

  “Johnny,” the weird television poltergeist sings out. “You didn’t think you could profit off my name without some feedback did you?” And as she says it, as though she’s given herself a great idea, the sound from the televisions becomes a piercing wail. Above us, in scaffolding I didn’t notice before, a series of popping noises begin to rat-a-tat-tat like gunfire, preceding the shower of sparks that rains down upon the entrance to Maulie’s.

  In the audience, still no one makes a sound or moves. It’s like they’re hypnotized, except everyone is instead just watching with rapt attention. I glance around, see some of the crowd lean in to one another, whispering. When the transformers blow, a few people even clap and begin to holler.

  What is going on in this place right now?

  “Maulie, please,” Grandpa Ghastly tries, holding his hands out in supplication, “I did this for you. The world doesn’t deserve to forget you. I want them to love you the way I always did.”

  “Love me? Oh Grandpa, you wouldn’t know the first thing about loving me.”

  “Maulie…”

  “Do you even remember my real name?”

  Another flinch. Each one seems to take something out of Ghastly. With every blow, he’s somehow even more reduced than he was before. In contrast, the Mauliegeist seems to become more exaggerated and alive the more Ghastly is reduced.

  The shower of sparks begins to die down, though a few center around the televisions, giving the Maulie on the screen a pair of incandescent horns. The image only lasts for a few moments, but I glance towards Winter. Her expression is concerned but skeptical.

  From somewhere behind us, I hear the distinct, apathetic tones of the goth kids. “Dude, Grandpa Ghastly always puts on a show.”

  That’s what is happening here. Everyone thinks he’s putting on a production. That Maulie’s in on it, that maybe she’s backstage someplace, filming this for the televisions. But I’d seen the look on his face, I knew that kind of loss well. Most people did, if they were looking for it.

  Maybe it’s because Grandpa Ghastly is a showman. Because even when the Hollow Roast was on fire, he was putting on a theatrical presentation and keeping the crowd distracted. It’s what he does, it’s who he is. No one ever sees behind the clown makeup caking his skin. Grandpa Ghastly is a character, not a real person. Except I think I see the real person beneath, and right now he’s terrified.

  As the final sparks die down, there’s the sound of electronic whirring. It’s familiar, and it’s coming from one place. Then two, then multiple. Each sounds slightly different, but they’re all familiar in a different way. And then the ticker tape begins to fall from the ceiling. No, not ticker tape. Receipt paper. The reason it sounds so familiar is every store has its own receipt machine, and each sounds wholly different from the rest. And yet, within the mall, all of the receipt tape is commandeered for this moment, and begins to shower from the sky like the high point of a parade.

  Receipts begin to fall from the sky all around us. I reach out and grab one. The thermal paper is warm to the touch and as I hold it, a strange symbol begins to appear, light at first but then rapidly growing black. It is a thing of shapes and curved lines, incredibly complex, the sort of shape that looks so eerily familiar, but just as I think I can start to see the rhythm around the chaos, the receipt vanishes like flash paper. All around the maul, I see similar moments. Any receipt that is touched by a person lights up and vanishes, even if they pick it up from the floor and look upon it.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

  The moment the paper is gone, though, the symbol flees from my memory. It’s there one moment, gone the next. I remember, briefly, the book that Freddie had that was responsible for the entire zombie debacle. That book felt like this symbol. Information that squiggled, writhed inside your head, unearthed new and unseen facts. Wasn’t that what this was?

  Maulie’s eyes now glow an unearthly green, like gas flames. “I’m coming to get you, Ghastly,” she promises. And then another hellish shriek just before the world explodes.

  The sound is more horrific than the explosion. In fact… there isn’t exactly an explosion. There is a loud sound that ricochets through the open mall area, as loud as a werewolf with an impacted tooth. And a billowing cloud of yellow smoke that starts small at first, emanating from a spot somewhere behind where Grandpa Ghastly stands frozen, though in the chaos I can hear him muttering something I can’t quite make out.

  The smoke continues to billow forth like a cloud suddenly teleported down into the room. And that’s when I realize what it is. The explosion? Not a bomb. Well, not exactly a bomb. Some kind of smoke bomb, but more powerful than the ones that kids in Hollow Hills would play with around Halloween. Soon the entire area around us is blanketed in that sickly yellow smoke, making it even hard to see Winter standing just to my left.

  The sounds of screams that followed the smoke bomb explosion die down to confusion, and I can hear quieter but still offset voices interrogating one another.

  “—doing this to me. I’m just trying to create something that will be as meaningful to your fans as you were to me. I know you don’t like the spotlight, but this is getting out of control,” I hear Grandpa Ghastly muttering, but I can’t tell who he’s talking to. There are a lot of vague shapes in the crowd, but only one with the upright collar stabbing at the air like razor sharp fangs. I head in that direction.

  Grandpa Ghastly waves a hand in front of him, seemingly unbothered by the murky yellow smoke. Others in the crowd keep coughing, but he is unbothered. Amazing, considering his age and likely the quality of his lungs.

  I get close enough to see him through the fog, and his expression is…wounded, I would say. But the moment he sees me, the mask descends again, and he adjusts his posture, slipping back into character. “My boy, this is an awful lot of panic over nothing.”

  “I’d say this is an awful lot of well deserved panic,” I gesture towards the smoke. “Unless this was a prop for your speech that went rogue.”

  “No, nothing like that,” he says absently. He’s struggling for control, I can see it in his face, but he just looks so tired. The Maulie on the screens has diminished, gone back to the highlight reel version that was likely intended all along. With the curtains pulled, and the storefront visible, it’s now possible to see what Maulie’s is intended to be.

  It’s a mix of all the things that Maulie loved. Death metal, sarcasm, goth culture, New Age artifacts, candles, and other knick-knacks. It looks like a real shop and I realize that this is where Ghastly has been all these months. Not just mourning, but building something to commemorate his lost partner. It’s sweet, and sad, and even from the eyeball glance I’ve given it so far, probably insanely profitable. Or at least it would be, if it wasn’t being haunted by something so anti-Ghastly.

  “My darling Maulie is haunting me and I don’t know why,” Grandpa Ghastly moans, grabbing at my sleeve. “I worked with a business partner to create this shop dedicated to the grotesque and the lovely, all the things that she adored in this world. And yet, something about it has sparked her ire.”

  I don’t tell him I don’t think this is an ordinary haunting.

  “It’s okay, sir. I can help.”

  He looks at me, for the first time with something like reality in his eyes. Grandpa Ghastly is always playing a character, always in costume and reacting the way that he always does. So when he speaks now, his voice is different. Lower, calmer. “I know it’s not really her. Something is masquerading as her. Maulie would never haunt me like this.” It’s so certain, and so real, that I take him immediately at his word.

  And then just like that, the mask reasserts itself, and Ghastly shouts for the crowd, “Everlasting screams! Today only at Build-A-Banshee. Build-A-Banshee, where screams are made!” His fallback of ad copy is a centerpiece of his cable access act, something he hasn’t been able to quit ever since the beginning.

  As the smoke begins to clear, a couple of people in the audience begin to clap. First one or two, hesitant, and then more. Then most of the crowd.

  Winter finds me, carrying Wrath’s backpack with her. I forgot it in the chaos of the moment. “They really think it was a production.”

  That’s the thing with Hollow Hills. Everyone is so ready to believe that everything bizarre is normal, they’ll jump through whatever hoops they need to in order to make it happen. Even now, what little chaos there was at the events of the Mauliegeist have settled and everyone has started moving back to their seats. Now that Maulie’s is open and visible, people are more focused on the interior design and items on display and less on the chaos and fear that plagued the crowd only moments before.

  The lights, which had sparked and malfunctioned, warm back up and add a normalizing glow to the mall corridor.

  “To be fair, it kind of was,” I point out.

  Wrath sneezes. “Something smells funny here.”

  I glance at the stuffed animal. “Funny how?”

  “Remember when that fraternity made all the pledges use pudding instead of deodorant for a month? It smells kind of like that.”

  Winter wrinkles her nose. “When was that?”

  I shake my head dismissively. “A couple of years ago, you didn’t miss anything worth remembering. I don’t think that frat is even around anymore.”

  “I hope not.”

  Wrath is very pointedly quiet, and I hold my breath, hoping he’s not going to share what supposedly happened to that frat. For once I wasn’t there when something terrible went down, but rumor said that they gambled away their housing license to a secret society, and now there’s a wax museum where the frat used to be.

  But Wrath’s sense of smell isn’t always just one of the five senses. More often than not it’s an olfactory barometer that madness is only a Black Friday sale away. “Maybe it’s time I got a job at the maul.”