We continue wandering the mall for awhile before I catch sight of the Ghouls down at the end of a different wing. “Don’t you have a meeting?” I ask Winter absently, seeing a small setup in front of a storefront under construction.

  “I’ve got some time,” she says. We continue to approach the shop at the end of the wing where a few people are already gathered. There’s a sign, but it’s not until we close the distance that I can read it. Even then, it’s…a struggle.

  The name of the shop is written in screamcore font, sort of like a normal gothic font that does acid until it’s nearly Latin or Sanskrit. It looks more like an album cover than a shop name.

  Coming Soon - MAULIE’S.

  “Maulie’s? Isn’t that the name of Ghastly’s girlfriend?”

  “Technically Ax-Girlfriend, I think. I don’t know if they ever officially got back together. It was a running gag.”

  Some fans online believe that Maulie is the reason Grandpa Ghastly became so beloved by the public. She humanized him, made him more than just a shtick. She was his handler behind the scenes, the one that kept his schedule, and generally somewhere between an assistant and a manager. Her face was caked with so much makeup it was hard to tell her age, but the way she tolerated him so easily, it seemed like they were close to the same age.

  “Interesting,” Winter says in a deadpan tone that indicates just how not-interesting she finds it to be. I shoot her a look and she returns it, unimpressed and a little judgey.

  “It was the nineties.”

  “Sure,” she says dismissively.

  We head in the direction of the Ghouls, who are camped out in the front row of a few small rows of chairs. Whoever organized this event wasn’t expecting much attendance, either. They must subscribe to the same hater newsletter as Winter. At the end of the aisle is one of the mall’s flagship stores, a Claire’s Cursery where there are usually a dozen of fledgling goths looking for piercings. Today it seems empty, but maybe that’s because there are a couple of goths in the makeshift audience.

  “Wow, that’s—” Winter starts to say.

  My eyes light up. The seats are already half full. We’re almost a dozen people. “It’s packed!” I say happily. I can feel the comment that Winter wants to make, as well as her eyes digging into me, but I happily ignore her.

  “You’re being awfully quiet,” I point out quietly, now not speaking to my human companion but my demonic one.

  “I’m not talking to you,” Wrath says grumpily.

  “Why are you mad at me now?” I ask, immediately on the defensive. One of the Ghouls, the one with the broomstick instead of a spine, curls her head around to glare at me.

  “Why don’t you ask your new human bestie.”

  At my side, Winter rolls her eyes but wisely stays out of the conversation.

  “I’m allowed to have other friends. So are you, remember. Or do we need to talk about your gremlin dance parties?”

  “Or your friend who helped inspire a zombie workforce,” Winter adds.

  “That wasn’t Garth,” Wrath says, and then immediately scowls. I think he was trying to ignore Winter, but unfortunately the goth girl knows just how to get under his skin.

  Another of the Ghouls turns at our conversation. This time it’s the one with the curly hair. She looks at us and growls, “I?! I?! Cthulhu fhtagn! Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah-nagl fhtagn.”

  “Oh, no thanks. We’re fine where we’re at,” I respond.

  “Did you understand her?” Winter asks curiously.

  “She’s part of an MLM that you don’t want to join, trust me. It’s a timeshare with a really annoying owner.”

  An employee door midway down the tentacle of shops opens, and I see a familiar black and white and red man emerge with a suited man at his side. The suited man is talking on his phone while the older man next to him cranes around, looking for…he spots the Ghouls and his eyes squint into total and utter joy.

  I recognize Grandpa Ghastly even at the distance, though it’s not until the two start to close in on us that I see just how different he looks from the last time I saw him. The pancake makeup on his face usually has the effect of paling his complexion, but now the white color almost seems darker than his skin tone, having the opposite effect. He also looks tired than I remember seeing him last time. Grandpa Ghastly has always been a man of uncertain years, but it definitely feels like he’s aged quite a bit since just a few months back.

  But still, the joy in his expression is unmistakable.

  “Oh, ho ho, hello my little ghouls and goblins,” Grandpa Ghastly calls out from the distance as he walks up. Excited murmuring in the crowd picks up as people begin to call out to him, wave and become more animated with his arrival. Grandpa Ghastly is something of a local celebrity in Hollow Hills.

  Grandpa Ghastly got his start on late night television long before I was born. I found out about him after mom finally left, when it was just Wrath and I, and I couldn’t sleep. So I stayed up late, watching television and finding the local channels cut over to cable access sometime after midnight. And that’s when Grandpa Ghastly came on. He’d show a selection of really terrible horror movies, but he watched them with such a wisdom that I appreciated.

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  The Ghouls themselves are front and center for his attention. The tall and spindly one is at the center, with the curly haired one in the velour power suit and bright blue eyeshadow to her left, and the one to her right a redhead in a green kaftan. Grandpa Ghastly stops right in front of them and spends a moment clasping their hands in his and sharing a moment just with them. Aside from the Ghouls, the rest of the crowd is around my age, somewhere in the nebulous twenties. Impressive, considering the height of Grandpa Ghastly’s career is thirty years old if not longer. That means most of us grew up on him at the tail end of his career or during his time on BooTube.

  “Parthenia, my darling, it’s so lovely to see you again. And a new hip, am I right?” Grandpa Ghastly’s laugh is a booming expression of joy. “The nose always knows,” he says with a smirk and a wink to the curly haired MLM lover. He moves to the next Ghoul, the tall and spindly one, and says, “Euphemia, babe, you’re practically aging backwards! You know my heart just can’t keep up with you!” And then to the final Ghoul, the one in green. “Asmodea, as demonically enchanting as ever!”

  Winter exhales in judgement. I try to ignore her. The rest of the crowd is just as excited to see the cable show host as I am, and each of us crave a moment with him. And he doesn’t disappoint. By the time he gets to the aisle and looks over at me, I see the warm and friendly expression on his face become something more like recognition. “There’s one of my kids,” he says to the audience, looking at me. “Grandpa Ghastly never forgets a blood donor.” He reaches forward and clasps his hands around mine as I go to shake. His hands are cool to the touch but dry and sure, like a funeral director.

  “How have you been, my boy?” he asks, his voice still booming enough to carry to the rest of the crowd.

  “It’s good to see you again!”

  “Oh, I’ve been down in the crypt,” he says as though confiding in me, “gotta make sure all those skeletons stay in their closets.” His eyes flicker to Winter, and I don’t know what he sees in her expression, but he deftly moves past us to the next row without greeting her.

  “He doesn’t know your name,” she says quietly to me with quite a bit of judgement in her tone.

  “Of course he does.”

  “My boy. He probably calls you buddy a lot too. It’s so he doesn’t get your name wrong.” Winter says, and I can tell she’s not saying it because she gets any joy out of it, but almost like she can’t help herself.

  “That’s weird,” Wrath says into my ear, making me lose my attention.

  “I think he’s always like that with the nonbelievers,” I turn to him.

  “Yeah, but that’s not what I meant,” the demon explains. “He didn’t even remember what happened to the Hollow Roast.”

  “I didn’t burn down the Hollow Roast,” I respond through gritted teeth.

  “You may not have lit the match, but you definitely roasted a marshmallow or two.”

  Winter glances over at us. “What happened?”

  I press my lips closed and surprisingly, Wrath fills in the blanks. Probably because he knows that I don’t want to tell the story. “Grandpa G was the guest of honor at the Hollow Roast they built just off campus, and Theo wanted to go see him.” I glare at him, and his voice changes abruptly. “He went, they saw each other. The end.”

  She looks confused. “There’s not a Hollow Roast near campus.”

  I sigh. “You know that patch of land on the corner of Crowley?”

  “The one everyone says is cursed?”

  “That’s the Hollow Roast,” I confirm. “Or it was, for about an hour and a half.”

  “It wasn’t Theo’s fault,” Wrath continues, unbothered. “The owner was putting hallucinogenic mushrooms in the coffee grounds, and she had a mental breakdown.”

  “She set herself on fire with a creme br?lée torch,” I add, shaking my head regretfully.

  “And you roasted marshmallows?”

  “Wrath is joking about that.”

  Grandpa Ghastly finishes his rounds, greeting all the regular fans and moves to the front of the staging area that the mall apparently set up. “I’m so happy to see all of you,” he says, his voice booming. Grandpa Ghastly never needs a mic, he’s his own PA system. “It has been quite a year. Quite a year.” There’s something somber in him now, the masquerade when he greeted his fans slipping away, revealing something raw underneath.

  There is a stillness and a loss within him that is both unfamiliar and all-too familiar. Something in my gut twists, and I look around the audience for Maulie. There’s never a Ghastly event that she’s not either his sidekick on stage, or the backstage manager keeping everything under control. She’s the reason his events normally go off without a hitch, insane baristas not withstanding.

  But I don’t see her, and that’s when I recognize the pit in my stomach. Familiarity.

  “Oh no,” I whisper out loud. Winter looks curiously at me, but doesn’t say anything. Though disembodied, I feel Wrath’s presence wrap around me. He knows, too.

  Grandpa Ghastly is going to say the words out loud. As soon as he does, it’s going to be true.

  Something in my chest hurts for him.

  The old man in the silly little vampire costume takes a deep breath. “I’ve had a long career. Too long, some would say. I’ve seen the world move from cable access television to internet streaming services and online livestreams. And it all became meaningful once someone stood up there by my side. She made me realize that there were fans o my work, of our work, who would support me in whatever I chose to do. When Channel 13 mysteriously burnt down that one August night, she was there. When the Hollow Roast burst into flames, she was there, too. And when Grandpa had to go see to a hernia twice over a Christmas holiday, she was there.”

  He’s quiet for a moment, though his mouth keeps working, moving slowly like he either can’t stop himself or he’s holding back the words he really wants to say. “I thought I could come up here and make one of my usual puns. The ones Maulie would roll her eyes at good-naturedly and tell me, ‘Sure, Grandpa’ in that sweet voice. But it’s not the same. Decades of work, of dedication to my craft and my kids,” he meets my eyes out in the audience, “and I thought it was all worthwhile. Until now. Until she…”

  At his side is a middle aged man in sunglasses, an ill-fitting suit and an expression of contempt. He mutters something under his breath.

  In Ghastly’s booming voice he says, “I know we’re on a schedule,” to the man, but it carries out to all of us. “Through it all, Maulie was there by my side. Grandpa Ghastly never fully became your Grandpa until Maulie came into the picture. ‘Grampa G, you gotta give the people what they fear’ she always used to say to me.” He looks down at something in his hand, and then tucks it back into his pocket. “I’m sorry to say that my dearest Maulie has left us and gone to her eternal rest. If I could have saved her, given my dark gift—” he cuts off in a sob.

  It takes several minutes for him to speak. No one in the crowd says anything, not even the Ghouls. “I know she never wanted this, but I could think of no other way to honor her memory than by christening this store to all of her favorite baubles and dark trinkets. And now you can enjoy them too, in a shop we’re calling—” he gestures to someone at the side and they pull down the tarp. MAULIE’S is written in the same screamcore font above the storefront. Two monitors are displayed on either side of the entrance, and right now they both show a highlight reel of Maulie over the years on the Grandpa Ghastly show.

  That’s when something goes terribly wrong.

  “Oh Ghastly,” a feminine voice echoes from the speakers surrounding the television units. “I look pretty good for a dead bitch, don’t I?”