After the meet and greet, Grandpa Ghastly surreptitiously invites me inside Maulie’s, pulling the gate closed behind us and locking the padlock. The slicked back haired manager glances at us impassively but doesn’t say anything as we head into the bowels of the store.

  “Who is that?” I ask, glancing back through the bars. Winter waggles her fingers and then heads off back through the mall, heading to her appointment.

  Ghastly looks back then scowls.“Capitalism in its cheapest three-piece suit.Don’t worry about him, my boy, he is a bloodsucker in name only.”

  The man on the other side is still standing there, watching us but he doesn’t say anything. Nor does he start to move away. It seems like he’s intent on seeing us disappear into the back of the store. Watching us like a sentinel.

  “Come on, my boy, let’s get into the heart of the malfeasance,” Ghastly says, urging me onward. We pass a collection of candles with bespoke phrases like Don’t mess with me, Cindi, and Paula, I’m not the one or the two, and then past a collection of clothes, nearly all of them black in color but with artful designs across the front.There is a deep incense section with what looks like fully articulated skeletons where the incense smoke pools down their insides and down across the ground.

  Everything looks to be something that a high schooler dabbling in counterculture and goth influences would be obsessed with. Which, to be fair, very much seems as though it was Maulie’s brand.

  “Ah, yes, my Maulie loved when I gifted her a spirit board catered just for her,” Ghastly says, reminiscing over a stack of heavy wooden talking boards. The letters are burned into the words to look like spray paint, and there’s a frantic energy to the lettering like it was rushed together, yet the board itself is of a high quality and polish. Engineered to look cheap, some would say.

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” I finally get to say, now that we’re free of the crowd. I don’t fool myself into thinking that there’s more to our relationship than casual encounters, but I still hold so much admiration for Grandpa Ghastly and the thought of him losing someone so close to him hurts.

  He takes a deep breath, opens his mouth once, but thinks better of it. He raps a hand on the stack of spirit boards and moves us further into the shop, and the open door at the back. Unlike the dark walls and atmosphere inside the store itself, the back door opens into a blistering yellowed hallway with a few doors visible. There’s no frame around the door as we pass, and both door and wall are the same black coloring, so when the door is closed I imagine it fades into the rest of the store wall.

  “Thank you, my boy,” Ghastly says, “I know you are.And I appreciate you so much for coming out today.”

  “Well, I felt like I had to, with your invitation and all.” I pull the flyer from my pocket and unfold it, showing it to Ghastly.

  He takes the paper and frowns down at it, and a true showman who rolls with the punches, smiles a moment later and says “Of course. So glad you could make it.” But I saw the frown, and I recognized the confusion furrowed between his eyebrows when he took in the flyer.

  “You didn’t know anything about this, did you?” I ask quietly.

  There’s a moment of bluster, and then Ghastly steps back and it’s like the air slowly drains from him.“I would never have such terrible spelling,” he says boisterously, but it loses something in the admission.“Someone really sent this to you?”

  “Does it mean anything to you? The spelling?”

  “The world is rife with the less fortunate. The addled, the coupon clippers, and spellcheck on every device.”He waves a hand dismissively, as though trying to swat away an irritation.“I don’t have time for it anymore.All that matters is my Maulie’s sanctuary.”

  “What… what happened to her, sir? Did she die with unfinished business, perhaps?” I try to phrase the question delicately, but is there any way to ask a question to a grieving… spouse? I don’t know what their actual relationship was, know that they pretended to be together in front of the cameras, but in real life it always seemed more like a partnership. One I could never be sure was professional or more.

  He leads me into a small office at the very rear of the hallway, passing very large rooms full of shipping materials, boxes, and various other storage items. There is a row of mannequins, empty, blank faces staring out at me as we pass. The office itself is incredibly clean and organized, barely anything hanging from the walls except discolorations in the paint where the last company in this space had notices and reminders hanging. In one spot there’s a dramatic discoloration: the paint remaining is simply a different color than everywhere else on the wall. As though whatever was hanging there before was left alone while the wall around it was painted. That’s odd.

  “I wish it was as simple as that,” the elderly man says, lowering himself slowly down into the computer chair.There’s another chair against the wall that he gestures for me to take.“It was a whirlwind that took my Maulie, she was here one moment and then gone before I could blink.I don’t think she ever had a contentious bone in her body, but now I wonder if I ever knew her at all.This is not the first…encounter.Every time she seems angrier.More unhinged.More wrathful.”

  “Are you sure it’s her?” I ask carefully.

  If you discover this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “What are you thinking? Do you think my Maulie had an evil twin out there? I’ve seen every movie ever made about the subject, and I can tell you with certainty that she did not. No, I think I always knew I was never good enough for her. And she didn’t feel like she could share that with me until after…” He tries to finish that sentence, but even now, he can’t.

  His hands tremble, and I can see how much the apparition has taken out of him. “I know a thing or two about weird things like this. I’ll help you look into what’s going on. If Maulie isn’t at peace, we’ll find a way to give it to her. I know that’s what you’d really want for her. And I believe she’d want the same for you, too.”

  “I just think I should listen to her and close the store. Maybe it was an insipid, stupid idea. I should have known no one would be interested in something like this from me. The only thing good I ever did was my show, and that was because of Maulie. Did you know I was a salesman before I was a television man? Couldn’t sell a blood bag to a vampire, could I?”

  “But Maulie, she had a dream. A night terror, she called it. A store in the mall, where girls like her could explore how to be themselves when the world told them they were too much. That was my Maulie, too much.” He says it softly, so fondly that it nearly makes me feel something. I know how much he loved her. It was evident in everything he did.

  “We talked about the store for years.Started putting away stock, making deals with vendors and artists.We were going to call it Shog-goths, after this little design of a slug monster that Maulie used to draw.She would sketch them all the time, she was such a brilliant artist, you know?Drawing one of these shoqggoths chewing up the station manager we worked for, or hiding in Standards and Practices office and devouring everyone who walked in. She was so delightfully creative and irreverent.”He sighs fondly.“My little deviant.”

  “She sounds remarkable,” I say with sincerity. I never knew Maulie well, she was more behind the scenes and besides, Grandpa Ghastly was more like an actual grandpa. That didn’t make her a grandmother, not at all. She was more like his nurse, or his assistant. Always there, but never part of the relationship. It never seemed to bother her. Another reason why I don’t think the specter that made an appearance at the meet and greet was the one true Maulie.

  “I still wanted to name it after her favorite creature, but I decided to name it after my favorite person instead.A memorial to the girl who made me finally something worth being… something.”He smiles at me fondly, then claps me on the knee.“Something is going on here at Maulie’s.I don’t think we’re meant to open.I think whoever it is wants to destroy capitalism itself.While I normally support such an endeavor, as you well know my boy, in this case I cannot stand such an indignity.”

  “Of course!” Grandpa Ghastly’s anti-capitalism rants were legendary. Every time one of his former sponsors closed, it started him all up again. I remember one time, Maulie started him with a prop explosion. The shock of the blast made him flinch, and he blurted out, “Holy howls! Lycan Larry’s Full Moon Laundromat!” the sponsor of episodes a decade ago.

  Maulie had just rolled her eyes.“Larry’s was sold three years back.It’s just Spotless Laundry now.”

  Ghastly groaned.“Ugh! Another grave dug by corporate greed!”

  I clear my throat. “The store looks really close to opening. What’s been holding you back?”

  “You would think so, wouldn’t you?But then the warehouse keeps changing.Boxes of spiders become nightgowns overnight.The shelves rearrange.The tarot decks all have The Hanged Man removed and pinned to my desk.The Devil Babies keep rising up and glowing with infernal light.One cannot open a store to the masses when the demonic and hellish netherworld is knocking upon the door!”

  “You could always tell the netherworld you’re closed for the day.Tell them to come back after making an appointment.”

  Grandpa Ghastly guffaws. “Always such a sharp tongue. No wonder Maulie adored you so much.”

  I don’t know if Maulie even knew my name. Though she would have been far too gracious to ever let on. It reminds me what Winter said before someone let the poltergeist out of the bag. He doesn’t know your name. That’s why he calls you ‘my boy.’

  “You…know me, right?” I ask hesitantly, almost immediately second guessing myself.I shouldn’t ask this.Shouldn’t open the door.You open a door and sometimes feelings leak out.And other things.Secrets. Bodies. The inevitable end of all things.

  There’s a flash of embarrassment on his face, there and gone in a flash, but I know I’m not hallucinating it. “Let me tell you a story,” he says instead of an answer, not meeting my eyes. My chest sinks, and I realize that coming here might have been a mistake. Maybe Winter was right all along.

  “Quite a few years back, I received a letter. An actual letter.Maulie set me up with a PO Box ever since the final years at the network, and she was the one who traveled to downtown Hollow Hills every month to clean it out.Junk mail, mostly.Sometimes people requesting I talk about their products. A new spirit cleansing spray, or chupacabra repellent. But then one day, she brought me a letter.”

  “In it, the person writing it told me all about how they were a fan of my late night show work, and how I made it so the nights when they couldn’t sleep, they didn’t have to be alone.They told me things in that letter they said they could never share with anyone else.Not even their best friend.Because those weekend nights felt the loneliest, but spending time with me, they felt like they knew what it would be like to have a grandfather.”

  He looks at me softly.“That boy was you, Peter.”

  I’d started to smile as he told the story, seeing something in it that I hoped was true. I don’t remember ever writing him a letter, but it sounds like something I would have done. As the story goes on, it describes things I’ve felt. Truths I didn’t think I’d ever said out loud.

  And then he says the name. And I flinch.

  Grandpa Ghastly sees my immediate reaction and puts his hand on my knee again. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry! Theo! I’m sorry!” But then he’s laughing like a little kid, just a fountain of giggles that start and cannot be stopped.

  It’s my name in the middle of it all that balms the injury. He knows my name. He really does. It’s not a joke. It’s not because I told him. He really does.

  That means the letter must have been true.I must have written it some time ago.Maybe ten or twelve or something.And he remembered it, all these years later.

  A few minutes later he walks me back to the front of the store. The main lights are off, only the security lights allowing us enough sight to navigate through the aisles without running into anything. He still chuckles a bit to himself here and there, his mood so much more buoyant than it was when he arrived.

  He unlocks the gate and helps me lift it enough to slip under.Then I lower it back down, and he sets the padlock again.

  “I knew if anyone could help me, it would be you, my dear boy.” Ghastly says. “After all, not too many of my children have their very own guardian demon watching their back.” He closes the gate on me, leaving my mouth agape.

  How does he know about Wrath?