*  *  *  *  *  *  *  *

Freakazoids and creepazoids, beware!  We've got a ghastly Freak-fest in store for you as two stumbling, bumbling weirdoes of Eerie Valley

come along to give you the heebie-jeebies!

Thrice upon many times ago, there dwindlingly thrived a lonely place called Eerie Valley that vainly attempted to flourish in the blithering dithering Nether Regions, way back in the dying autumnal Age of October, a time when trees and plants and things and creepy creatures were living to die, and so they likewise died to live.  Most of the inhabitants were blatantly dying, dead, undead, deceased, or the living dead -- like zombies, ghouls, ghosts, vampires, demons, or reanimated human monsters, and the like.

The sky was an eternal twilight, the dimly glowing hint of a sun long since gone down in the west, and a dark sparsely starry indigo display to the east.  Of course the bright full moon was always seen scurrying across the great bowl of the darkening heavens. The sparse grass on meadows and hills was brown, dried-up and dead. Gnarly wicked looking trees were leafless and dead.  Carcasses of various creatures just laid around not moving just about everywhere.  Let's face it.  This place was dead!

But for a pretty dead place, sometimes it seemed eerily lively.  Oktoberfests and shindigs and wild parties ran amok across the dead floor of Eerie Valley, so you’d think something or other was actually alive down there.  Well, it was dreaded deathly liveliness, or perhaps a lively deathliness, take your pick. 

There were numerous cemeteries here, because that's where the inhabitants lived, down in their gruesome graves. Duh!  What did you think -- they lived in apartment complexes or something? That luxury was only for the living -- whereas the ghastly inhabitants of Eerie Valley were literally dead in the ground -- and sometimes dying to get out, which is why they would go off and party hardy most of the time.

You'll find all kinds of bizarre and freaky characters stumbling or staggering, skulking are scurrying around Eerie Valley, and we're going to frightfully focus on two particular freakshow specimens, such as Bob Zombie and Gary the Ghoul.  Right now, as a matter-of-fact, they were stumbling through a typical graveyard, and rummaging through the graves for something to eat. These two creepazoids frequented any and all graveyards, because their favorite pastime was lunching on old corpses that they had to dig up, and sometimes they enjoyed dining on fresh cadavers at the local morgue.  There were no laws prohibiting any of this, because there were no police or sheriffs or anything like that.  Law enforcement was for the living, not the dead.  You didn't see "Wanted! Dead or Alive" posters plastered on walls around town. There was no crime in Eerie Valley, because everything goes.  Everything you do, you can get away with -- there's no one stopping you.

            Anyway, back to our wacky weirdoes. This unlively pair were the best of freakish friends, as you'll soon see.  Bob had long thin hair streaked with gray and silver strands.  His skin was dry and gray, in need of moisturizing face cream, or a good dermatologist.  Because his skin was pretty flaky and sometimes hanging off his face.  His eyeballs were dry and pallid with black-dot pupils.  Gary was a white-faced bloke with demonic red eyes, fashioning a bare pate, mainly because he couldn't grow any hair up there, and his ears strangely stuck out on the sides of his head.  They both wore nondescript tattered ugly clothes.  However, Bob fancied an unkempt aviator jacket and steel-toed army boots, and Gary favored a long black duster that hung all the way to his ankles and tall black cowboy boots.  Bob was tall and lanky were as Gary was a little shorter and stouter.

Now you know what they look like, more or less, so you'll have a sharp crisp image of these ghastly characters so that they can stumble around in your head from now on -- or at least until Halloween has come and gone, we’ll settle for that.

            Our two grisly friends stumbled along beneath the eerie glow of a full pallid moon, which cast their strange elongated skeletonesque shadows upon the bleak ground.  There happened to be a cemetery up ahead, surrounded by the usual creepy wrought-iron fence, and the creepy wrought-iron gate had a creepy wrought-iron padlock securing the whole structure.  The two stopped at this very gate.

            "Bat-crap." Gary the ghoul spat, not liking the situation. "Whadya think, Bob?"

Bob Zombie yowled, "Holy Helldaciousness!  Why do they keep fencing these joints in?"

Gary suggested, "Probably to keep freakazoids like us out."

"Our livelihoods are at stake here."

"More accurate to call it our deathlihood."

"Damn those hag-born schlepping schmuck-ruckers!"

"Yeah, I ditto that."

"Curse those snot-snuffling grimy slimeballs!"

"And I'm hungry too."

"Well, I'm so ravenously wretchedly starving out of my empty brainbox -- I could even eat YOU!"

Gary reached his pale white hands out.  "Now don’t get creepier than you already are, old pal."

"Just kidding," Bob laughed creepily.

"I knew that."

Staring at the creepy wrought-iron gate, Bob idly played with a hunk of flesh hanging off his chin "Hmmm. I’ve got a hunch about this."

            "Yeah? Like what?"

            "Like this!"

            Bob lifted up his long gangly leg and rammed it into the gate, which shook, tottered and teetered. Then he kicked it again, and this time the padlock broke, and the gate went crashing down, and the fencing to either side began shaking, then tottering and teetering, and then like dominoes, sections of the fence began falling outward, slowly but surely, crashing down cacophonously, making enough noise to wake the dead, all along the perimeter of the whole creepy cemetery, until every length of creepy wrought-iron fencing had collapsed to the ground.

            "Oooops," Bob said.

            "Now you've done it, Bob."

Bob shrugged. "Whatever. Anyway, I feel better now."

"I doubt the residents in here do."

They began hearing groanings and moanings all over the deathly grounds of the damn graveyard.

"Ghastly grimaces!"  Gary gasped. "We went and woke up the dead."

"Give me a spade.  I'll put ‘em all back to sleep." While feasting, Bob usually had to whack some poor dead schmuck on the head who was disgruntled about being eaten. 

The two freakazoids walked into the normally creepy graveyard, the very bowels of Hell itself. That dreaded groaning and moaning seemed to linger throughout the graveyard, and some undead fool flipped off flippantly, "Try making a little more noise around here while we sleep."

Bob grinned and replied, "Alright."  At that Bob hooted real loud, and Gary followed by howling like a werewolf.

Some other poor schlep stuck his head out of his grave and griped, "Hey, shut up already!  I'm trying to enjoy my peaceful death here!"

"Resting in peace is overrated," Bob chuckled as he stepped into the cemetery, Gary right behind him.  "Most of these wretched schmucks don't realize they're dead – you’d think they'd shut up."

"Well, you're dead, aren't you? And you never shut up."

"I’ll slap those freaking red eyes right out of their sockets if you don't shut up."

The two creepazoids continued strolling through the vaguely lively graveyard, which was the very bowels of Hell itself. Then Bob stopped at what appeared to be a fresh plot, where the earth had been freshly dug.  He announced, "Ah, dinner."

He hunched down and reached his hand deep down into the soft soil, felt around, grabbed something, and pulled out an arm, but as he pulled further, it was attached to a body, a lifeless corpse actually.  Bob opened his jaws wide and chomped down on the arm. 

Suddenly the corpse screamed, "Hey!  Stop that!"

            Bob snapped, "Shut up and just be dead."

            The corpse pulled his arm away from the ravenous zombie, then scolded, "Have a little respect for the dead."

Bob shook his head and grumbled, "Where can a living dead yokel get a decent bite of food around here?"

The disgruntled corpse replied, "Try Woody’s Steakhouse."

Gary remarked, "Or we can try the Tombstone Café, Bar and Grill, and Laundromat. You can eat and do your clothes at the same time."

Bob looked Gary up and down.  "What clothes?  They're nothing but shredded tatters."

"So’s yours."

While the corpse dug himself back into his grave, the two ambled along, both ravenously hungry.

Bob complained, "My freaking stomach’s growling."

"You probably’ve got a badger down in there.  And I bet it's just as hungry as you are."

Bob patted his belly. "That's possible."

"Let's check out that steakhouse."

"It's all the way across town.  I'll die of starvation by then."

"Too late.  You were dead on your heels ages ago."

"Alright then, by the time we get there, that damn badger will eat my stomach out -- then what'll I do?"

"Not my problem.  I'm a ghoul.  I'm not rotting away to nothing like you pathetic zombies are. Food doesn't just slip through the cracks and crevices in a decomposing body.  I can eat and have my fill."

"Answer me this. When you guys take a dump, where does it go?"

"I dunno. I suppose it just vaporizes into the furious flatulent wispy ethers of the far side of the dithering blithering Nether Regions."

"That's right, you were born in this freaking crap-hole."

 "I am a demonic spirit, after all."

"But you have to eat, just like me.  Cadavers, corpses, the dead, the undead, the deceased, whoever and whatever it is freaking crawling around at the time."

"Shut up.  You're making me hungry.  Let's find that damn steakhouse."

As they walked idly along, leaving behind them that despicable graveyard, where the inhabitants were too snobbish to allow anyone to chow down on them, Bob was babbling about something-or-other, and Gary noticed his left eye was gruesomely protruding from its socket -- which happened now and then, to everyone's discussed.  As he jerked his head to the right to glimpse a squawking crow overhead, the eye swung around impulsively.  Then it just hung there by a thread of flesh, turning Gary's stomach.

Gary pointed to the empty socket and said, "Stick that wretched thing back in.  It's giving me the creeps."

"Huh? Oh."  Bob casually shoved it back in its gaping socket, then twisted it around until it felt securely in place.  "There."  Then he chuckled, "That sure gives the girls a thrill."

"Makes ‘em upchuck, is all."

"That's the freaking idea."

As they ambled along some nameless cobblestone lane through some ghost town residential district of Eerie Valley -- and when we say residential district, we’re talking about cemeteries on both sides of the street -- the two creepazoid babbled and blathered and gabbed about nothing in particular, while they hoped to eventually stumble across that place known as Woody's Steakhouse.

Bob asked, "Do you know where the word ‘Halloween’ came from?"

Gary replied, "Yeah.  It came from ‘All Hallows Eve.’  It's actually the evening before All Saints Day."

Bob shook his head. "Nope. That's just freaking religious crap they brainwash into stupid idiot’s heads that don't know any better.  The fact is, there was this gourmet chef who invented a new taste sensation, Hollow Weenies. Around the valley he made a big hit.  The grand opening day was called Hollow-Weenie Day, but some twisted schmuck bastardized it into simply Halloween."

Gary grumbled, "That's a bunch of bat-crap. And you're full of worm infested grave-sod!"

"But I personally like roasted fingers smothered in thick bile and stuffed in rolls of obese fat! Mm-mm good!"

"You're grossly sick."

"Thank you."

"You get no welcome from me."

They plotted down the cobblestone lane amidst a collection of creepy mansions where they saw wispy white-sheeted ghosts flying out of windows and soaring into other windows. In and out, in and out. Pathetic. Probably playing ghost tag.

"Got another one for ya."

"Great. With any luck my ears will fall off."  

Bob began, "Do you know why the official Halloween colors are orange and black?"

Gary sighed and replied, "Yeah.  Orange flames of bonfires dancing in the dark night during early Halloween festivals, or so I’ve heard."

"Nope.  That's just old hype. Actually, a long time ago, when wily wicked witches rampaged across the freaking wretched land, there were two particular wily wicked witches who were twisted sisters, and they were just children mind you. But they did wicked things, like go door-to-door in the villages and steel candy and baked goods and such, and then regular non-witch children did the same freaking thing, causing a whole freaking commotion in all the towns and cities and villages across the wretched land.  The putridly puritanical bureaucrats apprehended the two little witch-girls and tried to hang them, drown them, even disembowel them, but since they were wily wicked witches, they survived all this, but then they got smart and ran away.  No one ever heard from them since.  Evidently the goodies-scavenging routine performed by sinister little children never died out, ever since it was instigated by those two wily wicked witch sisters."

"So, uh, according to you, is that what started the whole Halloween tradition of trick-or-treating?"

"Nope.  Just a coincidence."

"Then what does your idiotic story have to do with the whole orange and black thing?"

"Oh.  It's just that one sister had black hair and the other sister was a redhead -- together they had black and orange hair."

Gary's eyes rolled up in his head.  "It all makes sense now.  Your skull’s empty because one day your brain fell out and you accidentally ate it, thinking it was someone else's."

"That's possible."

Then they saw witches on broomsticks flying around chasing the ghosts, in and out of the windows, in and out, in and out. 

Then Bob flatulated another idiotic question. "Do you know where jack-o-lanterns come from?"

Gary mused, "Let me guess.  Some guy had a big fat orange pumpkinhead, kinda like our good friend Jack Q Lantern, and he was beheaded because he committed some horrid crime, and the pathetic loser’s name just happened to be Jack O. Lantern.  Right?"

"Holy Helldaciousness! You're dead right!"

Gary's eyes rolled up inside his head.  "I bet you just make this crap up -- doncha?"

Bob just snickered connivingly.

"I doubt if old Jack Q. would appreciate a moronic story like that. It would be offensive to his pumkinhead-kind."

"Ha!  He's the one that told me that!"

Gary mumbled, "Bat-crap. Everyone's insane here.  And I'll go insane next."

Then they saw not only witches and ghosts flying around the mansions, but they saw vampire bats, the kind that look half human and half bat. It was an aerial playground of witches, ghosts, and vampires.  Apparently, only above ground denizens of Eerie Valley had all the fun.

  Then Bob asked, "What’s your fave dish?  Mine’s frozen brains under boiling blood sauce with a sniveling snot side dish."

"Gross.  But then I like gross."

"They serve it at the concession stand of the Graveyard Drive-in."

"You can also get chocolate-covered batwings there, and roasted eyeballs dipped in mucous syrup."

"Yummy."

"But I prefer old corpse dishes -- like ground up brittle bones and shredded butt fat mixed in dried up eyeballs and served up with scrambled brains and topped off with grated toenails."

"Shut up, you're making that badger growl even louder."

They found themselves on top of a high hill, surrounded by cemeteries and old buildings and  haunted houses and maniacal mansions and the sort, and the whole mess was in between two low mountain ranges; hence, Eerie Valley.

Gary bitched, "Bat-crap. I think we're lost."

Bob snickered, "You're lost maybe.  I know exactly where we are."

"Yeah?  Where do you think we are, Corpse-brain?"

"Why, we're on top of this very hill, somewhere in Eerie Valley."

"I could've told you that."

"Then we're not lost."

"Alright then, where's that wretched steakhouse?"

"On the other side of town, probably that way." He pointed somewhere over there.

"Over there?  All I see is Jack Q. Lantern’s pumpkin patch."

Bob pointed somewhere else, "Let's try that direction then."

"You’re pathetic."

"Thank you."

*      *      *

They trudged down the hill, through some more graveyards, not all of which were fenced in, and there was also the usual scattering of frightful looking mansions here in there.

Bob griped, "I'm freaking ravenously starvatiously hunger-stricken!"

"Me too, but I don't have a badger growling in my stomach like you do."

Bob spied something laying there in the ground.  It looked like an old bottle of wine.

"Ah-HA!  Now I'm thirsty."  Bob trotted over where the dusty bottle lay, and picked it up.  The grimy label read: TRIPLE-X ROTGUT”

"Freaking bitchen! The good stuff!"

Bob uncorked it, tilted his head back, and proceeded to drain the bottle -- except that the liquid liberally dribbled out through his rib cage, onto his legs and basically splashing onto the ground.

Gary chuckled, "Wow.  That stuff rotted right through your gut!"

The not-quite-altogether zombie looked down at the mess he made.  "Damn body’s falling apart all the freaking time. Can’t seem to keep anything in."

"How about duct-taping your whole torso? I know you've got some in your jacket pocket there."

"Do you realize how freakishly idiotic I'd look to everyone?  A freaking duct tape wrapped mummy!  No thanks.  I’m not competing with Max the Mumbling Mummy."

Gary shrugged, "Just trying to help."

"Don't."

They sauntered along the absolutely boring scenic route through the otherwise frightfully fascinating Eerie Valley.  Ground.  Cemeteries.  Mansions.  And creepy creatures scattered here and there.  Pretty dead place.

In a vain attempt to liven things up, Bob asked one of his stupid questions. "Why did the zombie want to commit suicide?"

Gary sighed and replied, "I dunno. Why?"

"He was sick to death of death -- he wanted to go back to the living."

"That's horrid -- and in bad taste. Back to the living? Yeah right.  Are we living it up here?"

"Nope.  We’re dying it up! Hahahahahaha!"  Bob laughed goofishly.

Gary shook his head. "You’re one sick walking corpse.  Plus you’re demented and deranged."

"Thank you. You're so kind."

"And you're severely delusional."

In some dead field of dirt they observed a small gang of stumbling groaning zombies stumbling and groaning after a young witch-child, who was shrieking shrilly as she attempted to run away from them.  Then the tricky little wicth-bitch suddenly stopped and turned, stretching out her hands and proclaiming some wicked incantation.  Suddenly there was no gang of stumbling groaning zombies, but just several toads croaking and hopping along.  Then the sinister little girl turned and skipped along, cackling insidiously.

Bob shrugged and then he joculated, "How many zombies does it take to screw in a light bulb?"

"Uh, ten? Nine to groan and stumble around and one to actually do the job, right?"

"Nope.  None!  We like it dark."

"Did I mention you’re demented?"

"If by that you mean my brains are totally rotted away, you’re absolutely right." At that his eye began slipping out of its socket again.

"And you're morbidly disgusting."

"Don't flatter me."

"Then stick your damn eye back in its hole."

Bob did, and then he posed another wretched gem of idiocy.  "You'll like this one.  What's the difference between a zombie and a lifeless corpse?"

"I give up.  What?"

"The zombie doesn't know he's dead. Ah-hahahahaha!"

"Be careful, your lower jaw will fall off your face."

"Admit it, that was a good one."

"Yeah, but the way I figure it, the corpse is smarter, ‘cuz he knows he's dead."

Bob frowned, "You take all the fun out of it."

They happened to be near one of those fenceless cemeteries, where things could eerily get out or other things creepily get in.  Then the lanky zombie found a severed hand laying on the ground. Hmmm. Somehow it had creepily gotten out.  Bob bent down and picked it up, and studied it, turning it this way and that.

Gary coincidentally have been trying to stretches back, which was itching ferociously. "Hey, give me a hand here, will ya?"

Bob clapped his own hand against the dead hand, which just made a dull meaty thumping sound.

"Oh, you're cute," Gary scowled.

Then Bob scratched Gary's back with the stiff corpse hand.

"Aaah, that's better."

"Ya know, I should keep this for a spare, keep it on my back pocket.  I’ll never know when I’ll lose one of my hands."

"Good idea."

"Except it's too rigor-mortisized. Better for eating, I reckon."

Gary ventured, "Hey, do ya know any good ghoul jokes?"

To that, Bob replied, "When you got a mouthful of food and say the word for a female child, what does it sound like?"

Gary shrugged. "Beats me."

Bob stuck in the severed hand in his mouth and said, "Ghoul!"

"You're one sick twisted wretch."

Bob chomped on the hand for little while, gave a sour face, then tossed it away. "Yuck. Too stale."

"Picky picky."

"Normally I'll eat anything, fresh or completely putrefied.  I'm just in the mood for something fresh -- preferably still moaning."

"You're a zombie, you moan all the time, why don't you eat yourself?"

"Cannibalize myself? Now there's a thought -- a pretty rotten one though."

"Like yourself."

"But I'd only do that if there was nothing else around and I was extremely ravenous."

Gary stretched his arms out wide, as if to embrace the whole bleak landscape. "There's nothing else around -- and you told me you're starving to death."

"I suppose if my arm rotted away and fell off, I'd eat that."

Gary playfully grabbed his arm and chuckled, "How about if I ripped it off and handed it back to you?"

"Not a good idea."

Then the arm inadvertently snapped off, dryly and jaggedly. Nope, no oozing blood, folks. Bob's a freaking dried-up old zombie, remember?

"Ooops," Gary said, handing the amputated arm back to Bob.

"Well well.  You went and done it now, you freaking loathsome creepazoid!"

"Now, eat it," Gary laughed.

"Nah.  I ain't that hungry."

Bob pulled that roll of duct tape out of his jacket pocket, then he told Gary, "Shove that thing back in the shoulder socket and help me wrap that baby tight."

"You're no fun."

After they reattached the arm with a ton of duct tape, everything was back to normal, or in their case, abnormal.

As that wretched badger growled in his otherwise empty stomach, Bob slobbered, "I'm so hungry I could eat a blood-vulturing venomous vampire -- and you know how horribly I hate those blood-sponging schmucks."

"I know.  I remember the time one tried to suck your blood, but you didn't have one drop in you to spare the loathsome creep. "

"That happened to be Vlad, you know."

"Yeah, Vlad the Varocious Vampire, that lecherous blood-leaching letch."

"Yep." Bob spouted one of his goofy questions again.  "Hey, why is it you can't see a vampire’ reflection in the mirror?"

Gary shrugged and said, "Uh, ‘cuz he's invisible to the mirror world?"

Bob replied, "Nope.  It's all a scam!"

"Huh? Whadya mean?"

"In their vamp houses they use a regular sheet of glass with tin foil backing."

"That's bat-crap."

"Well, that's how Vlad does it.  He's a fake, I'm sure of it."

"But I've seen him suck people’s blood.  Especially transients from out of town that know nothing about Eerie Valley."

"It's fake blood, strawberry syrup most likely, probably from a little plastic squeezy bottle.  And his fangs are fake, too."

"Oh Yeah?  Are the people fake he victimizes?"

"Yep.  They're just actors."

"I take it you don't believe in real vampires."

"Actually, I do.  I know good old Phineas Fang is the real McCoy, a genuine real live vampire – I mean, a real undead vampire."

"The Phineas Fang who sponsors that idiotic TV show, Fright-Fest?"

"Yep.  The very one we're in right now even as we speak gibberish."

"You're acting demented and delusional again.  I see no cameras, or cameramen for that matter."

"They're hidden."

"Yeah, right."

"Well, you can't see them, can you?"

"You're full of bat-crap."

*      *      *

As they came up over a hill and started traipsing down the other side, they spied one of those ominous decrepit mansions. It was a dilapidated Gothic three-story structure with six ghastly gables and two uncanny copulas, with odious black bats flying around them, and a black cat was scurrying across the rooftop.  Oh, and a couple of those pesky white-sheeted ghosts were flying around too.  The typical haunted house.

They also saw out in the front barren yard a gang of assorted sordid denizens of Eerie Valley, apparently causing some kind of calamitous commotion. Bob Zombie and Gary the Ghoul came down to see what was going on.  They saw some of their friends there, and a few unfriends too, like Vlad the Voracious Vampire, Griswold the Grim Reaper, and Silas Pumpkin Smasher, who was basically a really mean-spirited zombie. But they were glad to see old pals like Jack Q. Lantern and his best buddy Pumpkinhead Pete, Wicked Witch Wanda, Frankie the Monster, Gunther the Ghastly Ghost, Max the Mumbling Mummy, and Fred the Wacky Werewolf.  They were in the middle of egging and toilet papering the large three-story building, which had already been thickly saturated with roles and roles of completely unraveled toilet paper and yucky gooey eggs.  And there were still more cartons of eggs and toilet paper rolls at their feet.  They were screaming phony profanities and downright rotten words in the direction of the house:

"Wretched Sock-suckers!"

"Scummy squatters!"

"Miserable muck-mockers!"

"Flatulating fleshy filth!"

Bob called out, "What's all the freaking hubbub?"

Gary added, "Yeah, whose wretched stewpot are you stirring now?"

Some of them turned to look at the newcomers, particularly Wicked Witch Wanda and Pumpkinhead Pete. Bob and Gary both liked Wanda; not your typical ugly old hag, but the young, redheaded, sexy type. Pete had once been a regular zombie, who one day long ago, just on a lark, decided to wear a jack-o-lantern over his head, but Silas Pumpkin Smasher -- who frequently enjoyed terrorizing poor Pete -- took his baseball bat and smashed it clean off Pete’s shoulders, original head and all.  Fortunately, or not, from then on Pete decided to keep wearing a jack-o-lantern in place of his own head (that badgers got), which only enticed Silas to continually smash his head off.  Pete lost track of how many replacements he had to put on. Fortunately, his good friend Jack Q. Lantern provided him plenty of these from his prized pumpkin patch.  Oddly enough, good old Jack Q. was an oddball who was a genuine pumpkinhead since birth; strangely enough, born in a pumpkin patch, since rather perverse stories relayed that he was wretchedly conceived due to the collaborative coupling of an insane zombie and a radioactive pumpkin. Yeah, you figure it out.  So old Jack Q. has ever since grown pumpkins for a living, or in his case, during his dying days.  Perhaps he was searching for his soul-mate, right in his own pumpkin patch. 

Pumpkinhead Pete grinned that eerie jack-o-lantern grin that was pretty much a permanent fixture splayed across his wide orange face, and he replied to Bob, "Oh, we're just having some good old-fashioned fun."

Wanda mentioned, "Gunther was flying around this mansion, when he realized there were squatters holed up in there, so he got us all to come and look.  It may be a whole family of intruders, we think." 

Here in Eerie Valley, home of the undead and other assorted geeky creeps, it was a novelty when members of the living came bumbling through by accident. Usually they were lost and didn't know where they were, and often didn't know how they got there in first place.

Then Bob and Gary spied three pink fleshy people come to one of the second-story windows and proceeded to gawk out.

"Ghastly grimaces!"  Gary gasped.

"Holy Helldaciousness!" Bob cried. "I SEE LIVE PEOPLE!"

Gary said, "I suppose you're using your sick sense now."

"Not at all.  Can't you see them?"

"Uh, yeah, of course."

Bob’s cockeyed eyes nearly popped out of his head, especially the left one, as he reached up as if to grab those living fleshy victims gaping out the window.

"I SEE FRESH MEAT!" Bob hollered.

"That's more like it," Gary nodded.

Pete mused, "Bob just has a sick sense of humor, that's all."

"Hell, and I thought he was psychic," Gary grumbled.

Bob glared at their pink fleshy faces and glossy watery eyes, licking his dry lips with his dry sandpaper tongue.  He snarled, "Forget Woody's Steakhouse. Dinner’s in there!"

Gary pointed out, "Whatcha plan to do?  Should we chase them all around the house until we catch them and devour them whole?"

"You read my mind -- except the rats ate my freaking brains out."

"It's just your base carnal instincts kicking in, that's all."

"Nope, it's my damn empty stomach that's growling up a freaking storm, that's what it is."

"Or that damn badger."

The motley gang of rude and crude ruffians kept hurling eggs and toilet paper at the house, and if they kept it up long enough, they would papier-mâché the whole freaking building. One of the flinging rolls hit the window squarely, cracking it, as the fleshy people jumped back.  They disappeared, evidently to run and hide.

Bob cleared his throat and walked through the crowd, saying bombastically, "Step aside, fine fractured folks.  It's time for the gruesomely disgusting Bob Zombie the Bloodchilling Brain-Eater to take charge and capture those freaking fresh fleshy meat-muckers!"

Gary followed, clumsily saying, "Uh, yeah, and his buddy, Gary the Ghoul the Ghastly Graveyard Rampager, uh, here to help him chow down and then clean up the grisly mess when we’re done feasting."

            Then their arch unfriend Vlad the Voracious Vampire rudely stepped in his way and snarled, "Blaah blaah blaah, not until I suck them dry! Blaah blaah blaah!"

            "I’ll suck you dry if you don't get out of my freaking way!" Bob pushed the verbose vulturous vampire aside and walked closer to the house.  Then he stopped, cupped his hands to his mouth and hollered, "Hey, you live fleshy squatters!  Get out, you pathetic cowering cowards!"

Behind him, Vlad called, " Blaah blaah blaah, Get out like good little tasty victims -- so I can suck your everlasting blood! Blaah blaah blaah!"

Then Bob hollered up, "If you come down now, I'll make it quick and painless -- unlike this wretched blood-whore’s repulsive time consuming siphoning method!"

Then Vlad called, " Blaah blaah blaah! But I will be graceful and smooth, not disgustingly gruesome and gory like this rot-brained staggering creepy corpse here! Blaah blaah blaah! Blaah blaah blaah! "

Bob growled angrily, "Shut up with your idiotic ‘blaahs’ you bloodsucking scum-mucker!"

Vlad’s already white face turned whiter and his bloodshot eyes darn near popped out as he blitheringly blathered, "Blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah!"

Gary shook his head and demanded, "Please translate!  We can't understand unTransylvanian."

Bob glowered, "He's just swearing at me in his freaking native tongue."

The vampire replied frustratedly, "You brainless fools, I said, blood blood blood blood blood blood!"

Grinning, Gary nodded.  "Well, I'll be bat-crapped! So that's what ‘blaah’ really means.  I've always wondered about that."

Bob said, "So you're a damn freaking bloody bloodsucking addict."

" Blaah blaah blaah!  Yes I am! Blaah blaah blaah!"  Vlad blathered maniacally.

"Hey. Got blood?"

" Blaah blaah blaah! " Vlad stupidly replied.

Then Bob smiled and asked, "Hey, what do you get when you take the ‘vein’ out of Transylvanian?"

The vampire scratched his head, and then replied dumbfoundedly, "I do not know."

Bob spat in his face, "BLAAH! You freaking idiot!"

Vlad continued to be found dumb, as he continued scratching his head stupidly.

Bob shouted, "Blaah as in blood? Blood that you suck from veins!  You're a pathetic bloodsucking blabbermouthed idiot!  I swear someday I'll drive a stake through your freaking heart just to put you out of your freaking hideous misery!"

In defense of his livelihood and stupidity, all he could say was, "Blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah blaah!"

Gary had been scratching his head too -- but then suddenly he got it.  "Oh, I got it! Transyl--vein--ia! Ha ha ha ha!"

Vlad frowned and blaahed, "Blaah blaah blaah, and it is a very bad joke."

Bob snapped, "How would you know?  You vomitous vulturous vamp!  You're just a freaking damn dithering blithering bat-barfing blaah-blatherer!"

Vlad shot back, "Blaah blaah blaah, oh yes?  You are a rancid rot-brained corpse! A corruptive creepy crusty cadaver!"

"That's putridly pathetic.  I bet you can do better than that, you sap-sucking neck-biting bamboozler!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  You're a creepy crawly crappy critter, Blaah blaah blaah! You are reeking rotting refuse!"

"You’re not quite freaking me out yet, you wretched freaking life-sapping death-monger!"

"Blaah blaah blaah!  You ghastly gruesome gore-gluttoner!"

"That's only the truth, you bloody bleeding blood-siphoning psycho-sucker!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  You zlithering zappified zombie!"

"Now you're just getting creepily creative.  You sock-sucking toejam-slurping schlep!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  You brain-chomping gut-slurping cannibal!"

"Now that's just dumb, but obviously legitimate. You freaking fang-fashioning freakazoid!"

Gary interrupted, "You're remarks aren't so clever either, Bob.  In fact, you're both spouting really idiotic pathetic garbage."

Bob growled, "I didn't ask you, so keep out of it, you grave-groveling sod-digging schmuck-rucker!"  Then he turned back to the venomous Vlad and shot, "You phlegm-flipping flatulator!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  You dead-flesh suit for skeletons!"

"Yikes!  Now you're starting to get under my dry flaky skin.  You freaking reeking bat-stinker!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  You cranially-challenged brain sludge!"

"Ooooooh! You're barely starting to creep me out now.  You reeking rancorous spud-sucker!"

"Blaah blaah blaah!  You bone-grinding flesh-gnawing scavenger of a floppy-eyed walking creepshow!"

"Now I'm thinking about getting mad.  And keep my flipping floppy eye out of this!"

" Blaah blaah blaah! I'm simply saving the best for last.  You bag of dry brittle dusty debris!"

"Hey!  You skipped over me!  That ain't fair, you scandalous cheating idiotic undead ungiving taker-awayer!"

" Blaah blaah blaah!  That's because you're a freak-faced muck-brained rot-head! And your hideous zombie mother ate your zombie father's head to give you birth!"

"Now you're really getting too close to home, you bloody spawn of Satan's mother’s dead corpse-husband who was just a creepy cockroach that I stepped on ages ago and smashed to gory gruesome pieces and then smeared the bloody mess all over your freaking face!"

"Blaah blaah blaah!  That is a lie!  You wretched rotten rumor-rouser whose mummified grandparents ate your repugnantly pregnant mother for dinner before she had a chance to squeeze you into this wretched wicked world!"

"How'd you know that? Anyway, you're a freakin’ flippin’ frickin’ freakazoid ripped from the wretched fiery pits of Hell itself! And furthermore, when Satan sneezed, he found you in his hanky! But more than anything else, you’re just a freaking faker!"

Suddenly, Vlad's vampire-white face turned blood-red with horrid anger.  He fumed freakishly and began spouting things that are totally unprintable here.  Sorry, folks.  In fact, the others had to grab his arms and drag him aside somewhere, making vain attempts to calm him down.  Evidently, the grinning Bob Zombie won the rip-roaring spouting match, something these two deadbeats did every once in awhile -- and always in front of a crowd.

Vlad was over there blubbering and whimpering, being reluctantly consoled by the other creepazoids.

Gary sympathized, "Poor pathetic bloodsucker."

Bob grabbed Gary's arm and dragged him toward the rickety old mansion, "Come on, let's leave the voraciously vain loser alone with his sick twisted sniveling."

Then the observant zombie stopped, noticing that door was creaking open and closed, open and closed, open and closed, as a slight breeze had been whipping around the area.  For some reason this irritated him.

"Hmmm.  Those freaking lively bunch of humans could easily get away.  So I got a plan."  He turned toward the group and said, "Gather around, luscious little lady and other gruesome gentleclods.  I've got a plan."

They all huddled around their reluctantly newly elected leader -- often determined by spouting matches -- as he spoke softly, so the unsuspecting humans could not overhear them, "What we need to do is have each of you block any and all doors, front, sides, and back, and keep your eyes on all the first-story windows too.  We're gonna trap those fleshy freeloaders like cockroaches in a roach motel!"

Then Silas Pumpkin Smasher griped, "Is that so? Then what are you going to do?"

"Gary and my ghastly self are going inside and reap hideous and horrid havock on their hairy hides!"

Griswold the Grim Reaper, who always showed off his shiny scythe, letting the moonlight glint off its smooth steel blade, grumbled, "Don't forget it's my job to reap, and if there's havoc out there, I'll be the one reaping it."

            Bob snarled, "Hey, dumb and dreary Mr. Deathstalker. I think you've long since filled your freaking quota of collecting fresh corpses for one eternity.  It's time for Bob Zombie to perform his grisly gory work now."

            Gary added," I like graveyards better, but a house being haunted by live people is the next best thing."

            "Right you are, old pal, so you're coming with me."  He grabbed Gary’s arm and hauled him toward the opening and closing, opening and closing creaky door of the haunted mansion. He spat, "Freaking door is freaking me out."  He stopped and turned to the motley group of idly standing buffoons. "Well?!"

            They continued stupidly standing around, gaping and gawking at him mindlessly.

            "Alright, I'm the stereotypical example of the deadbeat living dead around here, but you freaking imbeciles make me look like a live fleshy creature--" and he shuddered at the horrifying thought of that "-- and I'm doing all the work and the thinking around here.  That's just not natural. And you freaking slimy losers act like a bunch of deadheaded deadbeats.  That's supposed to be my job," he pointed out, jabbing himself in the ribs, inadvertently breaking one of them.

            Then Gary stepped in and said, "Yeah, we got a plan and we've gotta use it to get those haunting humans in that hideous house."

            "Uh, what was that plan again?" Max the Mumbling Mummy mumbled.

            Bob put his hand to his ear and like a deaf dummy said, "Eh?  Speak up, gruesome gauze-grueler!"

            Max tried, but failed.

            "Come on, talk louder, you bone-bag of mummy-rot!"

            After another failed attempt, Frankie the Monster decided to help, since he was standing right next to Max, so he repeated what he thought the mumbling mummy and said, "I think he said, we're in a jam again."

Pumkinhead Pete suggested, "No, I think he said, I'm having Spam again. Mmmm.  That makes me hungry."

            "Spam has no blood!  It's worthless meat! Blaah blaah blaah!"

            Fred the Wacky Werewolf ventured, "I'm pretty sure he said, I’ve got a cramp in my head."

            Bob shook his head, which was getting a freaking cramp in it, disgusted with the whole bunch. "Stop acting like a bunch of freaking miserable morons! Let's just stick with the plan.  Everybody grab an exit, all doors and windows, so the slimy flesh balls don't escape!  Got it?  Good!"

            The reluctant losers shuffled off toward the maniacal mansion, spreading out, each one grabbing some kind of exit, literally.  Each one grabbed a windowsill or a door frame, hoping that was what Bob had in mind.  But since most of them didn't have minds to think with, being the undead, they were virtually useless worthless inept deadbeats. It was simply amazing, if not radically scary, that Bob had taken charge of the whole situation, a pathetic wretched zombie whose brains had long since been eaten out by rats.

In the meantime, Bob and Gary entered through the front door, where Wanda had a hand in it, keeping its opening and closing motion from irritating Bob, but with her other hand she caressingly stroked Bob's rough leathery, falling apart face, and said sensuously, "You’d better put that back in, big boy."

Bob snickered.

Then Gary hit him in the arm and glared, "She's talking about your drooping eyeball, you idiot!"

"Oh." Embarrassed, Bob shoved it back in its socket, and squished it around to make sure it was secure. "Ahem!  Let's go, Gary.  We've got work to do!  It's time to suck the life right out of the living!"

*      *      * 

Bob Zombie and Gary the Ghoul stepped into the dark dank house, which was being haunted by living creatures from beyond the dithering blithering Nether Regions.  The old rotting floorboards creaked nastily as they stealthily crept along.  They started up the wide archaic staircase, and every step they took made an even nastier creaking extravaganza.

"Ghastly grimaces!" Gary gasped. "I bet this whole house is creaking apart at the seams."

Bob stopped and suggested, "Let's try it very slowly and carefully now."

So they proceeded, very slowly and carefully, but every carefully placed footstep, no matter how softly and gingerly, each stair caused an even ghastlier rip-roaring creaking ruckus, obviously exposing their very presence here to those pink fleshy human creatures.

Gary complained, "Bat-crap.  They’re gonna hear us."

Bob reminded him, "It doesn't matter. Every exit is blocked.  These disgusting pathetic human flesh-bags are completely trapped inside."

In the meantime, some of the exit-blockers got bored. Most of them had very little attention spans, so anything could virtually distract them.  For instance, Pumpkinhead Pete, who was gripping the sill of one window, was blathering away about something-or-other to Frankie the Monster, who was gripping the sill of the window next to him. But it didn't take long for them to ungrip their silly sills and wander off several feet.  Then Silas the Pumpkin Smasher, who had been gripping a door frame, got sick and tired of Pete's blithering blatherings, so he walked away from his side door, gripped his bat and approached Pete.  Silas laughed maniacally, came right up to the frightened Pete, and swung, Pete's pathetic jack-o-lantern head flying off and away, and plunked to the ground, miserably split in several places.

Frankie bitched, "That was kinda mean, Silas, donchya think?"

Silas just laughed maniacally. "That's just what I do for a living."

            The headless Pete blindly stumbled and groped around, his hands stretched out desperately.  Then he idiotically tripped over his own smashed head, and Frankie and Silas both laughed uproariously.  Not realizing he had tripped over his head, Pete proceeded to crawl around on all fours, frantically looking for his head.  He found a large rock, tried putting it between his shoulders, but it was too heavy, so he dropped it.  Hearing the dreadful side-slitting commotion, the others came around to see what was going on, having left their posts.

            Pete climbed back to his feet again, stumbled around, and bonked into the mailbox.  He pulled it out of the ground, lifted it up high over his – uh, lack of head, and shoved the post down his gaping neck hole.  He started walking around with a mailbox for his head, the front flap hanging open like a big metal tongue flapping out of a big mouth-hole, and everyone guffawed wildly.

            "I can’t see!  Where is everyone?" metallically echoed a voice out of the mailbox opening.  Everyone hooted hideously at the absurdity of it all.

            Jack Q. Lantern was the only one not laughing, and he scolded, "You're a bunch of repulsive heartless wretches."

            With that he ran off, but he wasn't running away.  His pumpkin patch was not too far away, and since he was a fast runner, it didn't take him long to reach it.  He found a ripe and ready bright orange pumpkin, and with his trusty pumpkin knife, he cut through the attaching vine, grabbed the pumpkin and ran.  He ran back to the dilapidated haunted mansion, finding Mailboxhead Pete stumbling and staggering around, hands still outstretched, pathetically.

            He blubbered, "How am I supposed to see? This is a really stupid head."

He stumbled relentlessly until he crashed into the side of the house, causing everyone to hoot and holler wildly again, or rather, to continue hooting and hollering wildly, since they never really stopped. It pretty much went in undulating waves of perpetual hideous laughter.

Standing close by the heinous commotion, but not close enough to get caught up in it, Jack Q. took his trusty knife and began cutting a face into the pumpkin, the usual triangular eyes and nose, and the grinning sparse-toothed mouth. Then he cut around the top to make a hat.  He stuck a candle down inside and lit it with a match.  He usually carried this kind of stuff in his pockets, just in case such an idiotic event would take place. And it usually did quite often, as long as Silas Pumkin Smasher was around to harass and terrorize poor pathetic Pumpkinhead Pete.

Jack Q. yanked the ridiculous mailbox post out of Pete’s neck hole, tossed the thing aside, and carefully placed the brand-new jack-o-lantern between his shoulders.

            "Yippie! I can see!  I can see!" the happy-go-lucky newly reheaded Pumpkinhead Pete cried with joy.

            But Jack Q. pondered, rubbing his pumpkiny chin, "Unfortunately, you've got nothing to secure your new head down.  The mailbox with the post was a darn good idea. Hmmm.  I'll have to figure something out for you."

            "I don't care!  I can see!  Yippie! And I got my head back!" Pumkinhead Pete exclaimed wildly, arms flailing about as he ran this way and that way, zigzagging all over the place, purposely avoiding bumping into things, in a show-offish sort of way, which he couldn't do before when he lost his head.

Right at that moment, Bob and Gary stuck their head out a second-story window to see what all the hideous hubbub was about.

            "What the bloody freaking hell is going on out there?"  Bob hollered at the crowd of guffawing idiots.

            They all looked up, not saying much at all except a bunch of mindless babble and the last shreds of winding down laughter.

            Bob barked, "You freaking pathetic brainless wretches! Get back to your freaking posts!"

            The members of the motley crowd broke up and shuffled off, returning to their stations, those dull and boring windows and doors.  As Pumkinhead and Pete ambled toward his post, Silas Pumkin Smasher snuck up behind him, gripping the mailbox by the lower end of the post, as if it were a bludgeoning bat.  He swung it hard –SMACK!-- and the new head smashed into pieces as they went flying hither and thither. The eerily beheaded Pete once again stumbled around pathetically, arms outstretched, searchingly, as the sinister Silas laughed maniacally.  Will the horror ever cease?  We may never know.

Back inside the human haunted mansion, Bob and Gary skulked around a dark dismal corridor, opening doors and searching the rooms, relentlessly.

            "It's as if they disappeared, "Gary assumed.

            "If anything happened, they probably escaped!"  Bob snarled. "Those idiotic freaking fools outside can’t do a simple mindless job. Hell, that's the kind of job I should be doing -- not this."

            "What? Hunting humans?"

            "I've never had to hunt one down before.  They're usually just laying there dying -- or just freshly dead.  Damn!  We should go down to the morgue.  Soft squishy cadavers lying around everywhere on dinner tables!"

            "They’re called gurneys.  Besides, last time we were there, some wretched back alley gang of zombies beat us to it and ate up all the cadavers."

            "Those freaking reeking gore-gobblers really ruined that day for us!"

            "So if we can’t find these living fleshy freaks, what ‘re we gonna do?"

            "I donno. Probably use Vlad as a substitute.  I’ll eat his freaking bloody heart out someday!"

            "I bet our pathetic prey is just hiding somewhere."

"With our fabulous luck we may never find them."

Gary looked at Bob strangely, then said, "Well, not you anyway, long as you're freaking eye keeps hanging out like that."

Bob shoved it back in its socket. "Damn eyeball.  Someday I’ll just rip it right out of there and throw it to the wolves!  A good round pebble would do instead."

"It’d just fall out. I think we should duct tape your eye."

"You imbecile!  I wouldn’t be able to see."

"But it'd never fall out."

Suddenly they heard something – the shuffling around of feet upstairs on the third floor.

Bob muffled a chuckle, "That's dinner!  Let's hurry before it gets away!"

They dashed to the end of the hall where they found a narrow stairway.  They climbed up it as the damn thing creaked boisterously all the way to the top.  They ran down another hall, and then saw a door at the end slam closed.  They ran to the door, and before opening it, Bob decided to scare the crap out of them -- literally.

He grabbed the doorknob and rattled it crazily and laughed maniacally.  Then he growled in an insidious mean voice, "You're trapped now, you fresh meaty morsels!  I bet you all have nice soft squishy brains for me, doncha?  I just simply love fresh squeezed brains! Bwooohahahahahaa!"

Gary whispered, "Let’s just get in there and get ‘em before they get a chance to get away again."

"Yep, you're right."

Bob opened the door and the two frightening flesh-eaters jumped in, arms flailing about while they laughed hideously, to further scare the bejeebers out of their prey -- except they were nowhere to be seen in the room.  They saw a closet door, and Gary opened it, but no one was in there either.

 "Bat-crap!" Gary snapped.

"Damn freaking hell!  Where the freaking hell did they go?"

Gary looked around inside the closet, from corner to corner -- then he saw a ceiling hatch.

"We’re in luck! They snuck up there," he pointed.

Bob looked up. "Well, I'll be damned to hell!"

"And you probably are anyway."

"Let's get up there and snatch those pesky supper morsels."

The short, stout Gary tried jumping several times while reaching his stubby fingertips upward in a vain attempt to grab the edge of the hatchway, but obviously he wasn't tall enough.

"Get out of the way, you stupid clown.  I'm two heads taller than you.  So you get done on all fours and make like an Ottoman."

"A what?"

"A freaking footstool, you fool!"

"Oh."

Reluctantly, Gary got down on his hands and knees while Bob stepped onto his back like a freaking footstool.

"Ouch!  That's my back you're stepping on."

"Shut up, you freaking whiner!"

Bob clutched the hatchway edges and hoisted himself up and threw it.  He sat there peering down a long crawl space, but it was too dark to see anything.

"See anything?"  Gary asked.

"Nope.  Too dark" Bob replied.

 So he strained his ears, trying to hear anything, but there was nothing to hear.  Gary was down in the closet babbling away about something-or-other, probably something about whether or not Bob could hear anything.

"Shut up, you freaking lunk-head!  I'm trying to hear up here!"

Now that it was so silent you could hear a million pins dropping, he could hear absolutely nothing, not a whimper, not the sound of crawlspace crawling around, not even a squeaking rat, which would have been expected at least.

"Damn.  They got away again. There must be another way out of this freaking crawlspace." But Bob was ready to give up, as he slid back through the hatch and fell on top of Gary, probably not accidentally either, and tumbled haphazardly off to the side.

"Ouch!"  Gary exclaimed.

"You're still doing your Ottoman impression?"  Bob chuckled.

 "My what?"

"Footstool, you blithering dimwit!"

"No. I just didn't feel like getting up yet.  I was getting comfortable like this." 

Changing his position to sit on his rump now, Gary noticed that Bob's leg was gruesomely lying beside him.

Gary casually mentioned, "Uh, I think you broke something when you fell on me."

Bob looked over and noticed his leg lying there.  He sighed heavily and yanked the duct tape out of his jacket pocket "Alright, let's jam that baby up my hip and wrap ‘er up tight."

After they completed the procedure, Bob stood up and tried it out, walking around in the room.  He had a ghastly gimpy limp, but he shrugged it off with his usual whatever-attitude.

"Alright, I think it's time for plan B," Bob decided.

"What?  Go to the morgue after all?"

"Nope.  Burn this damn house down.  We'll barbecue the hell out of them!"

Gary nodded.  "That might do it."

Before they reached the doorway to leave the room, something ominously unexpected happened.

*      *      *

The window in this room just happened to be open, as they noticed that fact for the first time.  So Bob and Gary saw something flying toward it. Well, damn if it wasn't one of those wretched bats!  The kind you see mindlessly flying around those copulas.  Except that this was no ordinary bat.  It was a vampire bat. We're talking about the kind from those old-fashioned horror movies where Bela Lugosi portrayed the infamous Count Dracula. As it flew closer, it grew larger, supernaturally morphing into a humanoid form. Aerodynamically approaching the open window was a pale-faced, raven-black-haired, fang-toothed, black-cloaked Gothic character -- and it was none other than Phineas Fang, the notoriously ominous numero uno vampire of Eerie Valley.  He smoothly slipped through the open window and landed gracefully on his feet, glaring insidiously at the two freaky flesh-eaters, as if they were lower than scum under a toilet seat -- which they actually were.

"Who is responsible for egging and toilet-papering my mansion?" bellowed the duke of all vampires of Eerie Valley.

Bob coughed, "Uh, those dreaded deadbeats you probably saw outside."

"And furthermore, what are you two miserable cootie-infested reprobates doing in my humble abode?" 

Gary tried to explain first.  "Uh, we were just rooting around for something to eat -- but they got away."

Bob chuckled weakly and re-explained, "Actually, since this is your ‘humble abode’ as you so eloquently put it, we witnessed some hideous intruders, so we were going to chase them out."

Phineas Fang snarled, "Then why are all your wretched friends blocking all of the exits? Hmmm?"

"They are?  That's surprising. Actually, I only half-expected that -- they’re so incompetent."

Phineas Fang said, "Realize that I do have a brain in my head, unlike you, Bob, and all of your creepy kind.  I know you were foraging for food, and so you were chasing my guests around in my house -- weren't you?"

"Actually, we didn't even know this was your house.  It looks decrepit and condemned. Cobwebs and spiders everywhere, ya know. "

"That's just my style."

Gary said, "Those putrid humans are your guests?"

Phineas Fang replied, "Most definitely.  They are my very special guests.  And obviously I must save them from the miserable likes of ravenous flesh-eating freakazoids like yourselves."

Bob cried, "But we're hungry!"

Gary added, "Yeah, ditto."

"Try Woody's Steakhouse.  I hear it's good."

"We don't even know where it is."

Phineas Fang shrugged, "Neither do I.  Surely it's somewhere in Eerie Valley."

"Hell, you're a big help."

"Nevertheless, I must tend to my special guests, and you must depart, because in my eyes, you are the intruders."

Out of sheer curiosity, Bob asked, "And exactly why are these guests so special?"

"Why, you might say I'm going to have them for dinner."

Bob's eyes rolled up in his head. "If that was a joke, it's so horribly old and moldy that it's gotten zombified just like me. It's a dead joke."

"I wasn't joking.  I'm having them for dinner."  He raised his thin lips and exposed his too long pointy fangs as he hissed.  "Then I'm going to suck their blood."

Bob nodded, "I see.  You're going to keep dinner all for yourself, and deprive us of good-eatin’.  You’re just another selfish vampire, probably no better than that freaking fart-barfing faker, Vlad."

"It's true.  He is a faker."

Bob nudged Gary's arm.  "I told you so."

But Phineas Fang explained, "However, only because he sucks bat, cat, and rat blood.  He's a despicable lower-class vampire."

"Figures.”

"A true upper-class vampire prefers human cuisine. Human blood is exquisite."

"But is he like you -- able to see his reflection in the mirror?"

Phineas Fang chuckled, "That's just a ridiculous gimmick you hear about in horror movies."

"Really? I'm not surprised."

"Nevertheless, it is true that when a vampire stands before a mirror, you can see his true hideous self."

"And what would that look like?"

"You do not want to know -- it would totally creep you out."

"I doubt that highly. I've seen every damn creepy thing you can imagine, especially inside corpses -- especially their brains, or lack thereof."

Phineas Fang nodded, "I stand corrected.  You are much creepy than I.  Although, I can be far more dangerous."  He displayed those fangs again and hissed.

"Yep, whatever."

Gary remarked, "I bet you're not as dangerous as the vampires in the horror movies.  They can be pretty nasty sometimes."

Getting offended, and annoyed, Phineas Fang hissed, "Have you forgotten that I am the genuine article?"

Bob just shrugged, and Gary just scratched his chin. Neither of them were really impressed.

They all heard shuffling around upstairs.  Dinner was running around up there.

"Holy Helldaciousness!"  Bob snarled.  "I sure wish you'd share some of those meaty morsels with us, Phineas old buddy."

"That is not going to happen," Phineas Fang assured them. "Nevertheless, I am not just going to waste them like most of my victims. I will approach them in a special way so that my preternatural bite in the jugular that I consecrate upon them will soon transformed them into my own kind, hence fellow nightstalkers! Then my guests shall join me and my gloriously hideous ranks of the undead!"

"Don't forget we're undead ""too."

"But the difference between us is that I am the well preserved undead, whereas you are the rotting undead."

Bob just shrugged and sighed, "Whatever. Besides, the only 'night stockers' I know about work in supermarkets."

"Bob, you're a rotting miserable mockery of life, a brainless wretched facsimile thereof.  To put it mildly, yet bluntly, you are a blithering mindless walking corpse!"

"What else is new?"  Bob shrugged.

"And Gary, you are a disgusting plunderer of graves, a loathsome demonic thief of the dead, who are helpless victims of your hideous iniquity -- and to top it off, you snack on their brains and entrails, just like Bob and his despicable zombies."

"Aw, don't flatter me like that," Gary grinned.

"You must be really fond of us, saying such nice things about us," Bob added.

Phineas Fang remarked, "Together, you are one disgusting repulsive pair."

Bob snickered, "Why, thank you, you're so kind."

 "Bob, it is unfortunate that I did not find you when you were amongst the living. I could have given you the preternatural bite, and saved you for eternity as a vampire.  But it's too late now.  You have become a pathetic wretched devourer of filthy flesh.  If I were to bite your brittle neck now, your head would fall off."

Gary smiled, "No sweat.  We've got duct tape."

Phineas Fang glared at both of them, "It is time for you to leave my humble home.  Now!"

And so Bob Zombie and Gary the Ghoul had no choice.  Deprived of what could have been a tasty scrumptious dinner, they proceeded moping along down the hall, then down the stairs, down the hall, and then down the last flight of wide stairs, and finally out the front creaking door.  It creaked back and forth, back and forth -- and back-and-forth.  Bob growled angrily, grabbed that damn door and yanked it off its wretched hinges.  Then he tossed it like a Frisbee, and it soared through the air. 

Incidentally, Jack Q. Lantern had just given Pumkinhead Pete a new head, after Silas Pumpkin Smasher had just demolished the last ones.  That flying door hurled right at poor Pete, smashed right into that new jack-o-lantern noggin, and tore it clean off the poor wretch’s shoulders, tearing it into pieces, and then the door collapsed somewhere beside him, and then Pete collapsed onto the door, as if he were a patient on a stretcher, ready to be hauled off to the hospital -- which they didn't have in Eerie Valley; they only had morgues.

Silas laughed like a maniacal madman, and the others began guffawing too.

Bob snapped at everyone, "Alright everyone, stop horsing around!  The fun’s over. We can all leave now."

"What happened anyway?"  Fred the Wacky Werewolf snarled.

Gary replied," It turns out this joint is Phineas Fang’s.  And those fleshy creatures were his special guests. He's going to have them for dinner, in other words."  He chuckled lamely.

Bob clarified it to them, "So, it turns out we're all the intruders here.  Let's get the hell out of this hideous joint!"

And so they all did.

*      *      *

Bob Zombie and Gary the Ghoul continued their futile fruitless search for Woody's Steakhouse, having no idea where the freaking place was, and neither did anybody else, not even the brainy Phineas Fang.  How pathetic. He was probably busy draining the wretched life out of his "special guests" at this very moment.  And once their life was hideously siphoned out of them, like a gasoline thief maliciously siphoning gas from some poor fool’s tank, these special guests would repulsively become undead nightstalking vampires.  Creatures Bob simply despised.  Probably because they were all a bunch of snobbish arrogant bloodsuckers.

The two deranged freaksters ambled down some dusty dirt road that wound through hills and dells, and the usual countless graveyards, and so they happened to come across Gimpy Gavin coming up the opposite way.  He was another wretched zombie, whose right leg was a few inches shorter than the left, making him walk gimpishly. Probably due to a falling accident.

"Hi Bob, hello Gary," Gavin called.

"Yo, Gavin," Bob returned.

"Whaaazzzup, Gavin?"  Gary greeted.

"Nothing really."  Then Gavin noticed Bob's own limp.  "Whadja do, sprain your ankle?  Or are you just making fun of someone ELSE who's limping around?"  He sounded a little defensive with that last remark.

"Yep, exactly, Gavin," Bob replied, grinning nastily.

Gary mentioned, "Fact is, he broke his leg when he fell on me."

Bob added, "Actually, I’m making fun of my own freaking self limping around. But sometimes it sure is a hoot to make fun of someone ELSE!" And he suddenly wildly exaggerated his limp as he staggered along the road, grinning broadly and nastily.

Gavin quickened his pace to get away from them, grumbling audibly, "Freaking freaks!"

So as the two old freakazoid buddies strolled along the dusty dirty avenue, they blathered away about nothing in particular, just biding their time, which they had plenty of.

Bob posed one of his wretched questions. "How do you kill a zombie?"

"Is this a trick question?"  Gary suspected.

"You can't.  He's already dead, stupid!" Bob laughed idiotically. "Actually, that’s the wrong question.  Folks should be asking, how do you stop a zombie?" 

"Shoot him in the head."

"His brains are dried up.  It won't matter.  But in our living death, we laughingly mock life.  So, I laugh at life! Bwoohahahahahaa!"

"While you're busy making a mockery of life, how do you know the living aren't making a mockery of death?"

"Good point."

"Sometimes they’re called the walking dead.  I've heard how they often stagger around mindlessly, not a thought in their heads."

"But that's a zombie."

"Hmmm.  Maybe there's really no difference between them and you."

"Maybe the only difference is that I know I'm a zombie and they don't."

"Makes sense."

Then Bob asked, "Alright then, answer me this.  Are ghouls dead or alive?"

"Is this another bad ghoul joke?"

"Probably.  But actually, I'm just asking you, ‘cuz you should know."

So Gary explained, "Alright, you see, when you go to the world of the living, we just hang out in their cemeteries, and do horrible heinous things their, as you know. Rob graves and munch on corpses sometimes.  But when we're here in the world of the dead, we usually just sleep."

"Well, you’re here now and you’re not sleeping."

"I reckon you're keeping me awake."

"Anyway, you didn't really answer my question.  Are you ghastly ghouls dead or alive?"

"As far as I know, we're not really dead or alive.  We just are."

"In other words, you freaking don't know what you are."

"That's it."

"Well, I'm dead -- and proud of it!"  At that, his eye popped out of its socket again and his jaw flew off its hinges.

Gary laughed, "You're just falling apart all over the place!"

Bob swore wretchedly, but it was unintelligible since his lower jaw wasn't there to help make sense of his profane words.

 Anyway, he pushed his eyeball back in, then when he reached down to pick up his jaw, the lower end of his spine popped out gruesomely. He quickly jammed his jaw into his face and began swearing again, and this time it made sense, but you don't wanna know what horrible foulness he uttered.  As Bob tried to straighten his back up, Gary pushed the disgusting spine back in for him.  Then the ghoul  grabbed the roll of duct tape out of Bob's pocket, and wrapped it all around his waist and torso, beneath his jacket of course, which Bob had to hold up while Gary wrapped it round and round and round.  Then he wrapped duct tape around Bob's jaw and the back of his neck to hold it in place.

Bob complained, "You're gonna make me look like a freaking dry-rot mommy!"

Gary grinned.  "I've got a joke for a change, Bob."

"Great.  Like I'm in the mood for one."

  "Suck it up and listen.  Why do mummies wear so much bandaging?"

"I don't know.  Why?"

"‘Cuz they're all wrapped up in their work."

"That was horribly lame."

Garry looked at Bob, who was starting to get all wrapped up in that ugly gray duct tape, and it was practically all over Bob's body; first his arm, then his leg, and now his torso and jaw -- and suddenly something occurred to him.  "You know, I just figured something out."

"What?"

"Zombies were once live fleshy people.  But I say mummies were once zombies.  Instead of letting themselves falling apart like you are, they had to wrap themselves up in mummy-wrap.  Or in your case, lots of duct tape!  Bob, you’re going the way of the mummy!"

"Do you know what? I think I'll eat you for dinner!"

*      *      *

It must've been a freaking miracle.  Yes it's true, they actually found Woody's Steakhouse. It took them several hours, but they finally did it.  But to their disappointment, it was not the kind of establishment they thought it was.  They read the sign carefully and it advertised:

Bob grumbled, "Well, I'll be damned in hell!"

Gary nodded, "That you are."

Bob mused, "So it's a freaking house that sells stakes, not a bloody steakhouse."

"What's the big diff?"

"One's made of wood -- the other’s meat."

"Oh."

"And Woody's obviously serving wood."

"Who eats wood?"

"Vampires do.  You see, when you ram that sucker into their freaking chest, you cry, ‘EAT WOOD!’  You see?”

"Oh, that's right.  You're supposed to stick a wooden stake into the heart of a vampire, and it kills him."

"And how many vampire movies have you seen lately?"

"Several.  Over at the Graveyard Drive-in."

"You got your schooling at the right joint."

Looking at the sign, frustrated that this place was not what they thought, Gary griped, "Bat-crap. And I'm hungry.  I wanted fresh meat -- not wood."

"Hey, I've got an idea.  Let's buy one of those damn stakes, and we’ll kill Vlad -- then eat him!"

"Alright!  Let's do it!"

*      *      *

To make a pathetically long story a little less long, let’s just quickly say that they failed miserably.

I hope we're not taking the most climactic scene out of this whole debacle of a tale, but I assure you, we're not.  Because not much happened when Gary and Bob found Vlad the Voracious Vampire, who was just idly wandering around the desolate barren yard of some old dilapidated haunted house, probably his own.  Bob clutched the stake, ran up from behind him, sprang out in front of him (using the idiotic element of surprise), and -- while hollering "EAT WOOD!" -- rammed the wooden stake deep into Vlad’s unsuspecting chest where his heart was supposed to be -- but it wasn't there.  The fact is, Vlad didn't have a heart, nor did he even have a black heart, although he sure acted black-hearted like most vampires, who relentlessly drained the bloody life out of the living.  In place of a heart he just had a big black emptiness, so he couldn't really die from a stupid wooden stake.  Bob and Gary started wondering if all vampires were void of hearts.  Perhaps that's why they were so hard to kill.  Especially when you tried to stake them to death.

 But that wasn't the real reason Vlad couldn't die.  Nor was it because Phineas Fang happened to show up to prevent the deranged duo from doing any further damage, because Bob would have succeeded in creating a huge hole in the poor victimized Vlad’s chest, which wouldn't have killed him either.  But he’d have to walk around Eerie Valley with an eerie gaping hole in his chest, where the wind would blow through it, witch-children would laugh about it, rude characters would stick their hands through it -- like Bob and Gary -- or squirrels might roost there, not to mention other hideous things.

But the real reason was because Vlad the Voracious Vampire just might have to show up in a future episode of this newfangled adventure, that being Fright-Fest!  It was a remote possibility, anyway.  So he couldn't die just yet.  Well, he won't ever really die -- he's a heartless bloody vampire, an eternal member of the Undead Club, and in Eerie Valley their particular chapter was called Vampires-R-Us!  So, like others like him, he was forever undead.

The only fortunate thing that did happen that night was when Wicked Witch Wanda came sauntering by as the two freakazoids were aimlessly walking along some cobblestone path.  Bob had a gut feeling, void of guts, that something good just might remotely happen when he saw her.  A zombie can hope.  So she seductively came up to him, and whispered bittersweet nothings in his ear, like, "You make my skin crawl," then she sensuously walked away, giggling mischievously.

Bob sighed heavily, and grumbled, "This freaking place is definitely hell." 

*      *      *

Everything didn't end too horribly for Bob and Gary. Which is sad, because this is supposed to be a horror story, and things are supposed to end very horribly.  They did happen to find an unfenced graveyard, of which there were a few around in Eerie Valley.  Bob and Gary decided to dig up an old grave, since they figured the body would be good and dead and not zombified like most of the freshly buried ones. They sat down in the six-foot hole, sitting in the coffin with the creepy dreaded old corpse. Of course they had unnailed the lid and tossed it aside.  Gary was examining the rancid reeking stiff, snatching an old Timex from the brittle wrist, and he found some loose change in one of the coat pockets, while Bob was chewing away on a crispy liver he had yanked from a gaping hole in the guy's lower torso.  Bob reached down and snapped a foot off, unbooted it, and handed it to Gary.

"Chow down, old pal. This is probably as good as it gets," Bob grinned weakly, so it looked more like a frown.

"Thanks for nothing."

"You're not welcome."

Gary grabbed the ankle and reached behind his back, scratching it with the toes of the foot.  The toenails were good and hard, so he got a damn good scratching out of it.  Then he brought it back and took a bite out of the first three larger toes of the foot.

Grinning stupidly, and with his mouthful, Gary said, "I love toes."  As he ate them, he made a horrible crunching sound.

Bob commented, "Livers aren't so bad either.  When they’re dried up like this, it's almost like eating meat flavored potato chips."

"Toes are like, uh, really crunchy pork rind."

Then they felt movement beneath them, and then they heard the corpse groaning.  And then it gasped, "Hey, what's going on around here?"

Bob quickly grabbed the shovel that was in the corner and smacked the guy in the head. "STAY DEAD!"

The stiff was now still.

Gary snickered, "Some of these deadbeats just don't know how to rest in peace."

"Pretty soon this idiot will be resting in a million pieces.  Or worse, he'll just crumble into dust before we eat him out completely."  With that, Bob began chewing on the corpse’s hand, which had snapped off at the wrist.

Gary remarked, "But at least you'll be feeding that damn badger in your belly."

"Nope.  I got hungry and ripped the damn thing out of my stomach and ate it whole."

"And you're still hungry?"

"After I swallowed it, it fell out of the hole in my belly and got away.  Which reminds me. Where’s that damn duct tape?"

*      *      *

So ends the pathetically horrid tale of two wretched undead creepazoids,

 who will live the rest of their dying days, searching for something to gnaw on

-- and at this point any damn thing will do –

because they simply have nothing better to do in death, right here in Eerie Valley, somewhere in the dithering blithering Nether Regions.

*        *        *

Copyright October 2007 by R. R. Stark

This wretched story is rated "PG" for Putrid and Ghastly!

Beware of phony profanity!  It may shock those who are faint of fart!