'Damn!' Sachelle cried, cursing her bruised thumb and the world in general.
'Now I'll never be able to win at table tennis!' Sachelle was the best
table tennis player at all of Eastmont High, and Sarah the snotty senior
knew it. As of yet she hadn't had a chance to prove her skill, but
she was looking forward to playing in the super tournament that would be
taking place the very next day. Johnny would be there,
Johnny with his beautiful smile and taste for young meat.
Johnny, the seventy year old janitor, who Sachelle had had a crush on
since she first laid eyes on him. She wanted to show him just how great
she was, how she had worked so hard at the table tennis courts.
She had finally gone straight and joined the team rather than hustling
to pay for her collection of Star Trek commemorative coins. Now that she
had given those up, now that she was finally about to show her
skill to everybody, this happened! She knew she shouldn't press
elevator buttons so hard, but now she was bruised. She could never play
the tournament in this shape. What was she going to do? This was,
like, a total disaster!
Had I but known the ancient, dank history of Castle Windvere, I would
never have entered gaping maw of its stained glass front doors.
I found it out soon enough as I went to tuck in the youngest Windvere,
whom it was my job to watch over as a full-fledged member of the
baby-sitter's club. He begged to stay up to watch the last of
Get Smart, but I agreed only on the condition that he tell me
the ancient, dank history of his castle. I wanted to know why Kristie and the others were so eager to give it to me. "Dank?" he asked questioningly. "How can a history be Dank?" "Shut up you little bastard," I responded in my best tone of authority. "So," he said after a moment of silence, his bright red eyes glowing (Yeah, red! I guess they're contacts). "It began way back in history, with my ancestors Paul and Uma Windvere, and me, Mike D." I warned him to stop with the Beastie Boys lyrics, and had to stick his fingers in the socket a few times to stop. And they said I couldn't babysit!
"Okay, okay. My ancestors built the castle with their own hands. The stained glass of the front windows were stained with their very blood and sweat." I told him reasonably that you couldn't stain glass with blood and sweat, and held his head under water for several minutes to prove my point. "Well, you get ahead of me," said the little runt when he finished gasping for breath. "They had a secret glass staining formula, which was very lucrative. Because human blood is cheaper than other red dyes." That made sense. "One day," he continued, "a babysitter was watching over some of my other ancestors, who were children at the time. She stole the formula for the glass staining, and sold it to a competitor. When my first ancestors, Uma and Paul, discovered what had happened, they took the babysitter and... DIDN'T PAY HER!"
I gasped in sheer horror. Not paid! For putting up with one of the little slime balls of the Windveres! The agony! Sure, there was some pizza in the bargain, but it was well known that the Windveres all ordered Veggie Lovers. And man, I can't eat a pizza with anything green on it. So I'm just geting dicked! I screamed in stark denial, and the kid laughed maniacally. This went on for a while, until I got bored and shoved his head under the water and his finger in the socket at the same time. The smell of burning Care Bears pajamas filled the room. But man! That history was so dank and ancient, I thought to myself. If someone had written about my experiences and entered them into a book, he deserved obscene amounts of money.
As I thought this to myself, an eerie, translucent figure approached me from the hallway. His gaping maw was such that it reminded me of the stained glass front doors. "It is fitting that I should remind you of the doors," the ghostly figure said. "Because I am the ghost of Uma, come to revenge myself on every babysitter who kills one of my blood!" "Every babysitter?" I asked, my curiousity getting the better of my palapable fear. "Am I not the only one?" "No," said the ghost in a horrible and yet cheesy ghostly voice, "the children of my family are all unmanagable little bastards." "Ah," I said. And then the ghost killed me, making me sorry I found out about the ancient, dank history of Castle Windvere.
The house had lain dormant for decades, perched there on Coogan's Bluff. Nothing
had disturbed its slumber since the burning time.
Now, however, the mansion trembled with the burning passion of two lovers,
caught inexorably into a web of hot, moist undeniable excitement. Their
moans traveled through the rooms like a mobile hot dog on a stick -
bobbing, oily, warm and firm, and eventually dying down
to a few greasy smears on a napkin.
Smiling obscurely, half in agony from the dust-induced asthma attack, Mike leaned tenderely against a rotting board and smiled. Carefully he traced his shapely, tapered finger across his lover's shoulder. His very touch caused his partner to arch in ecstasy. "I love you more than sausages," he wheezed.
Thyla spotted another likely candidate, a Senior who would do anyone at any time. She walked over to him.
"Yes, your majesty." he replied and hung up.
Sachelle thought to herself, "Too bad poor Michael won't leave this house. It will be a shame to do him in..." as she fingered the blade of the butcher knife and claws popped out of her face.
"Yes, a perfect shame." she said aloud as her skin turned green, her eyes multiplied, and her hair fell out in tangled clumps. She grabbed the butcher knife and crouched near the door to wait.
Sachelle pouted with coral-lined lips as she smoothed the fabric of her Versace jumper. "Eleven years old and no breasts yet! What the hell is Bruno going to do on our date Saturday when he finds oranges in my training bra!"
"Oh, grow up," Myra Spizzicola said cooly as she ran taloned fingers through her freshly-bleached hair. "Even Natoli's flat, and at thirteen she's older than us all. Anyway, you said you'd babysit the Marco brats for me Saturday." At Sachelle's silent refusal, she snarled, "Well, someone has to do some babysitting around here or else how're we gonna pay for the hit on that bitch Amanda White? Do you want her winning the science fair again this year?"
She knew, as the sand-laden wind swept a tumbleweed over the trunk of
her '79 Nova, that Eduardo would not come back. "Well," she thought,
"as Granny always said, there isn't anything which can't be
fixed by a lovely cup of tea." As she eased the antique
Wedgwood teapot out of the
hole in the back seat and carefully siphoned some water off her cooling tank,
she smiled in anticipation of the perfectly-blended English tea.
Suddenly, her chemical imbalance got the best of her and she hurled the teapot furiously against the rapidly turning tumbleweed. "Damn it anyway!" she screamed. "I don't even like tea! I like coffee! Black!" Kicking the tires, she flung herself into the hot sand and wept.
"If Eduardo had loved me, he would have bought me coffee..." she sobbed. "Not gone off for a Coke..."
"It's owned by the nephew of the family that lived there", Sadie explained as she huffed and puffed, "but he's never out here. I'm sure he'd let it go for a song. But why are you...". She stopped as she saw the look in the stranger's eye. "I need a house. This house." he said shortly, ending the conversation.