“Wowie zowie,” Mena exclaimed, her head darting back and forth between the reaper and the talking corpse. “Did we really find your soulmate, Janus? I thought you only liked girls.”

Janus held her hands to her cheeks and gave a wink. “Men, women, everything in between. Peel away the skin and we’re all skeletons”

But Chad Abber turned his head when he looked at Janus. She had clasped her hands together and swooned, but he seemed to condone the attention. “Only, I wasn’t meant to end up like this,” he remarked, a solemn expression on his rotting face.

“I was once the most artful teaser in all the land, wouldya believe?” Chad said, and he pushed off from the top of the wall. “Every lady in the dell wanted me until I died…”

“He’s hardly modest, for a post-mortem,” Ashlan whispered, but Janus shushed her.

“How…er…did you die?” Janus asked. “Not sure if my daddy reaps in this territory.”

“That, my fellow dead lady,” Chad Abber said, dropping his head in sorrow. “Is the sad answer to why we are in this bloody mess.”

“What bloody mess?” Mena asked.

Chad Abber grabbed the bars, a burning intensity was present in his remaining eye. “In the woods, I saw who used the sacred pen to summon that blighted Blot.”

Abber mimed running as he talked. “I hurried as fast as I could to the castle so I could inform the princess... and propose to her too. I tried to tell the king, but he threw me in that blighted jail cell and…”—Abber turned around and gazed at the wall. Flies buzzed around him. They seemed as greatly agitated as he was ”…he forgot to feed me for weeks and…I died.”

All three girls gave sympathetic glances towards the fallen man. At last, Mena spoke, “I hate to tell you this, Chad, but whoever had the pen probably wrote it so the king didn’t believe you and didn’t feed you. They wanted to give you an unhappy ending.”

“But who?” Chad asked, “Who would do such a thing to me?”

“Maggie McGill,” Mena responded, hope in her eyes that he knew who she was.

“Who?” Chad asked, shrugging his shoulders at the wall.

“The person with the pen,” Mena said.

“I’ve got no idea who that is,” Chad said, shaking his head but refusing to turn towards them.

“Really?” Ashlan said suddenly. “Didn’t you see her in the woods?”

“You are so blunt, lion lass,” Chad responded, and he finally turned around. He removed his square cap and the three girls gasped. Janus bit her lip with interest. The top of his head was missing along with a piece of his pink brain. “The part of my brain that remembered who held the pen has rotted.”

“Gah,” Mena growled. “This Ghost Writer has thought of everything.”

“Well, not everything, braces bird,” Chad said, placing the cap back on his head with an artful smile. “Apparently, being dead comes with some quirks, like…”

The teaser ripped his arm right off his body and watched as it paraded around on two fingers.

“I can walk my hand over to the key,” Chad Abber said in his suave accent. “It’s a jolly good trick, that one is. Only one problem…”

The fingers walked all the way to the keys, which hung from a ring at the far end of the prison. “They can’t quite reach.”

Ashlan rolled her eyes, inciting Chad from the opposite cell. “I thought you said we should bet on those odds.”

“Aye,” the zombie nodded. “It’s ruddy luck for a zombie bloke in a restless situa-tion like this. But…I realized something else. Bone lass probably has the same ability as myself.”

“Do I ever,” Janus sang in her flighty voice as she merrily ripped her own arm off, and let it parade itself over to Chad Abber’s hand. It grasped Chad’s and lightly tossed it at the keys, which Chad’s hand snatched and balanced them on its wrist. “Excellent,” Mena cheered, clapping her hands. “You two should totally enter into a one-handed zombie hand race.”

“I don’t plan on making this an occupation,” Chad said hanging his head in regret. “I’ve somehow gotta get my body back to the way it was. The princess can’t see me like this.”

“I assume being fictionally dead isn’t the same as being regular dead,” Janus responded sweetly, trying to ease Abber’s pain. “But really, it’s a real lovely feeling being postmortem.”

“I can barely feel anything at all,” Abber said, ignoring Janus and unlocking his cell. He approached the three girls and freed them too. “Though I suppose I owe it to you, birds. If it weren’t for you, I’d have no more meat on these bones.”

“No problemo,” Mena nodded, “We’re going to give everyone re-happy endings. Starting with you.”

Chad Abber tipped his hat to Mena and the girls, (Ashlan and Mena cringed, but Janus swooned again.) “Cheers,” he said, “Now how about we get outta here. Fortunately, the princess had a secret passage down here for our romantic liaisons. She’d sneak out of the palace and meet me in the country graveyard.”

Mena and her friends tried not to laugh at the morbid irony of their meeting place. Instead, they followed Chad to the wall at the far end of the prison to a dungeon. Composed of moldy black bricks, the wall resembled the kind that was found in any dirty dungeon, but when Chad uttered the phrase, “Chad X Plumerella Forever,” the bricks spread apart, revealing a cavernous tunnel.

“Nice password,” Ashlan said, a smirk on her face.

Janus was silent, but all three heeded Abber’s call to escape.

As they speed walked with great intensity out of the tunnel, Mena asked the most vital question. “Chad, why did the king forbid you to be with Plumerella? You seem very noble.”

“Ah, but not noble enough, fair lass,” Chad responded, limping along with his half-decomposed body. “For I was born without magic ink in my veins. To him, I’m merely the salt of the realm, even if my heart once burned with truer passion than he could ever possess.”

“That’s completely unfair,” Mena responded. Ashlan put her arm on Mena. “The richest and most powerful decide what’s best for the land. I should know, my father is one of those people.”

Janus glared at her, but Ashlan added, “He’s much fairer than this realm. That’s for sure.

Reaching the end of the tunnel, grey sunlight filtered down a ladder. “We’re here,” Chad said. “The country graveyard.”

He climbed up the ladder and pushed aside a tombstone that conveniently disguised the passageway. All three girls followed him with great haste. Mena was the first of the three to reach the light. Much to her horror, the graveyard was hardly an innocent resting place for dead people to repose. Alongside the graves, black pools of what seemed to be ink, steamed in a swampy soup. Helping Janus and Ashlan to their feet, Ashlan’s animal triangular snout snorted. “What is that awful stench?”

A soft, low moaning filled the air. “Ooh,” Janus said, dancing in place. “And what is that lovely sound? Sounds like my house.”

A black goopy hand extended out of a nearby pool of ink. “This is the ink where everyone’s wishes go to die,” Chad Abber remarked. “It’s gotten so much worse since I left.”

A dripping zombie-like head moaned from the ink. “Give me…loooooovvvveee…”

Another head followed. “Give me touuuuucchhhh….”

One by one, slowly lumbering bodies emerged. Everyone was vaguely humanoid, but barely. They moaned for comfort and happiness, but none of them could receive it. “They’re so sad,” Ashlan whined in discomfort. They picked up their feet and started to run. “I hope my deepest wishes don’t end up like this.”

“You don’t have magic brushes to make them go wrong,” Chad Abber said, surprisingly spry on his feet for a zombie. “They were this world’s biggest mistake.”

Gravestones and tombs passed them left and right as they ran, but the enormous puddles of ink seemed to expand faster than they could run, seemingly converging in a steaming pile of misery. Bigger and bigger it grew, until a gigantic hand slowly rose out of the pool. Another hand accompanied it; both were the size of a five rectangular tomb houses. Slowly, a gargantuan pointed head with ember like eyes erupted out with a roar. The hands pushed harder on the ground until a tremendous throbbing body burst from the goop. Standing the height of three castle spires, the beast roared. All around them, they could hear the crying and prayers for wishes that would never come true.

“How in Dula are we going to beat this thing?” Ashlan said, white sweat trickling down her bushy lion mane.

Mena looked up at the arch like legs of the giant beast. “There’s a saying my auntie had: When a problem is too big to face head-on…RUN UNDER ITS LEGS SCREAMING.”

Without further meditation, all three girls and Chad did just that. They screamed as loud as they could as the beast plunged its column like arms at them. As they ran beneath the creature’s pelvis, black drips, moans and screaming echoed all around them. Mena had never felt this uncomfortable since she heard the disembodied sobbing that accompanied Anguish the Blood Siren. The creature’s hand reached below it, but right when it was about to snatch them, it had extended its goopy limbs all the way and stopped. Mena and her allies escaped just in time, but they weren’t home free yet. The beast slowly swiveled its pelvis and began stomping across the graveyard, smashing graves left and right.

“Geez,” Janus remarked wryly. “We better get ahead, or else we’ll get a-headstone…”

“Really dead eyes?” Ashlan snarled. “More puns? Couldn’t wait til we got out of here?”

Janus smiled back. “Humor is the key to survival in the darkest times.”

Luckily for the girls and Chad, the beast lumbered slowly with its increased girth. They kept running, further and further until they reached the top of a hill at the edge of the graveyard and slipped down it. Everyone screamed, tumbling to the bottom where they found themselves lying flat on a cobblestone road. Mena and Ashlan panted heavily, though Janus and Chad didn’t need to, having no breath at all. “That was a close one,” Mena said, her eyes gazing towards the black-and-white sky. “I can already tell this is a dangerous world.”

“It wasn’t always like this,” Chad responded. “Curse that Ghost Writer and…”

A slightly raspy but girlish voice rose in the air. “Chad? Chad?” the voice called from down the road. The pitter patter of footsteps approached them, and they were greeted by a teenage girl wearing a ragged shirt, and short pants. Her feet were bare and dirty, and it looked to Mena like she didn’t have much in the way of proper clothes to dress in. Her face was dotted with freckles, her dark hair was tied back in braids, and she had a gap in her teeth. She clutched a frying pan and gasped when she saw the zombiefied man.

Chad rose to his feet to greet her, but she quickly screamed. “Aieeeeee, brother Chad’s become one of them wish zombies.”

“No wait, Jill,” Chad said, trying to calm down his sister. “I’m not dead yet…”

The girl leveled her frying pan. “Oh, but you will be,” and she whacked him upside the head.

With hardly a sound, Chad Abber was knocked out cold. Ashlan observed the scene very crucially. “Next time we have to run through a zombie filled graveyard, remind me to pick up some kitchen utensils. They’re super effective against the living dead.”