Ghoul Beach Party

So I went back to the U of O, because it was time for school to start again. Oddly, the university was on the beach. A big, warm, sunny beach. Not the kind of beach one finds in Oregon, with tide pools, sharp rocks and freezing cold water, but the kind they have in the movies, bright yellow with blue water and near-nudity everywhere.

Students were all over the beach, having clambakes and surfing and doing all kinds of teenage beach party stuff. There was one part of the beach with huge, walk-in sandcastles and interconnected sand tunnels. I went over there to investigate. I like tunnels and sand sculpture.

Nobody was in the castles, though. They were thick walled and dark inside, with a foreboding dampness. The tunnels came up haphazardly, some in the middle of a sand room, some outside the castles, some at odd angles or partway under a wall. There was a breeze coming from the nearest tunnel to me.

Like a horror-movie moron, I was about to go down the tunnel. Suddenly, someone called my name. It was my buddy Sean, who appeared to be a woman. This did not bother me unduly, though. He was a perky co-ed, in the best sense of the term. Strawberry blonde with freckles, wearing a T-shirt over a bathing suit, he warned me that the tunnels "were not made by Man."

"Wow, that's mysterious," I said, "so what built the tunnels?"

Sean didn't know, so I decided to prepare and come back.

I returned with flashlights and flares, on the assumption that beings evil and otherworldly are generally bothered by fire. I was still in just bathing attire, though: sandals, baggy pants, T-shirt and big floppy straw hat. Time to go fight Evil! Some guys on the beach told me they had seen werewolves in the tunnels, and that a werewolf had taken their beer once.

I went into the tunnel system fearing the worst. Man, I did NOT want to deal with werewolves. They're huge and strong and angry critters in most mythologies. I hadn't heard of any that dug tunnels, though. The tunnel got danker and smelled like rotten fish. Ah, the ocean.

As I crept along the tunnel with only one dim flashlight, I heard noises. Some footsteps and murmuring, nothing scary. No growls or barks. The tunnel sloped down into actual dirt, not just sand. The noise grew louder and I found myself in a large reinforced chamber full of humanoids.

Big, furry humanoids with muzzles. They all looked at me.

I looked at them. Their faces looked like distorted human faces, with the features exaggerated and somehow more human than human. The jarring part was that they had noses like cats and dogs, wild animal eyes, and sharp, predatory teeth. They were large, but scrawny. Their fur was ratty and patchy. Their build wasn't a bigger, stronger human with a wolf head, like the werewolves I'd been expecting: they were more ape- and mutt-like. They smelled like wet fur and sweat, and Old Spice. The fishy odor of the sea was not present.

Lovecraftian ghouls! That explained the tunneling!

Even though there were several dozen ghouls, I didn't feel threatened. I started talking to them.

"Hey, guys. You're scaring everyone on the surface. Some of the kids thought you were werewolves."

The chamber filled with a hideous snickering. One of the ghouls lit a few torches on the wall, and I could see a lot better. The ghouls looked like werewolves in a Charles Atlas "before" picture. I could also see what they had been doing.

Some of the ghouls were playing a 3-d fighting video game. The rest were watching it, reading books and magazines or playing board games. It was like the Rec Room of the Damned. Or rather, the Darned.

They stopped watching me, and I mingled. The ghouls did indeed appear to have their own language of glibbering and meeping, but they all seemed to speak English that was grammatically acceptable, if a little slurred or tending towards a grunt. They seemed to prefer to speak English, although that might have just been a courtesy towards me.

The ghouls seemed to be pretty nice guys. Some of them had jobs, and a surprising number had U of O ID cards. I recognized a couple from classes. It didn't seem odd that I didn't originally recognize them as being ghouls. Some were naked, but most had some kind of clothing on. It was more as decoration or because they felt more comfortable in clothes. A lot just had a band or movie T-shirt on.

As I was wandering about in the cave, I was having a pretty good time. I played games with the ghouls. I remember playing Monopoly, which was nice, because usually nobody plays Monopoly with me. The atmosphere was a little muggy, and the smell of the ghouls, though not unpleasant, was pervasive.

I started to realize that I liked the ghouls a lot more than I did most people. I seemed to have several things in common with each one, and we found talking easy. It was nice. We had long conversations about stupid stuff, obscure TV shows and novels. Ghouls like "Get a Life" and the works of Daniel Pinkwater.

When I first met the ghouls, I decided to tell people on the surface that the ghouls were harmless. After getting to know them, I decided to tell the people that the ghouls were as bad as werewolves. That way they could keep their privacy.

I said goodbye, and started back up towards the surface. I found my way back up easily, but the sunlight hurt my eyes. I stopped to collect myself in the sandcastle over the tunnel, and realized I'd become a ghoul as well. I felt fuzzy and my joints worked differently. I collected myself and just thought "human" for a few breaths. Then I walked out.

I was still a ghoul, but nobody noticed. Everyone treated me the same as before. I did notice that some of the people on the beach were ghouls, too. I guess it was in the way we carried ourselves or just a decision not to show true nature. Either way, I planned to go back down.