![]() ![]() For a moment Osborne finds himself speechless. Her eyes are wide and dark and shaped like some exotic nut. Her skin has a lustrous walnut sheen that goes perfectly with her jet hair. Osborne slides onto the stool next to her it is inexplicably unoccupied on this noisy, crowded night. Silky black hair flows over her shapely neck and shoulders with the grace of a waterfall, concealing what her scanty red summer dress would otherwise reveal. ![]() She’s sitting on a tall stool at the end of the bar, with one long, impossibly shapely leg extended toward the floor, like a dancer doing a pirouette. The girl catches Michael Osborne’s eye as he comes out of the men’s room. This story is not particularly gory, but I’ve always considered it one of the most creepy and unsettling things I ever wrote. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” appeared in “The Earwig Flesh Factory” from Eraserhead Press in the summer of 2000. “Underground with the Mouthless Girl” is about a rather nasty ghost from India called a churel, which is the restless spirit of a woman who died in childbirth. (This was before we could just hop on the Internets and pull information out of the worldwide series of tubes.) One of my favorite reference books was The Encyclopedia of Ghosts and Spirits, which listed literally hundreds of ghouls and beasties from around the world. Back when I wrote mostly horror, I accumulated quite a collection of reference books of ghosts, spirits, and various and sundry monsters. ![]()
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