Wankybod
In the house across the road from my childhood home lived a man who - in retrospect - either had mental health problems of some sort, or was an acid casualty, or was an acid casualty with quite unrelated mental health problems. Whichever way you cut the pie, he was odd. My eleven-year-old self and friends assigned the nickname "wankybod" to him. Not that we would have told him that to his face. We were too scared of him for that.

After all, he claimed to be a witch - he had used to place small ads in the local paper advertising lessons in witchcraft and spell-casting. And that was near as damnit as a confession that he was an out-and-out child-sacrificing devil-worshipper.

The circumstantial evidence was there, too. For one thing, he very rarely went outside - only for long enough to get his shopping: a clear sign that daylight was a threat to him, as it would be to anyone who had sold his soul to Satan. His house was, therefore, immensely dilapidated. (Google StreetView suggests that it looked very similar in 2009, which suggests that he was still living - or undeading - there then.) Neither did he make any use of electric light: there was never any illumination. Another tick in the "servant of Beelzebub" column. Very occasionally, you could see him through the net curtains dancing around his front room; but I assumed that he mostly did that in the back room. Noone ever saw him drinking human blood from a goat-skull, but the fact that noone saw it didn't mean that he didn't actually do it.

My parents told me that he used to have a wife and child, too: he'd called his daughter Andromeda, or Cassiopeia, or something like that; but they'd legged it years ago, never to be seen again.

Well: they might have legged it. They might also have been dispatched on the altar that he probably had in his kitchen. After all: if you're almost certainly using a goat-skull a teacup, you need to get your blood from somewhere...
( Enzyme is powered by sunlight, Fri 28 Sep 2012, 10:21, Reply)