{"id":12697,"date":"2011-11-12T07:23:18","date_gmt":"2011-11-12T11:23:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=12697"},"modified":"2011-11-09T09:11:14","modified_gmt":"2011-11-09T13:11:14","slug":"unspooky-saturday-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/?p=12697","title":{"rendered":"Unspooky Saturday"},"content":{"rendered":"

The second entry in this month’s “Cobwebs channels Myths RETOLD<\/a>” um…event…is a legend from Arabia. You may already be familiar with this one, since it seems to pop up a lot in books about vampires.<\/p>\n

—————<\/p>\n

so there’s this rich merchant who has a son named Abul-Hassan
\nand since he’s rolling in shekels he wants Abul-Hassan to continue the trend of upward mobility and marry the daughter of another rich merchant
\nbut Abul-Hassan sees her portrait and she is so negatively boneriffic that he suddenly decides money can’t buy happiness after all
\nso he keeps putting off the marriage
\nthen one day he rolls in and tells his dad that he’s fallen in love with some chick named Nadilla
\nwho is supremely hot
\nbut also supremely poor on account of being the daughter of a hermit
\nI thought hermits lived alone and would thus tend to not wind up with children
\nbut this is apparently not the case so update your mental encyclopedia accordingly<\/p>\n

the merchant tries to talk Abul-Hassan
\nwhich is fun to say by the way Abul-Hassan Abul-Hassan Abul-Hassan
\nout of marrying the hot poor chick
\nbut he eventually gives in and winds up with the best I-told-you-so in history
\nbut we’re getting to that<\/p>\n

so Abul-Hassan and Nadilla get married and move into their own little house
\nand the story says they live happily for a while which I guess means they have a normal newlywed relationship
\nwhich definitely makes the story ending all the creepier
\nbut we’re getting to that<\/p>\n

so Abul-Hassan thinks his hot new wife is great except for one or two little quirks
\nlike she never eats anything ever
\nand also she gets out of bed every night as soon as he goes to sleep and doesn’t come back until right before dawn
\nand it is not explained how he knows she does this if he’s asleep but I’m guessing webcam
\nand after several months of never seeing her eat or sleep he decides that maybe she’s not just a coked-up supermodel and he should investigate further<\/p>\n

so one night he just pretends to fall asleep
\nwhich seems to be a very common way to fool monsters
\nso the successful fiend will add “make sure they’re really asleep” to their checklist
\nand when Nadilla gets out of bed he tiptoes after her
\nwhich means the successful fiend should probably add “look behind you occasionally” to the checklist too<\/p>\n

so he follows her up the road to a cemetery
\nprotip: if you’re sneaking after somebody in the dead of night and they head for a cemetery
\nturn around and go get reinforcements because nothing good is going to happen<\/p>\n

so Nadilla goes into a tomb that’s conveniently standing there with its door open
\nand Abul-Hassan sneaks up and peeks in the door
\nbecause “post a lookout” isn’t on the checklist
\nand sees Nadilla with what the story calls a party of ghouls
\nwhich sounds like a very festive case of decomposition
\nand everybody is chowing down on the flesh of corpses
\nwhich have been dug up for the occasion
\nand I guess the story felt the need to clarify that last part
\njust in case anyone was assuming that there was some kind of rotting-corpse takeout menu available<\/p>\n

instead of throwing up on his shoes Abul-Hassan turns around and sneaks back home
\nresolving to maybe not use tongue the next time he kisses Nadilla
\nand somehow manages to act natural the next day until dinnertime
\nbut when Nadilla refuses to eat supper he yells at her about her dietary habits vis-\u00e0-vis eating the flesh of decomposing corpses
\nand she leaves in a huff and goes to bed<\/p>\n

at which point Abul-Hassan demonstrates that he has the self-preservation instincts of a depressed lemming
\nby going to bed as usual right next to a woman he has recently witnessed chorfing down human flesh like it was canned chili
\nso no one in the audience will be surprised when she leaps up at midnight
\nit’s always at midnight
\nif I were a ghoul I would attack people in the early afternoon
\njust to fuck with them
\nbut anyway
\nshe leaps up at midnight and bites his neck
\nand somehow he manages to fight her off and kill her
\nand she is buried the next day because “I had to kill her because she was totally a ghoul” is enough of a defense for the local authorities<\/p>\n

and then her dad illustrates that he is the shittiest father-in-law of all time by mentioning that yeah, she was sort of dead when Abul-Hassan married her in the first place
\nbecause she had been killed by her first husband for “profligacy”
\nwhich the dictionary defines as both “shameless dissoluteness” and “reckless extravagance”
\nso I guess that means she was a money-wasting hobag
\nwhich is a valid reason to murder your wife in 15th-Century Arabia
\nbut the death did not take
\nand she came back as a ghoul
\noops<\/p>\n

so despite knowing that she already returned from the grave once
\nAbul-Hassan is surprised for some reason when Nadilla shows back up three days later
\nat midnight
\nAGAIN
\nsuch a clich\u00e9
\nand tries to suck his blood
\nbut he runs away
\nand the next morning he opens her tomb
\nand finds her body looking very lifelike
\nwell duh
\nand throws it on a fire<\/p>\n

which I have a small problem with
\nbecause when she was dead the first time
\nshe was totes walking around during the day
\nbut now at a moment convenient to the plot she stays dead during banking hours
\nbut anyway the body is burned to ashes
\nand Abul-Hassan throws the ashes into the river
\nand makes a mental note to carefully interview the fathers of any potential future wives and specifically ask whether they’re maybe dead already<\/p>\n

the moral of this story is that those who marry for money sell their liberty but those who marry for love may wind up living with a flesh-eating corpse<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The second entry in this month’s “Cobwebs channels Myths RETOLD” um…event…is a legend from Arabia. You may already be familiar with this one, since it seems to pop up a lot in books about vampires. ————— so there’s this rich merchant who has a son named Abul-Hassan and since he’s rolling in shekels he wants […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12697","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-funny-peculiar"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12697","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12697"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12697\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12846,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12697\/revisions\/12846"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.shadowmanor.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}