FFDC Goblins In the Steeple
by Mike Mayak
(October 4, 2026)
We were barreling down the back roads, dirt flying from the wheels, me trying to navigate sharp turns without us going into a ditch.
On the seat beside me, Kent kept looking behind us.
“I think we lost them,” he said. He’d said that before, at least twice on this road.
“I’ll believe it when I see it,” I said, gripping the wheel tighter. My eyes were starting to smart from staring at the road.
I was able to glance down for an instant between us. It was still there.
Kent had called me about a week earlier and I had met him downtown at a knicknack shop next to the pizza place in a building so old Bat Masterson could have been in it.
Wrapped in a clear plastic bag, displayed in a locked glass case was a magazine. A comic book in remarkably good condition for being over seventy years old. Cover not faded, colors still vivid but the paper inside was getting brown. (Visible through a tear on the front, the only big flaw.) The cover displayed a large church steeple, looking down at an angle a man was running towards the church, losing money from his suit jacket. (The kind everyone seemed to wear back in 1953.) Pursuing close behind, and ignoring the money, was a ghoulish figure, claws, bald green head, fangs, pointed ears. And the standard suit and jacket everyone seemed to wear back in 1953.)
The blurb in garish letters read: “He found the perfect hiding place for his ill-gotten gains, but Others had been there first!”
At the top of the comic, just over the tip of the steeple was the comics title: GHOULISH TALES.
Issue number one,” Kent said. “And look at that price.”
The number on the masking tape attatched to the right edge of the plastic comic book bag was $10
I called the store owner over.
“Ten dollars?” I asked, pointing at the comic.
He shook his head. “Naaahhh. The clerk put the tape on the wrong place. It’s continued on the back. It reads $1000. First issue. And it’s autographed.”
Kent and I looked at each other. We went somewhere and planned. We waited for the right day…or night.
At about 0130 hours, just about a week later, I shorted out the alarm and Kent crawled into the store through the window he pried open. He smashed the glass case and grabbed Issue #1 of GHOULISH TALES.
Then we ran to our pickup truck, parked it a safe distance away and sat and read through the book.
Joe V. Jones, actually Jose Juarbe Vasquez, had been a writer and artist after WWII. He did a lot of work on comics and was known for drawing real places in his stories. And Kent had found an article in an obscure fanzine where Jones/Vasquez had said this story (about a fortune in hidden loot, stashed in an abandoned church) was based on something he had really heard in a place he had seen and he had drawn the real place.
But there were other people who had found out about this and were after the comic, and they were less ethical than we were and we’d just broken ito a store in the middle of the night.
“It’s a mad, mad world…” Kent said.
We read through the comic book. There were hints in the story; old highway signs and signs indicating what the next town was which all indicated the town being a couple of hours from the city.
“I knew I’d seen that place when I was little,” Kent said.
That was when the headlights blazed to life behind us. I would almost have been relieved if it had been the cops. It wasn’t.
Someone behind us shouted. There was a gunshot.
I gunned the engine, glad I’d kept the truck running. We roared off, the other car in hot pursuit.
Kent checked his phone, shouting directions as we drove. I hit the highway and turned off deliberately at the wrong exit and went the wrong way down one of the country roads, trying to lose the other car. Glat I’d spent my misspent youth riding down the Kansas back roads. After a few false alarms we thought we’d lost them.
I knew about where this town with the steeple was, and I do mean “was.” It was still dark when we pulled up to the old church. The town consisted of a small main street full of boarded up storefronts and the closed church. Everybody had relocated when the highway had bypassed them and the airlines killed the railroads. But there were still streetlights on.
We got out of the truck and I held up the comic book. Yup. Exact same steeple, same carvings on the side. Presumably with the money hidden under the basement floor.
“Hold it…” Kent said. “This is a holy place. We gotta deconsecrate it.”
“What?” I said.
“I wouldn’t feel right,” Kent said. “Here, just read this part aloud.”
He took the comic book and flipped to a page and pointed at a panel. Garishly drawn with pretty much blasphemous dialogue printed on a speech baloon.
I humored Kent. I held the comic up where I could read it from the streetlight and read the words aloud.
The church shuddered. Earthquake? I wondered.
“Don’t worry, it’s safe now.” Kent said.
We pulled open the front door which gave on its rusted hinges and walked in. I saw, in the dimness from the window where a board had fallen off, that the parishoners had pretty much taken everything. Pews were gone, nothing on the walls, no Bibles or crosses on the walls. Doubtless moved to their new building miles away.
“But the building was still holy,” Kent said. “Was…”
I was going to ask what he meant when I heard a scrabbling from above and a hatch opened in the ceiling opened and a dark, manlike figure scuttled out, crawling on the ceiling like a spider. He dropped on me and, well…
So now the two of us, with Kent as our servant, use the church as our base of operations. He (Kent’s and my Master) had been trapped in the dark steeple by the prayers of the faithful. Helpless for over eighty years. Powerless and held immobile by the power in the church.
Not now.
And he and I don’t sleep in the dark steeple, we sleep in the basement.
Coffins are much more comfortable.
—end—
AUTHOR’S NOTE: The draws for the October 2026 Flash Fiction Draw Challenge were: A Thriller, involving a Vintage Comic Book, set at a Church Steeple. This one plays like an old E.C. Comics story!
Here’s a link to the cool tune that inspired the title. (You’ve heard it in Porky Pig cartoons.) Milt Herth Trio – Goblins In The Steeple
