Oriane des Goules

Oriane never wanted to eat corpses. For much of her life, she wanted to be a beautician.

Things have a way of going off track, and they sure did for Oriane. It wasn’t a steady decline. It wasn’t protracted.

It happened very quickly, but the trigger event and the way her life culminated were sure to leave a lasting impression on the surrounding cities and towns despite the speed at which they unfolded.

Oriane des Goules isn’t the most grammatically correct nickname, but it resonates and carries exactly the type of mythic quality that gives these types of events legs.

She was born in France, and at the time of her birth, she was the only daughter and the youngest of three. After her parents moved to just outside of Ithaca, New York, her mother gave birth to two more girls in rapid succession. Oriane’s two younger sisters were not twins in the traditional sense, but they were born in the same year.

These births robbed Oriane of two of her most prized possessions; she was no longer the youngest child, and no longer the only daughter. This might have been a traumatic event, but it was filed away in those categories internally marked as formative but unavoidable.

Adapting to her new status as middle child was difficult.

She was clever enough to devise several schemes to draw the fleeting attention of her parents. The two most effective schemes were as follows.

Oriane made every effort possible to be an adventurous eater. She would go out of her way to order the strangest thing on the menu, and her tastes would range from geoduck and jellyfish to olive loaf and spam. Essentially, anything that someone else would think of as “gross” became Oriane’s favourite food.

Her parents loved this about her; they would foster it, and when entertaining, they would bring her out almost as a circus geek. They would say “elle mangera n’importe quoi!”(she will eat anything) Then they would have her eat whatever rare, eccentric delicacy they purchased to impress their friends at the party. Her younger sisters, on the other hand, were very picky eaters, so this was more fuel for the fire.

The other thing she would do is create elaborate hair and make-up displays on herself and her sisters. She started at a young age and was fascinated by all sorts of techniques and styles that had gone out of vogue centuries or millennia ago.

She would put her sisters in pin curls or draw on thick Egyptian or Roman brows. Oriane herself preferred a thinner 1920s style, and until her death, she modelled her brow after Clara Bow’s.

Whenever she completed the make-up for her two younger sisters, she would parade them around the house in a faux fashion show; sometimes her father would put on Claudine Longet’s “Hello, Hello” records and clap along as the children performed. When Oriane did this, her parents would call her le directeur and lavish her with praise. The rest of the time, outside of eating weird things and dressing up, her parents didn’t call her anything, and by the time Oriane was 18, she could barely garner a look from her parents. A teenager eating strange things and dressing up in funny clothes isn’t all that unique.

Oriane was more interested in the history of beauty than in any modern use. Additionally, one cannot make a living off —history — for the most part. She decided to be practical and to become a beautician.

By the time she was in her early twenties, she had almost finished cosmetology school.

In New York State, one needed to complete a series of courses in bacteriology and anatomy to obtain a license. Oriane developed a curious interest in these subjects following her studies.

For the most part, her interest remained in archaic glamour and the history of make-up and hair.

She had grown into quite a traditional, glamorous eccentric. She wore her dark hair in a loose bouffant with soft curls around her temples, and that, combined with her thin, Clara Bow-like eyebrows, stark eyeshadow, and bold lipstick colours, created quite a presence.

Oriane was never interested in fashion, so she almost always wore a simple black boiler suit. It was practical and functioned serving both as everyday clothes and work wear. Her shoes were also chosen for practicality, usually a dark, comfortable sneaker.

Despite her utilitarian clothing, before going out, she would spend hours preparing her hair and make-up, until just so. She developed the unusual affectation of ending each prep session by staring directly in her own eyes and saying, “I mistake myself.” She didn’t know what she meant by it or where it came from, but it was her ritual.

By this point, Oriane had suffered several romantic entanglements. The eccentric appearance she presented would draw people in, but once they got to know her, what was thought to be an artistic flourish or performance was discovered to be a genuinely odd personality.

She was somewhere between aloof and obsessive, depending on the day, and although not the cliché French ennui, there was an emotional and social detachment. Ultimately, she would be abandoned for the next thing that fluttered by with a pretty mosaic emblazoned on its wings. After her last break-up or ghosting, Oriane decided to do a particular thing —a thing — she never would have normally done, and this decision ended up leading to a quite occult and macabre demise.

She was in the final semester of beauty school, and one of the options the students had for practicing was to help at the local funeral parlour. The opportunity was presented as a low-risk transition from the mannequin heads and volunteers. The corpses were thought to be a more challenging client.

Normally, Oriane would have had no interest in something like this, not so much out of fear of death, but more out of a sense of absurdity about the whole thing.

Her decision to sign up was made out of spite for being spurned again and a desire to expedite her career trajectory.

It was the first time she was left alone with a corpse that she tried her first nibble. She was doing a quick cut around a man’s sideburns, and the scissors slipped. They were an expensive pair and very sharp, so the cut went clean through. This man’s lobe fell into the coffin, and without thinking about it, Oriane scooped it up and ate it.

She chewed and savoured the experience.

She was transported back to the days of geoduck and spam. The ghoulish compulsion gripped her immediately.

Within four days, she would claw into a fresh grave nightly for food. She had two favourite parts of the corpse.

First was the spleen. Oriane loved how acrid and foul it tasted. It was one of the most exciting experiences of her life when she tried it for the first time. She believed she had the most exotic and refined palate of all the ghouls around the world.

Her second favourite part was the brain, and although it took a lot of effort to open those skulls, she used to love the looks on waiters’ faces when she would order cervelle de veau as a child. Eating a dead human brain was sure to elicit a stronger reaction if ever witnessed.

Within ten days of her first taste, by all metrics, she was a full-fledged ghoul.

She kept up her hair and make-up routine, but her canine fangs had grown very long. Her nails were now hardened into fine points by rocks and dirt. Her skin also took on a deep grey-blue hue, and her irises had narrowed or shrunk excessively. This shrinking gave the whites of her eyes far too much room within her now sunken sockets.

The last night of her life, she perfected her make-up and bouffant, put on her sneakers and boilersuit, and went to a nearby graveyard for dinner.

The caretaker there saw what was happening and shot at the creature. He wasn’t trying to kill anything but acted out of fear and wasn’t sure what he was seeing. Oriane died in that graveyard. Her parents didn’t confirm her identity because they couldn’t be convinced this ghoul was their daughter.

Oriane was treated as a Jane Doe and cremated later that year.

The cause of death was reported as a gunshot wound.

The caretaker knew better; he was the only one who did, and he never said anything about it.

His shot had only wounded the creature.

It squirmed and spawled on the ground, shrieking “ I MISTAKE MYSELF! I MISTAKE MYSELF!” repeatedly.

Oriane was also ravenously biting and gnawing off her own fingers as she writhed.

She would chew, swallow, and screech her ritual mantra.

The caretaker tried to grab her hand and stop her from further eating herself, but when he did, Oriane clamped down on her own tongue with her newly razor-sharp teeth.

She bit her tongue clean off and was chewing it as she gurgled.

Oriane drowned on her own blood.