Tag: ghost story

Unheeded

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There is power in the unheeded.

Agreements hidden in the introduction to a recipe, skipped over and agreed without perusal. You have agreed to take on the burden of that witch’s anxiety, shared between you and anyone else who makes her kale and zucchini bread. It had 3 reviews and was on the second page of the search results. Consider medication.

Minutes of your life are stolen between the last time you looked at your watch and when you look at your car’s clock. You’re certain it didn’t take you five minutes to put on your shoes and walk to the car. You are right. You have personally added two weeks to the lich’s lifespan.

The dreams you forget are the best ones. You probably didn’t deserve them, anyway. Gregory the Night Thief deserves them. You deserve restless sleep and dry mouth.

Actually, that might be the anxiety talking.

You should share that recipe.

Covers

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It was a simple but clever display, Marsha thought. A dozen sculptures, all hollow, made of cloth and glue. Each looked like it was fabric draped over a famous sculpture – the kind of works the museum could never dream of housing.

It was a popular display too. People enjoyed guessing which sculpture was meant to be underneath. Marsha’s favourite guess was from the middle aged man who insisted to his teenage daughter that the outline of Rodin’s ‘The Thinker’ was one of those Ronald McDonald sculptures they used to put on benches.

There was concern about damage from the public. Being hollow, the sculptures were fragile and very light. They were also unsteady: the artist gave them uneven bases, where the fabric did not quite reach the ground. This let the audience see that there was nothing underneath, but meant that some were a little wobbly.

Marsha was locking up that night. She collected her purse from the office, then walked through the gallery to the exit. She held her keys in her hand – Marsha’s manager already locked the doors an hour ago when she turned the main lights out. Marsha had stayed behind to count the till and close up the gift shop. In the dim light from the front door and the exit signs, walking through the room of draped figures felt like passing a ballroom of frozen ghosts.

Entering the room, Marsha felt something was wrong.

Halfway through, she realised what the problem was.

She continued at the same pace, trying not to let any outward signs show. She forced herself to hum, rather than hyperventilate or cry out.

Trembling, she unlocked the front door, looking at her reflection to see if anything approached her from behind. Once she was outside and the door was locked again, Marsha bent down and pretended to tie up a zippered boot.

There were now 13 sculptures – one more than there should be. And from her low vantage point, Marsha could see there was nothing under any of them. Someone must have snuck in their own work, she deduced.

Now that she knew it wasn’t an intruder hiding under a sheet, Marsha stood up and looked more carefully. She had to press her face against the glass, cupping her hands around her face to block out the streetlights.

Scanning the familiar shapes, Marsha frowned. It was obvious immediately, because it was so plain. Slightly shorter than the others, it was an outline of a person standing straight, with their arms at their sides. A less-skilled copycat, then. Not the artist adding a late contribution.

Marsha got her phone out of her purse to take a photo. Looking through the screen, she gasped. It looked closer.

Looking up from the phone, she was certain it was. The sculpture was now placed at the edge of the entry carpet.

Marsha took one step back. The figure took one step forward.

Marsha ran, and did not look back to see if it followed.

The next morning there were twelve sculptures again, and Marsha did not offer to lock up for the duration of the exhibition.

The Letter

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Luke tried to make every birthday the best day he could for Sasha. It wasn’t easy after her mother’s passing, but he did his best to keep distract her from who was missing. It never worked. Every birthday ended the same: with a letter.

One letter from Sarah for every year her daughter grew up without her. A handwritten expression of love, grief, pride and hopes. Who she imagined her daughter would be at this age, age-appropriate advice, and stories from the few years they’d had together.

It didn’t matter if they were surrounded by friends and relatives, out all day or even on a holiday, Sasha would get her letter. She used to ask Luke to read it to her when she was too young, and she still passed the sealed envelope to him as part of the tradition.

Every year, Luke forced his voice to stop shaking as he read. He tried not cry at details only Sarah knew about their lives together. He read it loudly in order to drown out Sarah’s narration in his mind, the letter perfectly matching her mannerisms.

Luke dreaded the day Sasha moved out and spent a birthday without him there to read it to her. He had an equal fear that she would sooner find out how her mother had died.

It had been sudden and unexpected. It had left Sarah no way to say goodbye to her husband and young child.

But every year, the letter appeared under Sasha’s pillow.

Two Sentence Stories (part 19)

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Capgras syndrome, Dr Miller told me, was responsible for my conviction that people in my life had been replaced by copies. He claimed he told me that last session, but that Dr Miller has a mole on his other hand.

The housewife held the door open as smiling man entered to demonstrate his new cleaning solution. He endorsed the product, having seen how easily it removed the bloodstains left by its original salesman so recently from his own carpet.

While watching TV, the couple were interrupted by a child’s voice requesting a glass of water be brought upstairs. Approaching the front door, the childless couple froze when the same voice asked them to come outside.

Rise

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Ghosts can only haunt the places where they had died. This was why he was so careful to never kill anyone in his own home.

He was clever and well-connected enough to not be concerned about being caught, but a haunting was something that terrified him. He refused to be at the mercy of something that he could not fight. Most sensible people did not believe in ghosts, so it was unlikely that he would be able to seek help if he were to find himself so assailed.

And, to be clear, he was a sensible person. He was simply also a person who knew ghosts existed. The first time he saw one he had spent too long at a scene after he had finished. His meditation was interrupted by a woman’s weeping. The very same sound that he had permanently ended hours earlier. For a moment he saw the woman, whole and standing and impossible, and he had fled. He had needed to hire a cleaner for that one, which was embarrassing, but he could not return.

In the following weeks, walking the streets of his city, he began to feel unsafe for the very first time. Faces in windows were staring directly at him. Some he recognised.

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