The February Featured Story is by Ashby McGowan

Please feel free to email Ashby at:

AMcGowan@cleveden-sec.glasgow.sch.uk

GHOST STORY
by (Mr.) Ashby McGowan

I woke during the middle of the night. Checked the clock: 3AM.

As usual, I felt as if someone was in my room. My hairs all stood on end. But adults still don’t check under their bed for monsters. Do they? The breathing that I heard, I was sure it was mine. Sure it was mine. I slowed my breathing to check that the sounds of breathing came at the same time as the rise and fall of my chest.

There was a smell in my nose of cheap perfume. The kind that a young girl would use. Sickly sweet lavender. It made me recall some unpleasant memories from the distant past. From another time. Another place.

At the edge of my consciousness, I thought I could hear voices. Two voices whispering to each other. The only other noises were the ticking of my clock, and my irregular breathing.

Whenever I do wake up, it always takes me a few moments to be totally aware that I am awake, and not still dreaming. To me, the border between dreamland and “normal” existence is indistinct and variable.

I quickly dressed and checked, again, that the front door was locked. It was. I checked one more time, just to be safe.

Noises came from every floorboard and even from the ceiling.

The street outside my flat was empty, except for a mongrel dog. It wandered about from street light to street light, as if checking that they were all working. The dog stared up into each light. He seemed like some creature from my dreams, unreal.

The yellow glow from the streetlights was just as strange and unreal. I thought of phoning my ex-boyfriend, just to hear a voice that was real and alive. But no. He had fallen in love with me. And that is the time to say, “Bye.”

I said to myself, “Never go back in life. What is in the past can never trouble you.”

Looking out from behind my curtains, I looked at other houses in the street. I was checking to see if anyone else was awake; to see if anyone was staring at me from behind their curtains, perhaps watching my flat through binoculars or a telescope. You sure do get some strange people in this world. I wondered whether some burglar was watching the house. I couldn’t see anyone.

Standing totally still in the room, I listened to every noise. Ticking, breathing, creaking, and that strange sound of blood rushing about that you get when its so, so quiet. I must have stood there listening for a full ten minutes. Then I began to panic and started to walk around the room, trying to relax, trying to gain control over my body and my thoughts.

After pacing the cold floor for some time, I took up a discarded book and started to read.

“Jenny took up a book and started to read. Her mind still raced with thoughts filled with fear. Tainted with terror. She checked the words again. Where the words in the book or in her brain?”

Throwing the book to the floor, I pinched myself. Yes, I was awake. The book’s spine showed its title, Jenny and her Nightmare Night.

It was a book about me. About my fears.

At first this scared me. Then I thought, Perhaps here I can find out the reason why I can’t sleep at night. Why my dreams always turn into hideous, terrifying nightmares.

I would be in the middle of having this nice, hazy dream about being on a beach with some guy, and then the same thing would happen: a page from a book or a newspaper would blow into my face. The words would be full of the most horrible threats. When I went to crumple up the bit of paper, the words would turn to blood and trickle out from between my fingers. It was always the same ending to my nightmare.

With great care, I picked up the book and opened a page at random.

“Naughty nightmares always scare poor Jenny. Does she still remember Angie and those nights together long, long ago?”

Losing my temper, I fired the book into a corner of the room.

Angie Young had been a friend at school. We had often stayed at each other’s house. We told each other ghost stories. Sometimes Angie would wake me in the night to tell me that she had seen a ghost. Her parent’s house was said to have been haunted. I used to tell her that I had never seen a ghost. But I had.

Eventually Angie and I parted company. She accused me of bullying her. She was one of those ultra-sensitive people who don’t take kindly to the tiniest bit of criticism.

I remembered that she wrote short stories. Bad ones. She always wanted to be published, but she had no chance. I told her she was wasting her time. Friends tell friends these things. They don’t mean to hurt them.

Then I remembered that recently there had been something in the news about a promising young writer that had killed herself. Hung herself from an oak tree. But her name had been Angie Clark.

Had someone been stupid enough to marry the ugly little thing? That cheered me up. The thought of Ugly Angie writing ill-structured short stories for her equally ugly husband was a laugh. I giggled to myself in the room.

Crash!

Something had fallen in the kitchen. I ran into the room, and there was the book that I had thrown away in the bedroom, lying on the kitchen floor. I picked it up and started to read, “Revenge, when rightful, will come at last. Our heroine will soon see the error of her ways. Never seen a ghost, huh? You lying, skinny bitch!”

The book was hard to tear. But with the help of some dressmaking scissors, I cut it into shreds and pushed the pieces down into the litter bin.

I walked back into the bedroom and collapsed onto my bed. I tried to remember the times we had spent together all those years ago.

When Angie and I had quarreled, it was always me who won. She was too weak and too much of a failure to ever win at anything. I don’t even know why I ever kept her as a friend. Well, more a pal than a friend. She did get lots of pocket money though. Sometimes I needed money and would take some. Not much, just enough. Enough to buy my real friends some cigarettes.  Perhaps I should have given her the money back, but she had well-off parents and my parents were working class and poor.

Looking in the bedroom mirror, I could see that I was still attractive, still desirable. I had never liked going anywhere public with Angie. Boys would smile at me, then laugh at her.

Angie had said that the ghost she had seen was her only true friend and that one day she would be with the ghost forever.

One night, when we were staying at her parent’s old cottage, the ghost came and spoke to me. It told me to leave Angie alone.

“Leave that sweet girl alone, or you will suffer as she has suffered,” it had whispered to me. But my dad had said to me that there is no such thing as ghosts. And Angie had never suffered. She had some kind of illness that made her cry sometimes. Yet she was always complaining—things like “Don’t hit me Jenny,” and “Please give me my Mum’s picture back.”

She was always whining. I then thought that, if she is dead, then I am glad she’s dead! Let her ghost come back and haunt me if that’s what she wants to do. She and the other ghost don’t scare me.

Writing started to appear on the mirror. It said, “Jenny has the shakes. I will come and terrify you to death. You creap.”

Angie had obviously written it. She never could spell. Pretty sad considering she thought she was a writer.

In the middle of the room, a patch of strange white stuff appeared, dripping down from the ceiling. A bit like cotton wool. It started to form into two shapes. Two human shapes. It was Ugly Angie and her friend.

Strange to say, I didn’t feel that scared. She didn’t scare me when she was alive. What could she do to me now? I wondered.

“I have come here from Hell to get you back for all the bad things that you did to me. My only friend when I was alive was George, the ghost. Now that I am a ghost too, I will join him in scaring the life out of you,” she shrieked at me.

Her voice was more forceful than it had been in life, but still a bit whining. She talked through her nose.

I shouted into her face, “What are you going to do Angie? I ain’t a scared of you. You come here from Hell with your pet ghost and try to keep me off my sleep when I have to get up for work in two hours. You inconsiderate little sod. I am sorry that I stole some of your money. But you sure are just as ugly as you ever were.”

The other ghost spoke quietly, “Be afraid, Jenny. We have come to seek vengeance. Be very afraid, Jenny.”

“Listen, George,” I said, “You are a well-spoken sort of a ghost and you seem like a good friend to Angie. You do not scare me one little bit, though. I would be more scared of you if you hadn’t have woken me up each night, at the cottage, to chat me up. Telling me how pretty I was. I never told Angie because I didn’t want to get her more upset than she was. Didn’t want yet more tears out of her.”

Angie turned in horror to face her partner ghost, “George, you told me that I was the only one. That we were meant to be together. You were so jealous, that you even stopped coming to see me when I got married. You never said that you fancied my best pal. I trusted you. I told you everything.”

I had to tell Angie, “Yes, and then he passed on all the stories to me. The fantasies of Ugly Angie sure bored me silly. But it kept your little friend amused. He sure was totally mad on me though. Told me he loved me and that he would have married me if he had been alive.”

“You said that to me, George,” Angie whined at him. “You said you loved me!” She sobbed out the words and George started to fade away. Soon, he was nothing more than a patch of fog and a bad smell.

Through her tears, she asked me, “Why did you hate me so? Why did you hurt me so? All I ever wanted to do was write short stories. And all you ever wanted to do, was hurt me.”

“You were my friend,” I told her. “Yet all you ever did was write stories for hour after hour. Spending half the day with your nose stuck in a dictionary checking for spelling mistakes, which incidentally, you always made. You didn’t want to get a boyfriend. You didn’t want to shoplift. You didn’t want to do anything fun. Yet, I could have forgiven you everything, if you hadn’t been so ugly. I just can’t stand ugly people. Never have. Never will. Perhaps its time for you to go back to wherever you came from. It will soon be dawn and you might turn into a frog or something else even uglier than what you are. If that is possible.”

“One of these days I will come back and haunt you good,” she said and started to fade away.

“Piss off. Or I’ll come to down to Hell and haunt you. Ugly little spoiled rich kid,” I shouted at the rapidly dissolving green mist.

And so, I have decided to write down all that has happened tonight. Unlike Ugly Angie and her ghost friend, I can write. And I have a spellchecker.

I have decided to send in this story to get it published on the Web. That will be the final insult for Angie. I hope she reads this in Hell.

Mr. Ashby McGowan started out by writing factual articles about Sir William Wallace. It would take him three years to research and write one article.

He went on to write and perform poetry. At the moment, he is trying to get a theatre to show his play about Selchies.

Ashby loves writing short stories and writes a lot in the genres of fantasy and horror. He enjoys writing “odd” things because he has an “odd” mind. He is a Buddhist and a vegan.