13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days

A Halloween Carol

Bob Marley was dead to begin with.

Mark sat back in his desk chair and smiled, content in the knowledge that he had begun to write another great ghost story. It was going to be about a stoner who gets visited by the ghost of Bob Marley and learns a valuable lesson along the way. He closed his eyes and visualized the next sentence.

Dead as a doornail

His computer flickered off before he could write down the sentence. The lights in his apartment dimmed. All the windows shook. A ghostly chill filled the air.

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark,” said an ominous voice.

He’d know that ghostly echo anywhere. It was his old writing partner, who had struck it rich years earlier and then died from becoming too greedy.

“Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark,” the voice said again.

He had no time for a visit from the spirit realm. He had self-imposed deadlines to keep. He threw on headphones to try to tune out the undead voice. He closed his eyes and focused on sentence structure.

A crackle in the music and then, “Maaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaark.” Almost as if it came from inside his head.

He opened his eyes. The light below the ceiling fan exploded in a hail of sparks. His apartment plunged into darkness. Moments later, his eyes adjusted and he could see every detail clearly thanks to the preternatural glow of the underworld. The ghost was in his apartment.

“Leave me be spirit,” Mark said. “I have no time for this.”

The spirit stood before him, all ethereal and glowing and white. In life, his eyes had been ringed by darkness, he was a writer and never slep, but in death they looked worse. More sinister. He had a peg leg. Chains dangled from his shoulders. A ghostly metal safe, probably filled with the money the spirit made off his last book advance, was shackled to the end of his chains and hampered his movements around the apartment. The spirit still wore the beret and tweed jacket that they buried him in, despite them being writerly affectations that he added after making it big.

Mark ignored the apparition and plugged his computer back in. He began to type and soon fell deep into the meditative rhythm of a ghost story well told.

“It’s like I always say,” Bob Marley’s ghost said, with a wink. “‘No woman, no die.’”

Mark cracked his knuckles and noded. That was some good dialogue.

“Oh you have got to be kidding me,” the spirit said, reading over his shoulder.

“What?”

“This is the dumbest story you’ve ever come up with,” the spirit said, the pain of a soul at unrest audible in the spaces between his words.

“Look man,” Mark said. “I am writing a ghost story every night. Sometimes that means you take a risk.”

“You’re only on Day 6 and you’re already resorting to a story about a writer talking to a ghost about writer’s block,” the ghost said. “I fear what Day 10 will look like.”

A raven flew in through the open window.

“NeverPublishThis,” it crowed.

“Now you’re mixing genres,” the spirit said. “You’ve lost your way.”

“I’m fine,” Mark said. He shooed the Raven out the window and slammed it shut behind. “And you’re really more of a Christmas Carol ghost. That’s not the kind of ghost story I’m trying to tell. So, I think you should return from whence you came.”

“Return from whence I came?” the spirit said. “Now that’s the kind of powerful dialogue I’m talking about. What happened to the guy who wrote like that?”

Mark got up and closed the other window, in case the raven decided to return.

The ghost sat at his computer and opened a folder marked “TAXES,” which, as his former writing partner, he knew contained anything Mark was working on at that moment.

“Don’t you think you’re a little creatively bankrupt lately” the spirit asked.

“These stories are great,” Mark said, knocking his desk chair down and sending the spirit tumbling into his chains. “Look at this one.”

The spirit took a moment to read the story while Mark paced the room. In life, his old writing partner had been the only one he trusted to read his drafts and, even back then, it made him greatly uncomfortable.

“What is Snapchat and how could it possibly kill someone who didn’t take a screenshot within seven seconds?” it asked.

“Trust me,” Mark said. “That’s a good idea. A lot has changed since you died.”

“What happened to timeless themes?” the spirit bemoaned. “Love? Loss? The human condition?”

“I have just the story,” Mark said.

He pulled up a Google Doc titled “Netflix… and Kill.”

The spirit turned to him, his hideous face now pockmarked with perplexity.

“Like ‘Netflix and Chill’,” Mark said. “Except the person gets killed at the end. It’s sort of a love story.”

“You’ve jumped the shark,” the ghost said.

Mark looked down at the ghost’s missing leg. “At least I cleared it,” he said.

At this the spirit frowned. That he died from complications after being bit by a shark while on vacation in Australia, that’s why he had a peg leg, was a sore subject that they’d never brought up on any of his previous visits from the beyond. The ghost picked up a notebook and turned to the most recent page.

“Oh,” Mark said, getting excited. “That one is really good.”

The ghost frowned.

“There’s just a note here that says ‘Tinder, but for Frankensteins’ and it’s underlined three times,” the ghost said.

Mark grinned from ear to ear.

The ghost threw his hands in the air as high as the shackles would allow.

“Frankenstein is not even a type of monster! It was the name of the doctor.”

Mark shrugged.

“If you don’t change your ways and start writing works of substance,” the spirit warned, “you will be doomed to roam the earth for eternity, same as me. The world will never know the type of serious writer you are.”

Mark thought this over. The spirit had a point. Back when he was alive they dreamt of being literary titans. Profiles in the Sunday New York Times. Public denouncements of Oprah. Spending a summer writing in Europe and then pronouncing it “Barthelona.” So many berets. They had big plans. But then his partner wrote a trashy modern retelling of Wuthering Heights with a sexy Heathcliff in the center of a ghost love triangle, which was an idea he stole, that they made into a prestige cable drama and they lost touch.

“You’re right,” Mark said. “I have a serious novel I’ve been working on. It’s hidden, because I’m too embarrassed. Let me get it out of the closet.”

He emerged from the closet with a vacuum cleaner.

“I guess I’m just a little worried the story might ... suck,” Mark said, turning on the device.

“That’s not even a good line,” the spirit said, just as his his soul became tapped in the vacuum cleaner.

Mark removed the vacuum bag, shoved it into the back of the closet and barricaded the door with a card table. Then he went back to his ghost story.

“Don’t worry,” Bob Marley’s ghost said, as he faded from existence. “Be happy…”

“That’s not even Bob Marley,” the ghost cried out, rattling his chains from his prison inside the closet. “Bobby McFerrin wrote that sooooong.”

Mark ignored the spirit’s desperate pleas. He had deadlines to keep.

The only rule of 13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days is that the story must be posted the same night I started it.

Previously on 13 Ghost Stories in 13 Days:
Day 1 The Ghost’s Girlfriend
Day 2 The Girl with the Puka Shell Necklace
Day 3 The Time I Went to the Old Church Later Than I Should Have
Day 4 Ride Scare
Day 5 Miranda, Who Appears as a Portent of Death