Daily Ghost Anthology 14
The fourteenth issue of the Daily Ghost magazine brings together seven ghost stories from 4 October-10 October 2020. Please share them if you enjoy them and encourage other people to subscribe.
Here’s a set of stories from last October.
This was the time when I stopped doing audio readings on an ad hoc basis and committed to producing one once a week, on a Monday morning. I don’t know why I fixed on Monday morning. There’s no sense to it. I’ve since changed to creating two a week and, much more sensibly, publishing them on the weekends, on Saturday and Sunday mornings, so people can enjoy them while having a lie-in.
I also started going further afield for readers, asking friends and colleagues at first. In this anthology, Dr Robert Fielden, a classicist with a deep love of Latin and the philosophy of Lucretius, delivers a Roman Empire ghost story with what the Italians might call gusto (from the Latin ‘gustus’ meaning taste).
At first, I was motivated for the normal reasons - i.e. like all right-thinking people, I hate the sound of my own voice. But it’s a funny thing, with practice at recording, you grow to hate your own voice somewhat less, but you also appreciate your own particular limitations. I discovered other people who could deliver vocal sounds that I simply could not - who could sound horrified or sexy or insane or compassionate.
Recently, I appealed for more readers on Twitter, and some people have taken me up on it, so the range of voices reading these stories will increase further. I’ve also added to my repertoire by learning to mix in sound effects. Sometimes, in my excitement, I perhaps go too far with these - “less is more” - but in this Anthology you get to listen to one of the early audio recordings from before I learned such tricks.
The audio readings have also made me reflect on writing for the voice. There are literary flourishes - like alliteration, for example - which look good on the page or when read silently, but which can be tricky or clumsy to say out loud. Since the listener can’t ‘check back’ the way the reader can, there’s a need to establish key facts of the plot more clearly. I don’t pretend to have mastered this, but it’s been interesting to practice.
I’m always looking for new voices, especially women’s voices - it seems men are keen to volunteer but I discover that I write so many stories with a female narrator. I’ll write something about that next week.
Destitution Road
'Destitution Road' is a name for the A832, a 126-mile long road which links Cromarty, on the east coast, to Gairloch on the west coast. It passes through a region of Scotland hit hardest by the Highland Clearances. This story isn't about the Clearances, but the name 'Destitution Road' is too evocative to pass on as a story title. The story itself is inspired by The Phantom Coach (1864) by Amelia Edwards.
The rain rushed in from the sea loch. I was soaked when the headlamps appeared. It was a rickety old bus long overdue for the scrapyard, but I was glad for any lift to Dundonnell. My tent had been carried into the clouds above the Ardessie Falls.
The driver solemnly punched the old-fashioned ticket machine. There were three other passengers, sullen locals. None raised a head or a smile to greet a tourist.
It was cold. The windows were cracked, the seats were stiff, sodden and reeked of mold. When the bus skidded, I gripped the rail and shouted in alarm. The other passengers sat on, heads bowed, silent. The bus skidded again, buffeted by a furious blast of wind from Loch Broom. In front, the headlamps swayed across the road. The rain washed away vision until the wipers cleared a view, only for a fresh gust to cover it again.
“Slow done!” I shouted, but the driver ignored me, as grim as his wretched passengers.
The bus skidded again and tilted in the wind.
“This is madness!” I shouted to the passengers, but they never looked up.
On the bus careened, to the squealing of wipers and the increasing fury of the wind.
“I want to get off!” I screamed.
The bus shuddered to a stop. I paused in the doorway, minded to appeal to the other passengers to get out too, but their dour silence and downcast eyes irritated me beyond measure. Instead, I cursed stormy Scotland and sour Scots. The bus pulled away. The tail lights vanished round the side of the mountain.
The old farmer who picked me up in his van an hour later found my bedraggled state amusing.
“Aye, laddie, Destitution Road, it’s called, and it’s seen few tragic tales. The old omnibus went over these cliffs twenty years ago, driver and passengers.”
I started shaking with more than the chill from soaking clothes.
“How many passengers?” I asked, dreading that it should be ‘three.’
“Four.”
I sighed with relief.
“They did not find bodies. Carried out to sea, they were, poor souls. But when they salvaged the bus, four tickets had been punched.”
The rain had turned my ticket to a wet pulp.
“I’d have begged my worst enemy not to travel such a road on such a night,” he went on, “but not even the Lord God can alter the past.”
Lucretius and the Case of the Haunted House
Titus Lucretius Carus (c.99-c.44 BC) was a Roman philosopher-poet whose great work De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) showcases his wisdom, wit and genial personality. Supposedly, he died after going mad from drinking a love potion! This little tale casts Lucretius as a philosophical detective, subjecting supernatural phenomenon to his Epicurean analysis, and assisted by his slave Felix.
The dramatic reading on the YouTube channel is by my friend and classicist, Dr Robert Fielden.
Life, my master Lucretius used to say, is one long struggle in the dark. I struggled over the Case of the Mostellaria or ‘Haunted House’.
Thus...
“First my slave-girl Chlora, then my husband, both dead of the bloody flux,” explained the widow Primilla. “Now my mansion is uninhabitable because of this angry ghost.”
I took notes in Greek, but Lucretius never required them. He studied Primilla closely then instructed her to meet us at the villa after sunset.
I asked, “Has the Husband or the slave Chlora become the ghost?”
“No one becomes a ghost, Felix,” snapped my master. “They are mindless psychic impressions – eidola.”
We were at the villa, searching Primilla’s chamber.
“We are,” Lucretius said, “then we are not, whereupon we care not. Ah – as I thought!”
He had discovered a hidden phial of murky liquid.
A terrible scream came from downstairs.
“Come, Felix: the die is cast.”
In the atrium, Primilla cowered before a female spectre: grey as sea fog, but for the glistening tongue of blood welling from her nose and mouth. I stepped in front of the phantom, but she clasped me with her hideous claws.
“Felix,” Lucretius shouted, seizing Primilla before she could flee. “This woman poisoned her slave, out of jealousy. Then poisoned her husband with her love potions. See clearly!”
And I did see clearly. This was not a hideous ghoul, but an innocent woman, much wronged. She was fair, but hardened by sorrow, and seeking only love.
I told her “Chlora, you are beautiful.”
She pressed her cold lips to mine. Then she was no more.
At sunrise, Lucretius delivered Primilla to the tribune, explaining all her crimes. But I was perplexed.
“Master, if ghosts are insubstantial eidola floating aimlessly,” I pondered, “and if witnesses perceive them as hostile because their guilty feelings misconstrue them to be so…”
Lucretius looked up from his reading, awaiting my question.
“… Why did we perceive Chlora’s ghost to be so fearsome then so tender?”
“Did we?”
“Master, I certainly did.”
Lucretius rolled up his scroll impatiently.
“While you believed Primilla to be innocent, you saw Chlora as a threat, but nothing is evil but that thinking makes it so. Study nature’s laws, Felix. They are elementary.”
He returned to his studies and I to my chores.
My master’s philosophy explained so much. But, to this day, I treasure the memory of Chlora’s last tender kiss.
A Loophole (IV)
A Loophole (July 29 2020) introduced the necromancer Qadaffah who cheats death through a loophole in the Book of Thoth. Other stories (Aug 15 and Sep 12) introduced the death goddess Anupet who tries to reclaim the dead.
The story is inspired by W.W. Jacobs' classic weird tale The Monkey's Paw (1902), but whereas the couple in Jacobs' tale break the spell before the dead son can enter the house, this story explores what happens if you let the reanimated loved one back in.
That woman was still outside. Dark-skinned, oddest mask: like a jackal. Mister Qadaffah had warned us about her.
Fixed to the window was Qadaffah’s cartouche: the bird-headed man, the eye, the crocodile. There were others, all over the house.
I let the blinds drop. It stank in here now. It stank of him.
In the kitchen, Janet chattered away, to him. He said nothing. He never said anything.
“It’s our Bobby,” I remembered Janet screaming. “He’s at the door! Let him in!”
I remembered the knocking: heavy, muffled, like a wet sodden thing, like meat hitting soil. I smelled his stink. I wanted to tell her “That’s not our son! Not any more!” But she snatched back the latch and he was there. She pulled him into our house and I nailed the last cartouche to the door.
Now he was in our kitchen, wrapped in his filthy sheets. Every night Janet soaked them and the blood filled the bath. She laundered and wrapped him in fresh ones. The blood kept soaking through.
His glittering eyes watched me.
“I was telling Bobby about Danno and Kyle from school and what they’re up to now.”
She set a glass of milk next to his hand, his nail-less claw of a hand, and he ignored it.
“Louise is still single. They were a sweet couple, her and Bobby.”
She carried sheets to the tumble dryer next door. I sat opposite the thing in our kitchen.
“I know you’re not Bobby,” I hissed.
He tilted his head at an angle. The eyes glittered ferociously.
“You’re not my son. My son is dead.”
Then Janet was back, scooping away the untouched milk. She had old photographs to show him. He regarded them with indifference. His eyes inspected my wife, her body, like meat.
I went back to the front door.
“He will return to you,” Qadaffah had promised, but what exactly had come back to us in Bobby’s bleeding body?
I peered through the window.
“The cartouches hide him from her,” Qadaffah had instructed.
She was still out there.
I touched the cartouche on the door: the reed, the jackal, the looped cross. Tug it away and open the door. She would be waiting and that thing, him, he would be gone. Forever.
In the kitchen, Janet laughed. She hadn’t laughed since the accident.
I wept at my own weakness.
Witch's Dance
No one gets bored of witch trial stories - Puritans in steeple hats, repressed sexuality, rank hypocrisy and a bit of ambiguity about whether the victims really are witches or not. Godbolt and Tace (a fine 17th century girl's name which means 'Silence') are reading from the Song of Songs (also known as 'Canticles' or the 'Song of Solomon') which is an Old Testament book containing erotic verse fit to make any Puritan's blood boil.
“The women denied their love for Satan right to the last,” I told Nathan Barebones and his family over supper, “save Anne Leech only, who cursed our court and went to the gallows strong in her sins.”
“Save us!” squeaked Goodwife Barebones.
Her daughter Tace listened, saucer-eyed.
In truth, Anne Leech’s bold eye had troubled me, so too her words, as I passed the rope over her neck: “I’ll bite my finger, Watt Godbolt, when you dance my Witch's Dance.”
I paid Nathan Barebones a half-groat for his daughter’s testimony.
He said, “Tace for her reward wishes only divine instruction,”so Tace and I retired to the buttery to read Scripture together.
“Let him kiss me,” she read from the Canticles, a blush suffusing her neck, “with the kisses of his mouth: for love is better than wine.”
“Sometimes Scripture speaks to us through metaphor,” I reassured her.
“Behold, thou art fair,my beloved,” I continued, and in truth, Mistress Tace was passing fair, with a bold eye I had not noticed before. It was hot in the buttery. She removed her shawl and bid me unbutton myself.
“Thy two breasts,” I read, now hoarse of voice, “are like two young roes that are twins.”
The Scriptures slipped from my fingers, for Mistress Tace had unbound her twin breasts, hiding nothing of her maidenly charms. She climbed upon me, still reciting: “I rose up to open to my beloved.” Then, in sudden frustration: “But my beloved had withdrawn himself, and was gone!”
“Nay, sweetling,” I protested, moving on top of her, “I shall by thine presently, only fear of thy listening parents robs me of my vigour!”
Vigour was restored and Tace was as silent as her name, biting hard upon her finger when she took her delight.
The divine instruction Mistress Tace received bore swelling fruit. She denounced me with unseemly candour. When I returned from a witch-pricking in Bury St Edmunds, Barebones and his men dragged me to this barn, for that justice demanded by every wronged father of any wanton daughter.
Tace, her belly round with my child, came to watch my legs twitch as I swung from the rafter. She smiled.
“Thou hast danced a Witch's Dance with me, Watt Godbolt,” she cried, her bold eye flashing.
When I drew my last breath she bit hard on her finger, taking her delight.
First Date
There have been a couple of stories about the Dupree family and their inherited gifts for interacting with Jamaican duppies (ghosts). It started with Uncle Duppy (18 July 2020) and continued with The Talk (10 Aug).
I never expected Sophie Dupree to say ‘Yes,’ but there we were, walking down Harlesden Road. Not actually speaking, but I was thinking of stuff to say that would sound cool but not fake. I wanted to touch her but I couldn’t think of an excuse.
She stopped. We were outside the old Knowles House, where the Church Road Crew set fire to that tramp last year.
I said, “I thought we’d go to the Park…”
“Will you wait for me?”
Then she was off, weaving through the rubbish in the garden and disappearing into an unboarded window.
I thought, ‘Yeah, I’ve waited for you since Year Ten’ but also I thought of Darius telling me, “She’s proper mental, bruh. Watch out for the quiet ones!”
Plus, it felt weird, all alone on the street, at sunset. People looked at me funny: black kid, loitering. A copper was bound to show up.
I followed Sophie. It was filthy inside. Not even any good graffiti. I could hear Sophie in another room, talking to someone.
“So you've got a daughter?”
She was alone. It stank of smoke.
“She lives where exactly in Neasden?”
My floorboard creaked. Sophie saw me, but kept talking.
“I'll tell her that from you, yeah.”
It was too weird: her talking to the darkness and no one there. So I grabbed her by the arm.
Instantly, I saw him: darker than darkness, because he was covered in soot, no, in flakes of burnt skin. And the stink.
Instantly, he saw me. His eyes widened, white in the burnt mess of a face, and he screamed.
There was fire. He was fire. Up it went to the ceiling, whoosh, with him inside it, screaming. And I screamed. And Sophie screamed. And we both ran, through the hall and the window and the junkyard garden and onto the street.
I said, “He was …”
“Dead, yeah.”
“And you was…”
“Talking to him,” said Sophie. “Yeah. I can do that.”
She put her hands on her hips.
“I suppose the date’s cancelled, yeah?” she said. “You can tell everyone how mental I am!”
She was amazing, stood there like that.
I asked, “Dead blokes…”
“Duppies.”
“Whatever. Are they always giving you jobs and whatnot?”
She shrugged.
Her cornrows looked wicked cool.
I shrugged. Then I counted out my money.
“I think there’s enough here to get us to Neasden…”
Doll House
This story of love triangles and Slavic witchcraft intrigued me, so that I wrote a considerably extended version for Daily Ghost subscribers. The longer version explores Becky and Sadie’s ‘frenemy’ relationship, the unfolding of the enchantment of the Doll House and looks more closely and Mrs Belyakova’s witchy ways.
Mrs Belyakova’s room smelt of old lady, with wallpaper yellowed by her Russian cigarettes.
Sadie whispered, “Becky, check this out.”
The doll’s house was our building, with our rooms downstairs and Mrs Belyakova’s attic apartment, where we were now, poking through her stuff. My pink wallpaper, Sadie’s green carpet, everything a perfect copy. Right down to little dolls of us, her tenants.
“And you and Kyle,” Sadie giggled. “Doing it!”
Kyle’s doll wasn’t in his room across the corridor, but in mine, with my doll, in my bed.
“I reckon,” said Sadie, after we’d fled our dead landlady’s room, “it’s Russian voodoo. Mrs B brought you two together by putting your dolls together.”
Sadie had been hitting on our handsome neighbour for weeks, before Kyle suddenly showed interest in me. I knew she thought I’d gone behind her back.
Then, two days later, I returned from my shift and found Kyle moving his stuff out.
“It’s not you,” he said, looking stricken, “it’s me.”
Then, the very next day, the sounds of noisy sex from Sadie’s room, her bed squeaking and her screaming: “Oh Kyle, yes, oh God, yes, yes!”
I couldn’t get away from it, so I ran upstairs, to the attic, and there, in the doll’s house, was little doll-Kyle – now in Sadie’s bed.
She’d sneaked back and moved him! Furious, I shoved the Kyle-doll back where it belonged, in my room. Mad with tears, I snapped the head off Sadie’s doll.
I sat up there for hours, until I heard the sirens.
I watched from the attic window as the police led Kyle away. Then the paramedics carried Sadie out on a stretcher, a sheet over her head, which tilted at a sickening angle.
Like a guilty child, I rummaged through the old lady’s craft stuff then clumsily glued the Sadie-doll’s head back on.
I told the hospital I was too sick to work.
I woke in the night to my door opening.
“Becky,” said Kyle.
I sat up in bed and he kissed me, fiercely.
“Becky, I’m so sorry.”
Was I dreaming? Kyle kissed me again, reaching inside my shirt, then pulling it off. It was like our first time, like he was out of control.
The old bed squeaked to our lovemaking and I screamed and screamed, because Sadie was here, standing over us, watching us, with her head still tilted at its sickening angle.
Riddles Three
This story was occasioned by an actual walk my partner and I like to take. The path along the River Welland, around subset, takes on a creepy aspect, with the big overhanging willows and silent swans. The sort of place you expect a dark stranger to approach with riddles three.
Do not recoil. Doubtless you find my appearance strange. I once walked out, as you now do, on an evening with my lover. Most merrily Alison and I did pass the hours, before returning by this very crossroad.
It was here we met with a dubious stranger who challenged us to answer riddles three.
“The more you take of me,” quoth he, “the more you leave behind!”
The answer came to me when I looked upon the lane stretching towards the village, and the path curving behind us into the woods.
“Why, you are footsteps!”
“When you make me,” quoth the stranger, “you have me no more; I am given to you, but you seek me from another instead?”
This one vexed me, but Alison blushed and said, “A choice,” then said no more.
“My third riddle,” quoth the stranger, “must be answered wisely. Listen!
The one that walks with me, a mortal death must find;
Chains await the one, whose conduct is unkind;
Who leaves this crossroads and who remains behind?”
This was no ordinary riddle, yet it seemed to me there was cunning in it. This stranger purposed to murther his companion, so it would be foolish to leave with him.
Foolish also to leave with Alison, for she would play the victim of my lust and I be forced to marry her – clapped in chains, as the stranger foretold – or else thrown into the stocks as a thief of maidenhood until a magistrate might be summoned.
Yet if Alison walked with the stranger, then she would be murthered and silenced. The stranger, for his crime, would be locked in the iron gibbet as supper for crows at this very crossroads.
“Why then, you two must go on together,” I declared,” and I will wait here.”
Alison’s face fell, but the stranger offered her his arm, saying: “My lady, would you walk?” and the two departed along the lane.
I hear the stranger married Alison. I hear she died in birthing the child that was mine and the stranger bore the infant away to his distant home.
I hear many things, waiting at this crossroads. I hear the words with which the ravens greet the night and the secrets the blackthorn shares only with the frost.
I heard you approach down yonder path. And now, before you leave this place, I challenge you:
Will you answer riddles three ..?