They were everywhere.
Denizens of darkness coiled knifelike in their dim shadow. Dennis could see them, the ghosts that haunted this city and followed him with dread silence. Lurking invisible and malevolent, these haunted spectres drifted nearer at each hour’s bell: a doomsome toll that heralded death. Dennis felt a presence reaching out for his mortal soul in these moments, a murderous wind that beckoned him towards the grave. These spectres needed no rest in their pursuit, they corralled him, a circle growing ever tighter, a rope cinching around his lifeline. With lightless eyes and dreadful glare, the ghosts were closer now, their mouths distending in hunger.
Damn his luck! Things were safer in Huxleyshire. Sure, there was more darkness, more demons, and the forest was said to have wolves, but wolves were things of flesh and blood, they had their own fears. Pausing Dennis was struck by a thought.
Can a wolf become a ghost?
Danger, doom, death, no escape, nowhere safe! Must keep running. Must stay alive.
Dennis Highburrow had done many things in his life but was grounded by his constant fear of everything. Imaginative as a child, Dennis was, too early, gifted a book of fairy tales by an off-humoured uncle and the boy’s young mind was forever dedicated to jumping at shadows.*
Recently he had run an inn, and all the more recently he had run halfway across the country from his discovery that this very same business had a demonic presence in its basement**.
Now, in the city of Dwyer’s rest, he was pursed by ghosts.
~
Damn they had found him.
Pushing a scruffy looking child into the path of his invisible pursuer, Dennis bundled into an alley and pushed through the half open door before him. Light, bright dazzling light forced him to pause as the noise of laughter from the floor above became the only sense that he could focus on.
Eyes now coming to focus, Dennis began to thrash out with quivering fists, just on the off chance that he was being attacked. There was a desk in the room, a short green lamp on its top that could only grace the front reception of a well-classed hotel. A man, pencil moustached and symmetrically neat, looked profoundly at his new guest and could only manage a questioning, “Sir?”, which was both an objection and enquiry.
Reaching into his pocket, Dennis threw some salt across the entryway and then pushed past the baffled receptionist, finding the kitchen and then the street beyond on its other side.
Jumping over a low wall he crouched to allow his pursuers a chance to pass. He had avoided their claws once again. Not safe but allowed one moment’s rest.
He had tried many times to escape the clutches of Dwyer’s rest.
Busy as a trading town, the narrow roads and congested alleys wound confusingly in a beleaguered kind of trap. The main road, so wide, so open, was too perilous an option, for the ghosts of his pursuit would so quickly catch him there.
The southern cemetery, the monuments to the defence of old country Dunredith, all these totems were fonts to the spectral world. Watching eyes that searched for Dennis.
RING.
A bell, the ghosts draw closer.
RING.
Again, he must run.
Vaulting from his wall, Dennis darted left into an alley he was sure that he remembered. Right, he turned; left again he wove in desperate attempt to escape from the tolling bell’s marker. Now lost, he stopped in the confluence of four alleys, four paths, one route to safety.
He knew that left was evil, never again would he take the left-hand path. But as he spun, they all passed by his left. Four left hand paths, no choice to be made at all.
There was a door, Dennis ran for it without hesitation.
Bursting into the room five figures turned to look at the intruder, the soft candlelight much easier for Dennis to take in his surroundings than the hotel moments before.
They smiled at him from under their hoods.
‘Brother,’ one said, ‘such a wonderful occasion that we should meet at this juncture.’
Too many teeth, Dennis thought as he tried to step back but was pushed into the room from a force behind.
There were no eyes visible beneath the hoods, five knives then flashed in the candlelight.
~
In a study of flickering light, the god Dormir scratched at his beard thoughtfully and considered the strange candle, gently rattling upon his desk as if it disagreed with the concept of existence. A person’s soul was a precious thing, it filled the tapestry of existence with colour and without it the god of death would be without a purpose.
Life was embodied before Dormir as a candle.
A weak-willed human would appear as a dribbling, a weary candle tapered into a wasted point, whereas a straight pillar opaque black wax was usually an overlord or some kind of bank manager. It was Dormir’s role in the tapestry to observe these souls and to return them to frayed edges of existence where they were needed most, to guide them so that they will return to life anew.
This candle was tricky.
People could make mistakes, that’s what Dormir loved about them. A missed wagon could lead a stroll down the wrong lane and the misguided curiosity of an open door could lead to a room of hooded figures and a very persuasive demonic membership plan. It was these candles that were engraved with a symbol; entities within the weave that had a metaphorically inescapable down payment on a soul and expected to receive their investment when it should pass by Dormir’s hand.
This candle had quite a few symbols.
Turning his head in contemplation, the god of death stared at the heavily inscribed candle and wondered how it was that it was held together, given that it appeared to consist of more carvings than it did wax. There were the symbols of gods, demons, angles, and devils. Elder evils made an appearance here and there; the concepts of belief structures were dotted about; multinational corporations; a single accountancy firm. The perplexing variety of each disparate group amused Dormir, and he imagined that deciding whoever had the true ticket upon this soul was as inconceivable as knowing the length of string.
He relit the wick and the universe held its breath.
Dennis held his breath too.
When a person is dead, they quickly realise that holding their breath is as easy as say, not holding it. There is a lungless kind of vacancy to existence that causes some to panic whenever they notice that a breath isn’t followed by an exhale. It happens as a gasp and then a little feeling of freedom that is nice but oddly upsetting at the same time.
‘Where am I?’ Dennis asked the hunched figure of an old man who had appeared as some kind of full stop to the extended oddity of the study. There was a timelessness here, it was as if there was nothing beyond.
‘You’re in my study and before you ask, “where’s that?” know that my name is Dormir and that yours, was, Dennis Highburrow.’
The stress upon the word “was” felt to be the most poignant part of that sentence to Dennis. A wizened old man just claimed to be Dormir and there were far too many candles behind him to argue against the statement.
‘I’m dead then?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well, that’s a relief.’
Never before had Dormir heard these words uttered in his study. People were jovial, occasionally. People sometimes were thankful. But relived? This was a new experience.
Taking in the life of Dennis Highburrow for a moment, Dormir saw forty-five years of running, fear, and more expectance of death than he had come across. An existence of fearing the worst had seemed to make the actual fear of death not the problem at all.
‘I have an interesting quandary.’ said Dormir, as he lent back into his chair and considered the man before him.
‘Oh?’ replied Dennis, collapsing into the comfort of a reading chair and experiencing a four-decade release of tension in a single moment.
Sitting down, he thought, well this is nice.
‘It appears that a few entities have a ticket on your soul somewhat. Your attempts at exorcism by way of further contracts have confused matters.’
Clicking his fingers, a scroll of unfathomable length began to scrawl outwards from Dormir, the illegible script appeared to be covered with crosses and notes filling the margins.
‘It’s going to take me some time to work out just where your soul is to go, I’m afraid.’
‘Can I stay here?’ asked Dennis hopefully. Living—well, existing—in the embodiment of death’s study seemed a much safer option than he could have ever considered. It was quiet, you couldn’t die in the domain of death.
‘No, for tricky judgments there is a kind of waiting room, a purgatory if you prefer a more grandiose analogy.’ Dormir paused, placing the scroll down and picking up the candle of Dennis Highburrow.
‘Tell me, have you ever haunted something?’
~
They were everywhere.
Denizens of life all coiled blundersome in their noisy footfall. Dennis could see them, the citizens that lived in this city, the sages, scholars, and priests that all tried to banish him. But he had a lifetime of running under his belt, and humans were so foiled by a wall.
Life as a ghost was fine, really. Lonely, but the night air had a joyful waft as it passed through him and wandering around a city without the purpose of thoughts was something that Dennis never thought that he could know.
Upon a headstone, Dennis Highburrow sat and contemplated the afterlife.
The night was grey, a foreboding mist tangled ominously amongst the brambles of the quiet cemetery.
There were some youths, obviously out on a dare and wandering through the graves, they were tense with fright, and holding candles, Dennis noted, without a wind shield.
Stuck by a thought, the new ghost suddenly remembered all the ways that he was once scared of death and then imagined all the ways that he could now scare the living.
‘Oh,’ he said, letting his limbs lengthen and conjuring dark voids of weeping blood to form over where his eyes would be, ‘this is going to be fun.’
—
*Uncles, a curious creature representing the duality of familial endearment, have developed a habit of inflicting the real Fairy tales on nephews and nieces and continuing the cycle of being able to scare a child in a good-natured way and not having to deal with any of the repercussions.
The life lessons of grandmother eating wolves, witches have their heads cut off, and murderous fish people turning into seafoam, while are still applicable, have these days been managed to be explained in better manner than by the application of trauma.
**Well, talking rats, but that is another story entirely.
J. McCray
2023
Sunday Short Stories 