Ghost Writer

The noise of music and loud party guests had woken Sasha up. Her neighbor across the street, Patricia Scarberry, was holding one of her famous parties where seemingly everyone in Roaming City was invited except for Sasha Davenport. Not that she’d be willing to go anyway. Especially not since Scarberry’s best friend was Sasha’s longtime bully Madison and she was sure to be there. Patricia Scarberry, not only the richest but also the most popular girl in town; proof positive that there is such a thing as being born lucky. Now that Sasha was paying attention to that annoying music she was sure she’d never get back to sleep. She drifted back to sleep almost instantly.

That morning Sasha went outside to collect her mail, but when she looked inside her mailbox she disappointingly noticed it was still empty, despite her having seen the mailman drive by just a few moments earlier.

‘Sasha, right?’ a voice said from behind her.

To her horror Sasha discovered Patricia Scarberry standing right there, holding up the box with the copy of the classic video game Servants of Nyarla she had ordered. The game recently had a resurgence of popularity among Internet speedrunners and Sasha had been interested in seeing what it was all about.

'I think the mailman messed up again,' she added as she handed Sasha the package, who accepted it gingerly.

'That was some party last night,' Sasha said, trying to fake making polite conversation while her flight response was screaming at her to retreat back into the house.

'Yeah, sorry if we were too loud or anything. You know, I would have invited you but I wasn’t sure you’re into stuff like that. We’ve been neighbors for so long but I don’t think we’ve ever actually spoken.'

'I’m not much of a social creature. It’s Patricia, right?'

'Just Trish, please. I’m only ever Patricia when my dad is yelling at me.'

'Got it,' Sasha nodded.

An awkward silence followed. Trish continued smiling while Sasha fiddled with her package without really opening it up.

'Well, I guess I’ll see you around, Sasha finally said and she slowly started backing up.

'Right, we should definitely meet up sometime.' Trish patted Sasha on the shoulder.

‘Right, meet up.’ Sasha turned around and discreetly rolled her eyes.

That night a loud crash from the forest woke Sasha up.

'Again?' she yelled in frustration. Fleetingly she remembered flashes of a dream where a particularly vicious political pundit had followed her around a toy store trying to convince her that the national number of Roaming City was four.

She got up and stumbled to the window, but saw nothing indicating anything that could have made a sound that loud. She moved out of her room towards the window in the upstairs bathroom facing the forest. She had to open it up since the frosted glass was translucent, not transparent. From there between the trees she saw a dim orange light that slowly disappeared, as if a fire that was petering out. Her first impulse had been to run for a phone to call the fire department, but the apparent flames disappearing had reduced her sense of urgency and had instead awoken her curiosity. Sasha walked back to her room, as silently as possible so she wouldn’t wake her mother, who apparently had slept through the crash. She exchanged her pyjamas for the clothing she had dropped on the floor last night and quickly grabbed the flashlight she kept near her bed.

Sasha exited through the backdoor of her house, made her way across their small garden, and opened the wooden door in the fence surrounding it. The moonlight was enough to light the way so she didn’t yet need her flashlight, nor was she in a hurry to turn it on out of a paranoid idea someone, or something, could be watching her in the darkness. She made her way across the field towards the treeline, when suddenly Sasha noticed a lit flashlight heading straight towards her from across streetside of the field.

It was Trish.

'Did you see the meteorite?' she yelled.

'I just heard something loud coming from the forest and saw some flickering lights,' Sasha responded.

'Think we should call someone?'

'Maybe we should have a look first. Know what exactly we’re supposed to be calling about.'

'Good plan.' Trish nodded.

Sasha and Trish both entered the forest. Nearby bushes rustled as alarmed animals escaped the two intruders. Both girls became increasingly panicked by the forest springing alive around them. Sasha concealed her fear better and simply moved forward. Trish aimed her flashlight at everything that moved but usually saw nothing.

There was indeed a crater with some of the nearby plants and trees still smoldering, although there seemed to be no more actual fire. Sasha and Trish moved closer. In the center of the crater was the object that had to be the cause of all this. However it wasn’t just a rock, it was a perfectly round smooth sphere that appeared to be metallic in nature. It was about the size of a basketball, maybe a bit larger.

'What is that?' Trish asked.

As if to respond, the sphere split horizontally and both hemispheres turned in opposite directions. The top side then slid downwards into the lower part. Both Sasha and Trish took a step backwards when they saw a more natural form appear from the inside. Tendril-like fingers grabbed the edge of the sphere-half. A small creature with large eyes emerged. It tilted its head, which was proportionally much too large for its body, upwards and looked straight at the two girls shining flashlights at it. Sasha and Trish held their breaths for a moment before a loud scream escaped both of their lungs and they darted back out of the forest.

Sasha ran as fast as she could and was the first to reach the treeline. She stopped for a moment and looked backwards but didn’t see Trish anywhere. She hesitated and considered going back, but fear held her in place. However a few moments later an out-of-breath Trish emerged from the forest too.

'Jeez, what took you so long?' Sasha asked.

'What do you mean? I was right behind you. I mean I tripped but I wasn’t that far behind.'

'Come on, let’s go before that thing catches up.'

'Right.'

A few minutes later they slammed the door of Sasha’s house and breathed in relief. Trish stood with her back against the door as if she were trying to barricade it. Sasha ran into the hallway and picked up the wireless home phone and dialed the emergency number. Trish picked up a few words but mostly she was trying to calm herself down. A few minutes later Sasha appeared in the doorway as she pressed the phone’s disconnect button.

'So what did they say?' Trish asked.

'I told them about the meteorite, but they said that if there was no emergency it could wait until morning. When I told them there was a metal ball and we saw some creature coming out of it, they thought it was a prank and hung up.'

'So we’re screwed. What are we going to do now?'

'I don’t know. Lock the doors and hold out until morning?'

Trish trembled. 'Would you mind if I stay here tonight? I don’t think I want to be alone at home right now, not to mention having to go outside again.'

Sasha hesitated. Eventually kindness overwrote her desire to just be rid of Trish. 'Sure, why not.' And also she herself didn’t much like the idea of being alone right now.

Sasha went upstairs and guided Trish towards her room. Sasha picked up stray remote controls and video game joypads from the two-seater sofa in front of her bed. She then gave Trish a blanket and an extra pillow.

Trish admired the wall that held Sasha’s entertainment systems and rows upon rows of video games. 'You really like your video games, don’t you? I had a couple systems too when I was young. I guess I grew out of it.'

'Make yourself comfortable,' Sasha said as she sat down on her bed.

A couple hours of troubled sleep later, Trish discovered Sasha was already gone. Sunlight lit the room. The door was open and she heard Sasha downstairs talking to who she assumed was Sasha’s mother. Evidently she was trying to explain everything that had happened that night.

Trish got up and descended the stairs. 'Good morning, Mrs Davenport,' she said with a friendly smile.

'Oh yeah, and Trish here decided to spend the night,' Sasha added to her previous story.

Lydia Davenport was a woman in her late thirties who Trish thought could pass for Sasha’s older sister, but unlike Sasha she carried her dark hair long and required glasses. She had broken up with Sasha’s father shortly before Sasha had even been born, which also resulted in Sasha having been given her name rather than her estranged father’s.

'Sounds like you girls had quite an adventure. Are you sure you weren’t just amping each other up over nothing though? You were probably just caught off guard by a fox or a weasel. It’s a nightmare to keep chickens in this town.' Lydia took a sip of coffee.

'Mom, I know what foxes and weasels look like. That thing wasn’t one,' Sasha said.

'Actually it was really strange, Mrs Davenport, like it had a really big head and freaky hands instead of paws,' Trish paused for a second. ‘And that thing it came out of wasn’t just a space rock. More like a space ship.’

‘Well, I’m sure we can all figure this out now that we have cooler heads. Nighttime adventures tend to mess with your heads,’ Lydia said.

Sasha scratched her head. It was dark and they were already scared because of it, but she was pretty sure of what she had seen.

'I should probably get going. I think I left the kitchen lights on and the door unlocked last night,' Trish said.

'Right. I’ll show you out,' Sasha said.

'It was nice to meet you, Mrs Davenport.'

Lydia waved a silent goodbye.

Sasha walked Trish to the front door. Before exiting Trish quickly looked around to make sure there were no creatures waiting for them. After she walked through she turned around. 'Look, we can’t just pretend like nothing happened. That ball thing is probably still there. The sun is up. There’s two of us. We can easily go back and take pictures.'

Sasha nodded in agreement. 'Yeah, it’s probably the right thing to do. I’ll get my camera. I hope you have like a weapon you can use.'

'Actually I played baseball in high school. Pretty sure I can still swing a bat,' Trish smiled confidently.

A little over half an hour later the doorbell rang. Trish had reappeared with a change of clothes and her hair neatly combed. As she had suggested she was holding a baseball bat. Sasha had equipped herself with a broom handle as an improvised weapon and carried her camera in her right front pocket.

'Let’s go?' Trish asked.

'Sure,' Sasha responded.

They made their way through the field and into the forest, attempting to retrace their steps from last night. It did not take them very long to rediscover the clearing where the ball had caused a crater. Trish’s grip on her baseball bat tightened. Sasha clumsily held up her broom handle in her right hand while she fidgeted to turn on her camera. When they got close their stances relaxed slightly. The crater was still there, but the sphere was nowhere to be found. Nothing to suggest the impact had been anything other than a regular small meteorite either.

'Bugger,’ Sasha said.

Sasha looked back to find Trish staring off into the distance. She turned to Sasha and pointed further into the forest, left of the path which they had come.

'Was that house always there?' Trish asked.

'What house?' Sasha came closer to properly follow the direction of Trish’s finger.

A few hundred meters from them within a dense thicket stood an old two-storey brick house that had clearly seen better days. Oak trees, many likely younger than the house, obscured much of it from sight. Undergrowth of thistles and stinging nettles made approaching the house somewhat hard, and certainly unpleasant. The girls were still on their toes because the creature from last night might still be around somewhere, but mostly their curiosity had shifted to the house they never knew was practically in their backyard. Their makeshift weapons had found new utility as tools to clear a path to the front porch of the house.

The door was unlocked, not that it would have mattered much if it wasn’t. The wood looked and felt like it could collapse under light pressure. The windows hardly helped shining light inside; even where the trees provided an opening, the grime that accumulated on the glass prevented the sun from properly entering. The inside looked mostly intact, the girls had entered in a living room with an adjacent kitchen, with leaves and acorns in various stages of decay littering the old floor. Two couches in front of a fireplace had most of its covering ripped away by animals. A dining table had collapsed with one of its legs broken off. Books had apparently slid off of it, covering the floor, their combined weight probably having provided the fatal strain on the aging wood. In front of the girls was a doorway into a bedroom and stairs to the second floor.

'Two options. How about I look upstairs, you check out what’s over there?' Trish asked.

'Yell if you find anything. That creature might be in here, so be careful,' Sasha affirmed.

‘Will do. I just hope these stairs hold.’

Comparatively the upstairs area was much less damaged by the encroaching forest. With proper dusting Trish would have almost considered it livable. Trish found herself in what appeared to be a library that doubled as a writing room, bookshelves filled with old books adorned the wall and a heavy desk with an antique typewriter stood in the middle of it. Trish ran her hand over a book covered in dust next to the typewriter, revealing it to be a rare copy of The Persian Tenpasses, a Middle Eastern story collection thought to be an imitation of Antoine Galland’s One Thousand and One Nights translation, in which a princess and nine of her servants tell each other stories while waiting to be rescued from a collapsed bathhouse. Then she noticed the typewriter was oddly clean of dust as if it had been recently used. The paper in it looked a hundred years old, but the text sent a cold shiver down Trish’s spine.

The peace in the sleeping Roaming City was disturbed by a streak of light that illuminated the night sky. In the dream-like Nimmerworld Sasha Davenport had received official confirmation from city hall that Roaming was officially designated as number four and that the doll with the weird head she wanted was priced at €1.76. Trish Scarberry however hadn’t been able to sleep at all. She had been watching a hedgehog running across her lawn from her bedroom window when suddenly a fireball entered the Earth’s atmosphere and disappeared into the Roaming forest.

Trish ripped the piece of paper from the typewriter and ran back downstairs to find Sasha flashing pictures of the bedroom.

'Sasha, you have to take a look at this,' Trish yelled as she handed over the paper.

Sasha positioned herself with her back to a ray of sunlight and looked over the piece of paper. She sighed. 'I get it now. Ha ha, let’s all make fun of the weird girl.'

Trish was confused. 'What do you mean?'

'Madison put you up to this, right? Make some noise and put up a light show to scare the crap out of me, then lead me to a supposedly haunted house?'

'Sasha, I have no idea what’s going on either. You have to believe me,' Trish said.

'Whatever, I’m going home.'

Sasha’s shoe rustled a piece of paper she hadn’t noticed before. Sasha ...

... picked up the manuscript from the floor. Trish pulled back a strain of her blonde hair behind her ear and frowned. Sasha started trembling as she realized the words written down were indeed describing events as they were presently occurring. Maybe this wasn’t a prank played by Trish and Madison after all. She didn’t understand any of it, how could anyone have predicted all of this so accurately? Why was the piece of paper so old if this was done recently? How were their names in here? Trish tried calling out to her but Sasha was too far gone to hear her.

'What does it say?' Trish asked. Sasha simply stood there with a horrified look on her face. 'Sasha, what does it say?' she tried again.

Sasha looked back up with tears of frightful confusion in her eyes. 'If this is a joke, please just tell me now. This isn’t funny anymore.'

'I swear I have nothing to do with this. Whatever this is, it’s messed up. Impossibly messed up.'

Sasha paused. 'It’s either a weird prank or this place is genuinely haunted. Either way, I don’t think we should be here.'

‘Yeah, we should go. Here, take a picture of these and we’re out.’

Sasha took out her camera and flashed two pictures of the papers.

Two days later Trish found Sasha in the cafeteria of their university. Sasha was sitting hunched over alone in a corner near the window. From the other side of the hall Madison waved at Trish and motioned her to sit with her, but Trish just waved back with a smile and walked straight towards Sasha’s table, to which Madison responded with a confused frown.

'Ever hear of Simon Victor Graves?' Trish asked while she took a seat opposite Sasha.

Sasha finished a bite and thought for a couple of seconds. 'Name rings a bell. Some sort of author from around here, right?'

'Yeah. Was never really big but he was a bit of a local hero about a hundred years ago. Wrote a few novels, contributed to The Roaming Evening, translated the works of foreign authors like Irvin Jensen into Dutch, that sort of thing. Where it gets weird is that he simply disappeared some time in 1916. Supposedly he lived isolated in the forest surrounding Roaming City.'

'Wait, you think that house we were at was his?' Sasha asked.

'I mean it doesn’t explain why those pages were referring to us by name, but it’s something, right?'

'So you mean rather than an elaborate prank, instead some guy who disappeared over a hundred years ago was writing about things that are going on with us specifically right now? I don’t know if that counts as any sort of explanation,' said Sasha.

'I know, that’s why I want to get to the bottom of it. Maybe we should get back there. There must be something that can help us make sense of all of this.'

'Every time we enter that forest, we find more messed up things and we end up leaving more scared than the last time. That creature might still be out there too.'

'Yeah, I am scared too, but we can’t ignore freaked-out stuff like this happening in our literal backyard.'

'I suppose you’re right,' Sasha sighed. ‘Man, I wish I had never left the bed that night.’

The next day after their final classes Sasha and Trish took the bus home, swapped their backpacks filled with university books for their recording equipment and made their way back to the thicket where they had found the house supposedly belonging to Simon Victor Graves.

The house was no longer there.

Regrettably at the time I could not entertain our guests as I had other business to attend to.

- S. V. Graves, Roaming City, 1908