Ghost, Writing

A little love story for Valentine's Day

Image credit: Canva

There are romantic stories written about tortured geniuses in cramped garret rooms, crafting tales that would one day make them famous.

Those stories could be about me. But that bohemian lifestyle is better on the page than it ever was in real life.

I spent my days penniless and alone. Whenever I came into some coin I immediately found the nearest den of inequity and spent it. Whenever I wasn’t alone, I might as well have been. My associates were all cads and wastrels.

I was often dirty, cold, or ill. Sometimes all three at once.

There was only one romantic thing about my life. One great romance that kept me going, fueling a fire in my soul when the world around me was bleak and dark.

I called her my muse.

She might have been a fairy or a goddess or simply a figment of my imagination. But besides supreme debauchedness, she was the one constant in my life. As real to me as the ash in the air, the ink on my fingers.

For her I would open myself up and let love and light flow from my veins directly on to the page.

With her I wrote rapturously of freedom, glory, and passion in all its forms.

Because of her I knew the words she inspired meant something.

They were words for the ages. Words that would live on after I died.

And death came, sooner than it might have had I lived a better life. There are only so many ways you can abuse your body before it breaks, and I indulged in them all, and then some.

When I died, I died in a gutter.

No, that is not an exaggeration. The idea of the broken, withered artist pale and lifeless in the street originated somewhere. And I am that unfortunate soul.

At least when I collapsed there, I could see the stars and imagine that I would be among them someday. A literary sun, shining from some distant time on the hearts and minds of future readers.

Yes, my life was hard, but I was certain my death would bring an apotheosis into the canon of great authors.

How I laugh now at that folly, that braggadocio.

Don’t get me wrong. Everything that I imagined would happen, did. My death was the catalyst of my fame. Students now study my words, academics write reams analyzing the themes I wove so carefully into each masterful tome.

But I can well and truly say that my afterlife, as the young people put it these days, sucks.

Yes, my afterlife sucks, and it’s all because of Chad.

Chad is a dastardly ne’er-do-well. A shirker and fake. If I still possessed my corporeal form what sweet revenge I should like to wreak on his ridiculously coifed head.

As it is, I am caught in his clumsy web. I am ensnared by some homespun witchcraft which he has worked. All it took was his family’s ill-gotten fortune applied toward the acquisition of a pen I once used, plus the muttering of some unholy words, and I found my spirit chained to a failed writer.

Now the words he writes are not his own, but mine.

Roused from my eternal sleep, I dream up worlds for Chad and characters to populate them. I fashion intricate plots for him with rich and layered meanings.

With me in his thrall, Chad is a nobody no more.

It’s not lost on me that perhaps I was no better than Chad. After all, without my muse what would I have been able to create? The difference is I acknowledged this. I appreciated her, thanked and paid tribute to her in whispered prayers and small offerings.

Most importantly, she was free to come and go as she pleased. To chain her down would have been unthinkable. She graced me with her presence, and I never forsook it.

Chad on the other hand, has me trapped like a genie in a bottle.

It was somewhere around the fifth book I penned for him when the idea struck me. I’m not sure why I didn’t think of it sooner. I might blame a decayed brain, I suppose, but I’m not one for excuses.

My muse.

Might she still visit me? And if she visited me, could she somehow break the spell?

It was worth a try. Anything to end this wretched existence.

When next Chad took up that infernal enchanted pen, I let the words flow as normal, the bastard nothing more than a conduit, an organic transcribing machine.

But instead of losing myself to the rhythm of the prose, I reached out to the aether. I called to my muse, that lovely, brilliant spirit. I begged her to grace this awful time and this vile space with her presence. I implored her to save me from the repugnant Chad.

I was met with silence.

Silence except for Chad’s heavy mouth breathing.

I was a fool to think she would come after these long centuries of neglect.

Hopelessness settled in my hollow chest. Despairing, I tried to stop, to keep the words to myself as I had so many times before, but Chad’s hand only paused a moment before plunging on. My practiced sentences filled the page, mere echoes of those my muse had inspired in me.

And then, suddenly, miraculously, they were something more.

The words weren’t echoes but her sweet voice entrusted to the page.

She was there.

Her graceful hand guided mine, and mine guided Chad's, and together we wrote ancient words that only my muse understood. No doubt they were magic. The magic I needed. Because when her hand left mine, I reached for it, longing to hold her for a moment longer. And, to my surprise, her fingers pressed mine in return and together we stepped free. Free from the pen, free from Chad, and free from the page.

Free. My muse and me.

We embraced and then, like all stars, celestial, literary, or otherwise, we faded away, lost to the promise of a new dawn.

---

This story was originally my contribution to February 2024’s

Fictionistas

Let’s Write Together event based on the prompt: Write about a book being ghostwritten by an actual ghost.

Looking for more tales fresh from the witch’s oven? Check out my other dark fantasy and horror stories here, including the contest winner, The Echo of Gods.

Or maybe you’re in the mood for something a little longer? My serialized novel, Dark as Dawn, Bright as Night, is a literary fantasy with elements of horror, and you can find all the episodes here!

And if you’re all in, go ahead and subscribe below!