I thought it would be fun to go back and reread
Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are, which I wrote for the Horror Writing Competition two years ago (f
uck me, does time fly), but quickly remembered that I wrote it before learning how to properly space paragraphs and dialogue. So for the approval of the Midnight Society, here is an edited version that'll hopefully be a little easier on the eyes. Plus, I got rid of some spelling/grammatical mistakes, and reworded a few things.
Ghosts Aren't Real, But Other Things Are (Edited)
A haze of cigar smoke filled the cabin, giving it a sickeningly sweet scent, as the men and women throughout the small but lavish compartment continued to talk and laugh in leisure. Memories were shared, drinks were spilled, and deals were made, while the rhythmic pattering of raindrops gave the party an audible white noise in the brief moments of silence. In her youth, Claudia had relished the chance to appear at such social gatherings, seeing them as a relaxing break from her work. However, she had realized a long time ago that keeping up appearances was a job in and of itself, one that became pure torment to a disillusioned mind.
The laughing, the constant smiling, the lies, the pointless repetition of the dance of self importance, all drained Claudia of the energy that in her youth had seemed naturally endless. And yet, whenever she caught herself mentally groaning at her situation, she couldn't help but smile. "Poor girl," she would mockingly say to herself in the mirror, as she made small white lines on the marble counter top of the bathroom sink. It had been years since she had last felt the grip of true hunger, but even at her parents lowest descent into poverty, she had always had a roof over her head, and opportunities to make money. Having to attend lavish parties, and now being able to live a life where her every whim was instantly satisfied, complaining was hardly something that she could explore without feeling like a fool that didn't appreciate what she had.
"D!" yelled Mike, her husband, from across the room.
Claudia hated when he called her that, and she shot him as disinterested of a glance as she could muster. The cigar in Mike's glowed as he dragged on it, before exhaling and vigorously waving her over, his face still red from laughing at a joke that must have been terribly funny. Though she dreaded the inevitable embarrassment that was to befall her, she eventually forced herself to walk over to his side, preparing herself to fulfill the nightly tradition of slapping him after being insulted. Such is the way of someone who has neither the courage to truly fight their benefactor, nor the cowardice to completely submit to them.
"D," said her husband as he set down his cigar, and placed his hand on the small of her back. "We were just talking about the time that you were in that 'car accident'. Remember?"
The fervent heat of anger and disgust rising inside her, Claudia restrained herself and nodded apathetically. In her mind, she once again saw the broken man with the clear green eyes. He appeared every time that the story was told, though in a way he was
always cast over all of her thoughts, like a thin but boundless shadow.
"Well, it was a Friday," Mike continued. "I remember, because I had played golf with Terrence that day, and we've made a habit of playing on Friday since the merger, about ten years ago. Anyway, it was late,
very late, just about midnight if I remember correctly. So there I am, watching some show about animals mating, when I get a phone call. It's D, of course. I mean, she's scared and talking so frantically that I barely recognized her, but I could
tell it's her, because she asked me for something. She
always asks me for something. 'You've got to help me,' she says. So I say, 'Hey, slow down. What's going on?', right? And she tells me that she's on Auxley Road, the stretch next to the cornfields, she's hit something with her car, maybe a deer, and she needs help."
Claudia remembered it all vividly, and every word that came from Mike increased her disgust. Not just disgust at him, but disgust at herself. She tried to subtly back away, but Mike grabbed the back of her dress, keeping her from leaving without struggling and putting on a show for everyone.
"So naturally, I was worried, and I got there as fast as I could, and, well..." he stopped to look up at her and smirk, before continuing. "It sure as hell wasn't a
deer that she had hit."
She tried to back away again, this time more forcefully, but his grip tightened. The two people listening to the story were either too drunk to notice her distress, or too set on not spoiling the evening to care.
"It was some
bum, just
lying there in a bloody heap," said Mike, before picking up his cigar with his other hand and taking another drag.
The man across from him laughed, and quickly said "That happened to
me, back in
Florida! They're
everywhere in the cities, and they just
jump into the street without any caution.
Fucking bums. I told you about that, didn't I? I
must have."
"Yeah," replied Mike, "I think you did, when we had lunch together on Tuesd-" He was cut off as Claudia pulled herself away from him, causing him to fall out of his chair before loosening his grip. "Oh, what's the matter, D?" he asked loudly, as he stood up.
"You're disgusting," she replied.
Mike laughed. "Let me guess, you blame
me for it, right? It's all
my fault.
Everything's my fault. If a
fucking meteor fell out of the sky and
destroyed the whole damn world, it'd be my fault."
"You think I
don't know that I fu
cked up? I
do. I think about it every fuc
king second of every fu
cking
day, trying to come up with some way, some scenario, where it's not my fault. Where it's
anyone else's fault. And I can't. I just fuc
king can't. But what I
don't do is turn it into some fu
cking gag to amuse a bunch of as
sholes that I
desperately want,
need, to be my friends, so I can pretend for a moment that I'm
not a lonely, vapid insect."
"Oh
fuck you. You see all of this? All of this glitz and glamour that you 'hate' so much? I earned it, every last piece of it. And guess what?
This is just
life. It may seem fake compared to your nostalgic little memories of the world, but it's the same sh
it you'll find anywhere. It's not my fault that you can't handle it. And you really
can't, because nothing I could ever do would ever make you happy, would it? Jesus, you had the money and the time to do whatever the hell you wanted to, and you turned yourself into a fu
cking coke whore. How the f
uck am I
supposed to react to that?"
In a flash, the nightly tradition was fulfilled. After slapping him, Claudia put on her rain coat and stepped out of the cabin. Mike laughed as he let his anger slip away, putting a cold drink up to the red mark on his cheek, and the party soon resumed as if nothing had happened. As she stepped out onto the deck of the yacht, Claudia was hit with a hot wave of spring humidity, and the rain began to soak her clothing and wash away her makeup. She didn't mind. She found a peculiar type of relaxation in taking a walk in the rain, so long as she wasn't caught in it unintentionally.
As she leaned on the deck's railing and stared out at the swelling waves, Claudia couldn't help but think about the broken man with the clear green eyes, and the way he looked up at her as she and Mike buried him in the woods. Though badly wounded, he was still alive when they put him in the ground, as they hadn't had the stomach to put him out of his misery, figuring that he would bleed to death soon anyway. Even after the dirt fell across his face and broke his gaze, he never stopped staring at her, and he never would.
After reflecting for a few minutes, Claudia blinked and cleared her nose as he came back to reality. Reaching into her coat pocket, she found a half-eaten bag of gummy bears. She smiled weakly as she took it out, and popped one into her mouth. She figured that it was a childish habit, and that they were probably horrible for her teeth, but she had loved them for as long as she could remember, and they always seemed to have a strange way of making her dark situations a little brighter.
As she started to chew, she put the bag back into her pocket and leaned on the rail once again, scanning the horizon. Before long, she noticed something moving amidst the waves in the corner of her vision. She took a closer look, trying to make out what it was. As it stretched itself up above the waves, Claudia could see that it was a human, and they slowly began to lift their arms as if signaling to her for help. Claudia ceased chewing, and her heart began to pound. She had never been particularly adept at keeping a clear mind during an emergency, and simply stood there and stared, as if hoping that this was all a daydream that would soon fade away. It didn't, and as the man began to struggle and wave more vigorously, Claudia came to the realization that someone had indeed fallen overboard.
Now sure, and with a mind heavy with guilt and desperate for heroics, she jumped over the railing and fell into the water. After all, the yacht was anchored, and the waves hadn't yet become strong enough to sweep her away. Still, she almost immediately regretted her haste. She should have told the others and grabbed a life preserver, just in case, but hadn't thought that far ahead. She had always made fun of people for acting irrationally in action and horror movies, doing things without thinking them through, and now that she herself had been forced to make a decision in a crisis, she could somewhat understand and sympathize with them.
As she swam towards the figure, a thought suddenly came into her mind.
Who was it that had fallen overboard, and
how? As far as she knew, nobody had left the cabin during the party, except for her. How could anyone have possibly fallen off of the ship? She also found it odd that they were simply splashing around helplessly in the waves. All of the party goers were perfectly able swimmers, and they easily could have returned to the anchored yacht and climbed the side ladder at their leisure. Could it be that someone from
another boat had been stranded? After all, they weren't terribly far from the harbor.
As she drew closer to the figure, swimming as fast as she could, she eventually reached them and threw her arms around them. It was then that she lifted her head above the water and looked at them, to see who they were. To her utter confusion, it wasn't a man
at all. She let out a gasp as she pushed herself away from it, her hands slipping against it's slimy skin. It seemed enough like a man from far away to fool someone in a panic, but it was void of details. It had no eyes, ears, or really any features at all, and seemed to be nothing more than a vaguely human shaped figure. Up close, it's 'arms' were more like tentacles with rudimentary fingers, and they had ceased their swaying.
Before Claudia could examine the strange creature further, she felt a surge of pain in her chest, before being pulled beneath the waves by some powerful force. Air bubbles poured from her mouth as she gasped, and looking down she saw some kind of large creature had sunk it's teeth into her, planting them firmly in her midsection. Terrified, she tried to free herself, only to find that she was not strong enough to pry open the monster's jaws. Oddly enough, in the heart of her panic and desperation, she couldn't help but feel like she had seen the monster before. It pulled her away from the water's surface, and darkness began to surround her as she started to pass out from the massive blood loss and her lack of oxygen.
As the last bit of light faded away, and her vision began to blur, Claudia took a final glance at the beast, and finally remembered where she had seen it before. When she was a child, she had owned a book about fishes, and she had never
quite been able to forget how terrified the picture of the angler fish had made her, a creature that had adapted to specialize in fooling and ensnaring it’s prey. For a moment, she wondered how long it had taken for this mysterious variant of the species to come into existence, developing alongside humanity since their earliest days, preying on swimmers along the coasts and dragging them to their doom. Her curiosity and fear soon faded away, along with her mind, as her vision became nothing more than darkness.
Linear Mode
