The singer sat in his dressing room and listened to the opening act. He tried to ignore the rumbling in his gut that said his best years were over, but he felt washed up. Nobody bought albums anymore, and he couldn’t feel the energy of the crowd like he used to. He heard the cheering, but the audience felt farther away. But if he was at the end of his career, he always promised himself he would go out with a bang instead of fading away. So he went out and gave the best performance of his life, every night.
The necromancer’s apprentice stood in the graveyard, watching her sift through the detritus of centuries. He would hand her tools as she performed arcane rituals, and jotted down the results. Just before dawn, he reburied the bodies and locked the gates behind them. Back in her lair, the necromancer looked over his notes approvingly. “A profitable night’s work.” “But what did you do?” He asked. He’d expected to be raising armies and cowing shades. This was almost boring. She sighed, disappointed. “Some secrets do not pass when the spirit leaves, but are known in the bones. And now they’re mine.”
Each evening, as the Sun set, she hung a lantern over the gate. The soft white light could be seen for miles, and it always brought him home, riding after dark with whatever he had hunted or foraged in the wilds. Until the night that the storm blew the lantern down, and he didn’t return. The search party found him days later, swept away by the flood. During the funeral, she said sat very still and said very little. That night, she repaired the lantern. She hung it over the gate again, hoping its light would guide his spirit home.
They had a system, but they were still going through cat food too quickly. Every morning he would get up, feed the cats, and mark the chore done on the whiteboard before leaving for work. She worked night shift, and checked the board when she got home. In the evening, they would repeat the sequence. Each wanted to talk to the other about it, but they had so little time together that it always slipped their mind. It wasn’t until the caught the cat with a streak of ink on his paws and tongue that they realized were being tricked.
When the creature rose from the sea and rained destruction upon our cities, it was called a punishment from God. And how could it not be? Nothing we threw at the giant beast could stop it. But it was a new form of life. and there is always a scientist somewhere with more curiosity than sense. When we finally paused in fighting or running, she confirmed it was just an animal, driven out of its territory by deep sea drilling. After that, it was only a matter of time before we figured out a way to guide it back home.
X’lart sipped his admittedly decent hot drink and glared at the crowds. So much for his ‘wilderness planet vacation.’ His disguise was holding up, or at least nobody was staring at him. He pulled up his guidebook and reread Earth’s entry. ‘The Planet shows hints of intelligent life, but no civilization.’ The publisher’s data was about a million years out of date, probably harvested from public astronomical data. He’d wanted to go camping on a truly undeveloped planet. Maybe Mars would be nice this time of year. He dropped his empty cup in the trash and headed for his spaceship.
The Pumpkin Ghost slithered through the night on withered, spectral stalks. It was Jack’s shadow, made of everything that was thrown away: The stringy, seed-speckled entrails, the sawed out shapes of nose and eye and grinning mouth. It demanded that everything forgotten get its due. It sought to be whole again. But as it surveyed the neighborhood, it saw the sinking shapes of rotting fruit, smashed or half-eaten by squirrels. It saw strings of lights set out for the next holiday. It realized forgetting is a cycle. As it fit itself awkwardly back into rotting shells, it yearned for revenge.
He’d been bitten and turned in the 1870s, long before Stoker’s torrid little novel. He’d met the man, and remembered him as passably handsome, but not nearly as charming or clever as he supposed himself. Now the dead mortal got all the credit and he was left a pop culture cliché. It infuriated him. The worst part was, he wanted to change. The world had progressed, but he could not. It was full of wondrous things he’d never understand. His death had trapped him like a fly in amber. Now, he would never be anything more than a Victorian Vampire.
He didn’t realize the old book he picked up from the consignment shop was a ghost until he brought it home. But that night he was kept awake by the sounds of creaking leather bindings and rustling yellow pages. A story lives when it is told, and can leave a ghost behind when it’s forgotten. He couldn’t bring himself to destroy a book, so he tried to dump it in a free little library. The book was back on his shelf the next day. He realized the story wasn’t malevolent, just lonely. So he built an archive for it instead.
The Jolly Scarecrow perched upon his pole and looked out across the valley. Everything was calm and still. No screaming crows or ravens perched on the corn. No scurrying rat skulked among the wheat. No buzzing locust descended upon the vines. Everything was perfect. When rain fell, fat and heavy and black with soot, it knocked the unharvested apples from the trees, where no intruder plucked them from the ground. Since the noise and fire on the horizon, no humans came in their noisy machines to cut down stalk and branch. All was as it should be. The scarecrow beamed.
Hugh J. O'Donnell 