Ghost Writer

By Crystal Jordan

The moon loomed big and bright over the old Victorian mansion on Beeker Street. The light from the full moon bounced off the sharp angles of the building, throwing long, eerie shadows over the freshly manicured lawn. Ezra Ward gazed up at his new house through the wrought-iron fence surrounding the property, his supper cooling in the brown paper bag held by his side. The windows of the home were dark and empty, resembling nothing so much as the eye sockets of a skull. As he pushed open the fence’s gate, it gave a loud whine of protest.

Upon entering the house, Ezra paused for a moment in the darkened foyer. The grand staircase stood directly in front of the door, its banister spiraling upward to the second floor in a graceful crescent. The newel posts at the base of the banister were intricately carved to resemble serpentine dragons. To the left of the staircase was an archway leading to the parlor. To the right sat an identical archway that led to the kitchen. After a handful of seconds passed in silence, Ezra reached over and flipped on the light switch, bathing the foyer in bright, incandescent light. He turned right, into the kitchen, and began rummaging around in the cupboards, searching for a clean dish. The majority of his dinnerware sat, unwashed, in the stainless-steel sink. Emerging triumphant from the cupboard above the microwave, Ezra grabbed the paper bag, opening it up and dumping his kung pao chicken and fried rice onto the plastic plate that prominently featured the face of a famous cartoon character.

With food taken care of, he rushed up the stairs to the cavernous library on the second floor, ready to get back to his writing. His computer sat in the middle of a massive oak desk along the wall of the room. To either side, and in fact along every available inch of wall that was not taken up by windows, portraits, or other such wall décor, sat floor-to-ceiling bookcases. These bookcases were filled to the brim with all manner of books, from modern romance to true crime to antique first editions. They even featured the hardware for a rolling ladder, although the actual ladder was long gone. Instead, there was a six-foot-tall step ladder folded up in the corner of the room, waiting to be pulled out to reach the top shelves.

Ezra sat at the desk, booting up his computer and opening his word processor to begin writing. He was in the midst of writing his sixth novel and had experienced several hiccups along the way. Specifically, he had been plagued with severe writer’s block. He had hoped that moving into this house would provide a cure for it. So far, he had been right as he had written more in the past two weeks than in the previous two months. That night was no different. He sat at the desk to start writing at exactly eight, right as a vicious thunderstorm rolled into the town. Several hours later, he was still there, typing away as lightning flashed in the window behind him. However, at this point in the night, his eyes had grown heavy with exhaustion. Eventually, he slumped forward, his head landing with a thump on the desk as he fell asleep.

***

A consistent, rather annoying, knock pulled him from his dreams. He groaned as he stood up from the chair, his bones aching from the night spent slumped over the desk. Glancing down at the gold watch perched on his wrist, he discovered that it was ten in the morning. Likely, he only got five hours of sleep the previous night.

On the way down from the second floor, he passed by several large portraits hanging from the walls. They had come with the house and, according to his real estate agent, were paintings of the original owners of the home. Radcliffe was the surname, if he remembered correctly. When he arrived downstairs, he turned the lock on the oak front door and swung it open to discover his elderly neighbor, Mrs. Bianca Bellerose, on his front porch.

“Good morning, Mrs. Bellerose. How can I help you?” He asked her, blinking his eyes as the brightness of the day overwhelmed them.

“Good morning, Mr. Ward. I was wondering if you might have a moment to stop by today and have a look at the faucet in my downstairs bathroom. It’s leaking again,” Mrs. Bellerose said, her high-pitched, nasal voice ringing unpleasantly in Ezra’s ears so soon after having awoken.

“Didn’t I just fix that faucet last week?” he asked, confused.

“Yes, but it is leaking again, and you know my poor husband can’t fix it himself,” she responded.

“Alright,” Ezra sighed, exasperated by the neediness of his neighbor. If he did not like her so much, he would have stopped agreeing to do manual labor for her a long time ago. “I’ll stop by after lunch, if that works for you.”

Mrs. Bellerose thanked him and turned to walk down the wooden steps to the concrete sidewalk. On the final step, however, she turned around. “By the way, when am I going to meet your wife? I saw her through the windows late last night, walking around your parlor.”

“Wife? I don’t have a wife, Mrs. Bellerose.”

“Well, of course you do! Like I just said, I saw her in your parlor last night. She was wearing a long, old-fashioned nightgown. Very traditional.”

Not wanting to contradict the old woman a second time, wondering if perhaps she was late for a visit to the ophthalmologist, he simply wished her well and watched her walk off down to the sidewalk to her own home next door. He swung the door closed and turned around to head back up to the library.

Once there, he sat down at his computer and turned it on, opening his document to the place where he had left off the previous night. Confusion went through him as he looked at what had previously been written. It was a horrific description of the murder of a girl named Mercy Clark. Not entirely out of the realm of something he would write, but the problem lay in the fact that he could not remember having written it. His mind flashed back to Mrs. Bellerose and the woman she said she had seen inside of his house. He thought about it for a moment, wondering if someone had broken in to leave this disturbing passage in his novel. He quickly dismissed that idea and decided that he had written it while he was falling asleep and that was why he did not remember it. Deleting the paragraph, he got back to work on his story.

However, the next morning, the passage was back in his manuscript. And the next morning after that. And the one after that. Every time, there was slightly more information present in the paragraph. In the first, the description of the murder itself was rather vague. By the third night, the murder was overwrought in its descriptions, featuring a vivid account of a  wood-chopping axe and the severing of a spine. As the nights progressed, so did the story.

Ezra stopped leaving the house. He stopped returning phone calls. He barely slept. His mind was fixated on this story that kept appearing over and over again on his computer. No matter how much time he spent searching for mentions of a woman named Mercy Clark who lived in this town, in this very house, nothing came up. There was no sign of her having existed at all. The only sign was this story.

On a blisteringly hot summer morning in July, about a month after the passage began appearing in his manuscript, Ezra sat down at his computer. On the screen, the whole story was finally laid out for him. The text cursor in his word processor slowly blinked in time with the beat of his heart as he read it. According to the mysterious hand who was typing these words (Ezra had concluded that it was the ghost of Mercy herself, although he would never admit it), Mercy’s body was bricked up in one of the basement walls. Even though it was unclear which wall in the basement supposedly housed the dead body, Ezra went out the next morning, for the first time in weeks, and bought a sledgehammer from the local hardware store.

When he arrived home with the sledgehammer, he went down to the basement and began to methodically punch holes into the walls. After the hole was punched through the brick, he shined a flashlight into the gap and peered around behind the wall. Each one was empty. Finally, he got to the final wall. At this point, Ezra was considering whether he had gone mad. This was the kind of behavior that got you forcibly admitted into a mental hospital. Regardless, he approached the wall and calmly swung the sledgehammer. After a few minutes, the hole was wide enough for him to stick the flashlight in. On the dirt floor behind the wall lay a skeleton, its spine split in two.

Category: Featured, Fiction

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