An short audio horror story The Trunk by Joe Stanley
Tag: The Ghostly World
The Storm Ghosts (Audio Version)
Here is the audio version of The Storm Ghosts, a short monologue from The Field Guides to the Ghostly World.
for written transcript see post here The Storm Ghosts
The Ghostly World Journal
by John Riley
When old of age and looking into the glass and see but a little of what I was, and know that ahead in time and season would if I could make the world a little younger.
For I shall not have walked alone in reflective mind and taken that path of rock and stone.
Hello again, that we meet on a day of such brightness that without conversation without announcement, I know of your spectral presence.
For in this morn of spring, the awakening of dawn, I, bound, with the bleakness of a winter’s season, searching for shelter, that I might find but one moment.
Would it be better to have given another, who could have lived and expressed love in ways I denied? For why not have set me with a heart of ice than a heart that feels and knows pain. Better that, I not feel a life of loneliness.
That I wander through this life as a phantom existing beyond your threshold. That we at times might see of one another and brought close to know one another. Yet the truth remains, we are but long seasons apart and you destined to love another.
A familiar refrain that I greet you, the darkness, and talk with you again.
-end-
The Ghostly World Journal
by John Riley
A HAUNTING CURIOSITY NEVER MORE then a moment away from you, ebbing and flowing until at last reaching out to steal your life that I may continue in this living damnation. Would you not, if I were to ever give you the chance to, sink that rising hope of intention deep beneath and send me to oblivion?
The pull always comes from the tagline, some wasted heart on display and this shadow out prowling again might be a half remembered stranger.
A fog sends the lost into a new dawning week laden with greyness and threatening outside steel sharp showers gathering while eternal life is like a winter feeling locked without a key.
Some may say a Peeping Tom, maybe once, safely cruising alone those old haunts in a sea awash with pollution and the fallen may be desperate seeking solace from a broken lost belief.
Well it may be waste to parade a life laid bare astride an old ash tree born twisted and a wreck under waves of rain while a bone coloured luminary slips between sheets of cloud and love comes in a loud scream nailed hard against the wood.
It’s time to close down secrets for there are greater ones in here and time to see out the winters in murky laden bars fighting a good fight for heart and mind against those half-forgotten prayers your kin told you against a dark phantom of the night.
I seek a moment’s grace for my time ended and leave you to seek out your own truths.
-end-
The Ghostly World Journal
by John Riley
Sometimes a situation happens upon one, refusing to remain buried. It haunts both day and night.
I’m sure when awakening during the early hours of the new day and it still dark, I’m sure someone knocked on my front door. The essence of the disturbance remains long after the reverberation faded. I’d say I’m waking up just after the measured knock upon the wood, but I never hear it, just know that it has happened.
This is a recent manifestation.
You see I’ve had need to walk a lane at night. A lane very quiet, spooky and certainly dark along its length.
I’ve made the journey for over ten days now, the first week uneventful but the last few nights, felt quite a different experience.
I have the awareness of someone walking alongside me when I am returning home. I should say walking silently and to the left of me. Close enough that in my state of increasing nervous anxiety, I have to look. I’m ready for someone to appear, not that there is anybody with me. My stride quickening when the realisation upon me, and the atmosphere noticeably sharpens at this point, an inner voice urgent in its insistence to return home and safety.
I’m rather regretting the favour asked of me. You see the householders, requesting my time, are attending to some business out of town. It a strange wish, but knowing me as they do, I understand why they asked.
They wanted me to keep a vigil over a closed coffin in their house. A relative unable to recover from a recent illness had sadly passed away. I did know of him, only briefly. We use to swap the latest moan before I’d be on my way up the hill. He came across as a well travelled man and someone knowing things that perhaps we cared not to know about, certainly a man harbouring secrets.
My routine over these last days is to arrive just before nine in the evening and on the last occasion; I felt such sadness in the place that I’d taken fresh flowers to lighten the mood of the room. As I am the only one with a key, I usually quickly check around the place. There’s nobody else with access to the house so I consider it prudent to make sure all is secure.
In the silence, I sit at the side of the coffin and read a short hand written piece that he liked and had penned himself. It was amongst his writings, much as he left them and I always return the piece of parchment to his desk.
I even asked if he was walking me back down the lane. After all, he never wanted to be alone, hence the request. Even at the end he wanted the company of another to be with him. Perhaps if he was watching me home, maybe he could do so but not be so obvious.
There is one thing to mention. The other morning, after disturbed from the knocking on the door, I noticed an envelope had been pushed through the letterbox, hand delivered by the look of it. When I took out the parchment I recognised the writing, from the self-penned verse I read out aloud at the coffin. It was a simple handwritten note – Thank you for reading and watching over me. The flowers are lovely.
-end-