12 spooky vignettes

Belfast-based author Stuart Neville has been running a contest this month, challenging his readers to produce some ghostly micro-fiction for Halloween, via Twitter. Apparently this means that you're limited to 124 characters (including punctuation and spaces). I suppose I should have given this a shout-out earlier, sorry; but the submission deadline is midnight GMT on the 31st October, so there's still plenty of time for you to have a go, if you feel so inclined. Follow the link above for full details. Although I was intrigued by the format, I disapprove of Twitter rather violently. Blog-buddy JES very kindly forwarded a couple of my efforts (the first two below) via his own Twitter account, but I didn't want to bother him any further. However, at the start of the month, I found myself knocking out one or two of these a day, in idle moments. As with haiku, once you get the knack of the format, they're relatively easy. So, here are 12 micro ghost stories, to get you in the mood for Halloween. (I'm not a big fan of the holiday myself, but I don't begrudge others their goosebumpy pleasures.) [Stuart's debut thriller has recently been published, as The Twelve in the UK, and the rather more self-explanatory The Ghosts of Belfast in the US: an extremely well-written but disturbing tale of an ex-IRA man haunted by the spectres of those he has killed - see JES's review here.] What drew him to that dreary graveyard day after day, he never knew until at last he found the stone with his name on it. The perfect man, she thought. He walked her home. They kissed by moonlight. And then he showed her the spot where he died. He couldn't help himself. Every day he drove down that street, the little girl always waiting to run out in front of him. I watch myself across the street, under the lamp-post: the man who looks like me, my mirror-self escaped, following me. Suddenly, the hitch-hiker has vanished, yet the seat beside me is wet with rain. She stalked him in life, and now too in death, his jilted mistress. Suicide did not end her obsession. The barman's in a mood: ignores us regulars, chats only to these new guys, says things haven't been the same since the fire. It puzzles him. He buried his wife in the basement last year, but she still sits there on the sofa every night watching TV. Vengeance is what he wants. Though the men who killed him are themselves long dead, he still thirsts for vengeance. Each dawn I see him, the sentry standing down, lighting a cigarette – just as he did a week ago, when the sniper saw him. We stopped using the departure lounge at Gate 22 after the crash yesterday; but when I walked past just now, it was full. 'One careful owner' the salesman said. He didn't tell me she gassed herself in this car. Now she bitches at my driving.