HONORABLE MENTION, Spring 2025
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY TIMOTHY ZIEGENHAGEN
When I was 11 years old, the regent said to me, “You need to get married. Being single is an evil life. As sultan, people look to you for an example.”
The regent was an old man who wore a blue wig piled up and shaped like a bowling ball on the top of his head. Sometimes, I thought I could see a narrow green eye wink open then snap shut through that hair. He wore long robes printed with colorful patterns that seemed to move when he talked. I once heard him call these patterns “batik,” and the robes fell all the way to the ground. My mother and father had gone the way of the shadows, and it was the regent’s job to make sure that people listened to me.
“I am too young to marry,” I said.
“Never too young,” said the regent. “Why, your parents were married before they were even born!”
“I never knew my parents,” I said, feeling a pang of regret, as always. Could you miss someone you’d never even known? I’d read about phantom limbs on the internet somewhere. Maybe my parents were like phantom limbs.
“Ah, your parents. Now that was true love,” said the regent. He called for my breakfast then, and the issue seemed settled. That’s what it was like to be a sultan: You waited for things, sat on thrones, read parchments sent from people you didn’t know, took a tour in the Mercedes, and waited for the dinner bell. It was not unpleasant.
Sometime after my twelfth birthday, an invisible girl started living underneath my bed. At night, she would come out and move things around in my bedroom. She would leave bottle caps on my nightstand and draw stick figures holding flowers in the frost on my windowpane. I always woke up at 3:00 a.m., and sometimes I could hear somebody humming old songs—lullabies—from under my bed. My desk drawers would open and close.
The regent found a princess and I became betrothed to her. The princess was 18 and very beautiful, and we spent a lot of time playing chess. My princess was very kind. I liked how she would palm a black rook in one hand and a white one in her other and have me choose a hand to know who would play the black pieces and who would play the white. She would come to my bedroom at three in the afternoon and we would order pizza and 32-ounce tubs of Coke. I never kissed her, not so much as a peck on the cheek—not in those early days, when we were only betrothed.
“When did you become a princess?” I asked her one day.
“When did you become a sultan?” she asked in return. Her hair was dark brown, like the wood of a walnut tree. Her eyes were the same color—warm earth.
“I was born a sultan,” I said. “My dad died in the wars. The regent says I was sultan ‘in utero.’”
“I haven’t always been a princess,” she said, her face looking a little sad. “I remember being just an ordinary girl, playing with dolls in a sandbox. I lived next to a parking lot overgrown with ugly weeds that had fat leaves. I found a naughty magazine there once.”
I nodded, not sure what a naughty magazine was, exactly.
“Then, one day,” she continued, “some men in black suits whisked me away in a limo. That morning, I had been thirty-ninth in the line of succession, and then . . .”
“Then you were a princess,” I said, finishing her sentence for her, like a sultan should.
The princess fell silent, pondering something without me. When it was time for me to go to bed, the princess read me a book, so that I could fall asleep to her words, which were like beads on a golden necklace—no, like gum drops she strewed on a path to make you follow her away from where the monsters lurked. She did this every night after that, and I told her that I wanted to tell her stories too, and she would sit on a chair next to the bed, listening to me as I told her tales about broken-down knights and djinn that lived lonely lives in the desert. I always fell asleep when I was in the middle of the story, and the next morning I would forget to relate the rest of it, but the princess never complained.
The invisible girl did not seem to like the princess. For a few weeks after my betrothal, the girl stayed under my bed and perhaps she kept quiet so that I would miss her. I did miss her, but then one morning she forgave me for the princess, and I woke up from dreams and I saw crayons scattered on the floor next to my bed. When I pulled wide the draperies, someone had drawn midnight blue swirls and pink flower-shapes on the window glass. The swirls looked like words, but I couldn’t read them. They looked like words from the future.
One day the regent said to me, “Do you think the princess is pretty?”
I could feel my face grow red. I didn’t say anything.
“She is dark, like your mother,” said the regent. He leaned closer to me, and I could feel his hot breath again, and I had the strange idea that, somehow, he was tasting me.
I held my silence.
“You need to give the realm an heir one of these years,” said the regent, putting his hand on my shoulder. He leaned close to my face and winked broadly at me, enjoying some joke. “A sultan without a child is nothing. We are all like gumballs in a machine. Even sultans. One day, someone sticks a penny into the slot, twists the knob, and we drop out of the world as though we never existed.”
Though I was very naïve and rarely left the palace, I knew that my country was suffering from a great withering. I wanted to talk to the people who lived in the streets of my city, but the regent said that a sultan should be wise, and that meant hiding himself away from the eyes of his subjects to read of the great deeds of ancient rulers. My ancestors were great warriors, and they led loyal armies into battle.
“How did my father die?” I asked the regent.
“You know that he died far away from this city, fighting in a land where people pray to the sky,” he told me. “They do not believe, as we do, that clouds are the souls of the dead who will return to the earth in the next rain.”
“Why do we hate these strangers, those who worship the blue arc above?”
“Because they killed your father,” said the regent, “and because your mother died of grief soon after. Someday, you will raise seven armies and make them believe as we do. Then you will rule shore, valley, and mountain. No one has ever ruled everything at once. Wouldn’t that be excellent?”
I told him that I didn’t know.
Most afternoons I would sit in the library between cliffs of books. As decreed by the silver tomes, I was allowed to consult with my subjects on certain sacred days. They would come to me for advice, and the princess said that even though I was only a child I should put my hand on top of their heads and bless them. “If you do that,” she said, “they will always love you, even when the granaries are empty from drought.”
“Will they love me if thieves travel the roads?” I asked.
“Not then,” she said. “A sultan can never rule wisely if his kingdom is full of thieves.” The princess gave me a look, one that I didn’t fully understand at that time. She wanted me to know something, but I was too young and couldn’t know it yet.
One holy day I was in the throne room, playing jacks with the princess. I was kneeling on the floor, and she was crouching next to me. The guards said we had a few petitioners, so I sat dutifully on the throne, smoothing my robe and sitting as straight and tall as I could. A man with no hands came to see me. His arms ended in two stumps. His hair was as red as an apple, and he had a round face and a fringe of beard at the chin that made his face look even rounder. He had bad breath, but I could tell the man with the stumps was a decent man. “I loved your father,” he said. He looked around, as though to see who might be listening to us, then he bent closer. “We fought together in the wars, your papa and me. You see what happened to my hands? We were in a terrible battle, and he saved my life.”
“Do you hate the men who took your hands?” I asked.
“The sky people?” he asked and shook his head. “No, they were just like us, those soldiers. I hate the one who sent us into that battle in the first place.”
“Did my father send you to battle?”
“Your father was a good man, but he was easily deceived by people he trusted.” He leaned closer still, almost whispering. “I have a message from your father to you. Don’t trust those who only seem to be wise but give bad advice.”
I nodded.
He leaned more closely, his voice as small as a feather. “There are those without hands, like me, but there are those without feet, and they’re worse. Not too long from now, you will be sent off to a war you won’t return from, and your son will be left alone, like you are. Only handless men are allowed to grow old in this world.”
The princess had heard all of this, and she gave the man without hands a gentle nod as he slipped back into the crowd.
That night the ghost child was louder than ever. She made knocking noises under my bed, and then she opened the closet door. For the first time, I felt afraid of her. She seemed to want something from me. I thought about calling the night guard, but he was an ugly man with a cut nose who reported everything to the regent. As I lay there, dread creeping into my heart, I listened to the windowpanes rattle, ever so slightly, and I could see ice scrawl in looping, crystalline shapes across the surface of the glass. This time there was no writing, only fanciful designs, a jumble of flowers, feathers, tentacles, mollusk whirls, and elephant trunks.
My bedroom door opened and the princess slipped inside. Immediately, the ghost fell silent. “I could sense you tossing and turning, even two floors and three hallways away,” said the princess. She touched my forehead to feel if I was running a fever. “Can’t sleep?”
I pointed to the window, to the shapes the ghostly girl had scrawled there. Though the icy forms were melting now, you could still see the lines, thickening as they defrosted. The princess went to the casement for a closer look. “Did you do this?” she asked.
“I told you! It’s the ghost! She drew those shapes!”
Her face grew dark, unreadable. The princess looked yet more closely at the frozen scrawls. “That’s a batik design,” she said. She held out her fingers, as though to trace what she saw on the glass, and her fingers trembled in the moonlight. “Strange, too. When I was downstairs in the weaver’s basement, they were making a robe using this pattern, I think for the regent.”
I waved for her to crawl into my bed. Perhaps we would be able to sleep together better than we could sleep apart. I wanted her to tell me a story. “How old is the regent,” I asked the princess.
She shook her head, crawling into the sheets next to me. “No one knows. He’s older than anyone in the realm.”
“No one lives very long in this land, I’ve heard it said. We almost always die before our time. The people who pray to the sky keep invading our outer provinces, every fifteen years or so. Their gods demand blood, or that’s what a general told me once.”
“We invade the land of the sky people, too,” the princess said.
I frowned at her. “That’s not very patriotic,” I declared, exuding the dignity of a sultan.
She shrugged then and seemed to concede the point. “I’m sorry.” The princess pulled the covers up around us.
“Someday, I’ll be a great warrior like my father. I’ll conquer everything that needs conquering.” I reached out and held her hand under the blankets, falling asleep as soon as my fingers wove their way into hers.
I turned 13, then 14, and then 15. Because we were betrothed, the princess and I continued to live together in the palace, innocently, like brother and sister. One day I went for a walk and I could see a bustle in the throne room. Men I didn’t recognize wearing three-piece suits and holding top hats stood gathered around the regent, who was standing next to the throne, with one of his long, paddle-like hands drooped over an armrest of that great chair. “But the plague,” said one man, a tall, thin man with a thatch head of hair like a haystack, “it’s gotten worse. There is no keeping it out anymore! What are we going to do?”
The other men clamored for the regent’s attention. They all talked at once, pounding their fists into their hands to emphasize their points. These men shook their beards and rolled their eyes. They were desperate to be heard. It was obvious to me that they were all terrified.
“The plague will pass,” the regent told them in a calm voice. “This disease only attacks the unkempt, the slatternly, and the morally perverse. Keep your houses clean and your belts buckled and you will have nothing to fear.”
The regent had not yet seen me. He paced from the throne to a nearby window and looked out. As he moved, his robes rustled and slid across the marble floor. He was wearing the same batik pattern that the ghostly girl had drawn on the window the night before. I felt my tongue and my throat go numb, and I realized that I too, like the men, was afraid. I thought about how the regent had walked across the room just now, how he always walked as though gliding, or undulating, from one space to the next. If those robes were somehow pulled free, I thought to myself, we might not see the shape of a man under there.
I stepped forward into the room. “I am the sultan,” I said, “so why wasn’t I informed of a plague?”
The regent was not facing me and, for the briefest moment, I thought I saw an orange eye open and then close within the strands of hair balled up on the top of his head. “Nothing to fear, my sultan,” he said, turning to address me. “This has been going on for months, and, like all things, it will pass.”
“But the witch, the witch who caused this!” said the thin man, “she’s not going anywhere! As long as she stays on the mountain, watching over this kingdom, the plague will keep going from hand to hand, mouth to mouth, and nose to nose!”
“Who is this witch?” I asked, “and when did she come here?”
“She came a few years ago, my sultan,” said the regent. “The peasants tell me that she has curdled every pot of milk pulled from every udder in that time, and every single ear of corn grows baby teeth, not kernels. The people have grown so terribly, so spitefully stupid that they are becoming a threat to our safety. Without a new war to occupy the poor, they grow restless, even dangerous.”
“Why haven’t I been told of this witch before now?” I asked.
The regent shrugged, then said, “What can be done? Witches are unfailingly ugly and you can’t reason with them. Once this plague abates—and it will, soon—we will go back to life as it always was around here. The sky people are causing trouble again. They are the bigger problem, you know. I will need to talk with you soon, my dear sultan, about raising a new army, one that you will lead into battle before long.”
I determined then and there to go climb the mountain and confront this being—to have it out with her one way or the other, as was required by my duty as sultan—but I wouldn’t tell the regent that. He wouldn’t approve of me going where he couldn’t watch me. In my heart of hearts, I knew he’d prevent my departure, so I told him I would be in the library and that I was going to read about witches. That’s what a boy would have told him, anyway, and in the regent’s eyes I was still just a silly boy.
I left the palace that afternoon, alone and on foot. I wrapped myself in a cloak just like secret kings always do in those old stories I read about in the library. The princess wanted to go with me but I played the sultan and told her that she had to stay safe in her room. I easily slipped through the palace gate, then into the city. All of the windows were closed shut, and people had painted their doors purple to ward off the plague. Before long, I was in open country. I passed through the farmlands north of the city, and these quickly gave way to fens, then higher ground. I trudged along until I came to the mountain where the witch was supposed to live, and I began to climb, like seekers always will. I hauled myself up, pulling at the knees of gnarled old trees. I banged my elbows on boulders that had seen a million sunsets. Finally, I came upon a dark, jagged opening in the mountain—perhaps a bear’s den, perhaps something else. When I had squeezed my way through, instead of falling into a cave strewn with bones, I tumbled into a living room, a very ordinary space with a couch, bookshelves, and tall windows that looked out over pleasant meadows. I heard a fire crackling and smelled cookies baking.
To my surprise, the witch wasn’t ugly. Nor was she particularly beautiful. She was sitting in a large leather chair, knitting, eyeing me closely. She was the kind of person whose face you might see once, or five times, or ten, then struggle to remember. Her magic, I realized without her telling me, was the magic of sunlight on a fallen leaf, or rain on the face, or of the cool shade on a hot day.
“That’s right,” she said, waving for me to sit down in a wicker chair opposite her, “I look like everyone. Or no one. Next time you see me, I will look differently than I do now. It’s all a moot point, this concern about appearances.”
My tongue didn’t move. I wanted to say something but only nodded.
“And in case you’re wondering, I didn’t cause the plague. What fun is there in plagues? Nasty things. People get so serious. I like a good laugh.”
I sat down, my voice still frozen. I wondered if I was bewitched somehow, but then she assured me that I was not.
“You’re just in awe,” she said, “and that’s natural. Nobody expects a witch to be so ordinary. That’s half of our power.”
Without further delay, she began to talk about the origins of things, of dreaming trees, of how people once grew from acorns, of how fire was angry because it was trapped so deeply under miles and miles of stone, of winged serpents that breathed flames and drank blood. As I sat there listening to the witch, my attention kept getting drawn away by the smell of those cookies, baking in the next room. I wanted milk and cookies, and to fall asleep in the wicker chair, but she told me that instead I had to do what all great kings and sultans did, which was to slay a dragon, to kill the worm that was making the land fester and rot. This dragon sat on a hoard of gold got by the cutting of throats and the strangling of orphans. “You know this dragon,” she told me. “You both do.”
“Both?” I said, confused.
The witch pointed to a chair five feet away and slightly behind me. There sat the princess. She smiled and gave a quick wave. I had no idea how long she had been sitting there, but she had followed me all the way to the mountain. Stealth always looked forward, never back, as the old adage went. I shouldn’t have been surprised: The princess was light on her feet. When we played hide and seek in the basement of the palace, she always found me quickly, even when I held my breath.
“That’s right,” said the witch. “That princess is light on her feet. She even took me by surprise, a little.”
“You can read thoughts,” I said to the witch, who was knitting steadily.
“What good would I be if I couldn’t?” she said. She sniffed at the air, as though trying to decide if those cookies were ready yet.
“But who is this dragon?” the princess asked.
“I can’t tell you,” said the witch. “I can’t utter its real name, but I can tell you the nature of the dragon, and that’s enough. She has been telling you about this monster, night after night after night. Your child, I mean.”
“My child?” I asked. “I’m only a child myself!”
“Yes, your child,” and she pointed at the princess, then at me. “The child you will have together, someday, the one who likes to draw on the window glass. She knows who the dragon is. I think that you do too.”
“What does this dragon do?” I asked.
“The dragon drinks and drinks,” said the witch. “It drinks blood. Men fight wars and the dragon fattens like a drunken leech. The dragon rolls a pair of dice, and then it asks you to go die for that number. And the worst part is, you all go so willingly. It’s always been that way. I don’t know why.”
She put down her knitting and went to the closet, where she pulled out a long, battered cardboard box stuck with colorful stamps from countries all over the world. The box had green stamps, blue stamps, red stamps, and rainbow stamps. From this box she withdrew a golden scimitar, the hilt jeweled with red rubies and green emeralds. This weapon, she told us, was the only thing that could kill the dragon.
“Is this for me?” I asked, carefully taking the sword from the witch. “And how should I use it?”
“With all snakes, you’re best striking off the head and doing it first thing. Don’t hesitate though. Snakes can hypnotize you if you delay too long.”
“Where did he go?” asked the princess.
The scimitar, it turned out, made its carrier invisible, but only if that carrier had never told a lie.
“Not even a white lie?” I asked, enjoying my invisibility. I stuck my tongue out at the witch, then at the princess. I felt lighter, like air. I swung the scimitar, and it rotated in a beautiful arc.
“White lies are the truth,” the witch told me, “everyone knows that!”
As we left the witch’s cave together, the princess and I munched on chocolate chip cookies, talking through crumbs about what would have to be done next.
That night, the princess crept down to my room shortly after the moon rose. I had stowed the scimitar inside a steamer trunk near the window, underneath a pile of old ripped and tattered sheet music for the piano. Until this point, the ghostly girl had only made a nuisance of herself when I was alone in the room, but now I began to hear again the taps under my bed. I looked over at the princess, and she was looking back at me with wide eyes. A book slid off my bookshelf. Then, the ghost girl began to draw on the windows again, the icy scrawls forming a new batik pattern, whorls and paisleys twisting wildly into rose petals and goldfish. Then she drew a dragon, with rat-like wings and a heavy tail spiked with the ace of spades.
“What is this?” said the princess, amazed.
“It’s the ghost, I told her. “She has always known the secret of the regent. He is the dragon, I’m certain.”
As soon as I said that, a smiley face appeared on the window.
The rest is easily told: I retrieved the scimitar from the steamer trunk and instantly vanished, leaving the princess alone in my room with the ghost—with our future daughter, I suppose I should say. The guard with the cut nose did not see me pass. He just stared at the wall in front of him, breathing in and out, flexing his fingers as though they hurt him. Feeling invincible, carrying moonbeam and mountain magic in my grip, I stalked the labyrinthine hallways towards the regent’s room—but he was not there. His bedclothes were crumpled in a mess, and a pile of leather-bound books had been scattered on the floor.
I decided to press on and find the regent wherever he was, and I passed by sleeping guards—young men with thin coconut-hair mustaches and old warriors with crushed feet and knees facing backwards—hearing my footsteps echo on the marble walls. I descended into the kitchens, where cooks lay dazed at wooden tables, drunk with wine, then poked into the gallery, hung with my ancestors, all dressed in gold armor, frowning, holding pikes and muskets. All of the men in these portraits were very young—boyish and cheery-cheeked—and they had the same old blood of sultans running through their veins. Our family had ruled a long time, sometimes wisely.
Not sure where the regent might be hiding, I continued searching for him, peeking into old closets, under the blue chapel, floored with ten-thousand pieces of lapis lazuli. I even climbed up the towers, following winding staircases that led me to the very rooftops of the palace. “Where is he?” I asked the stars, but they only blinked back at me.
Dawn was not far off when I finally found the regent in the throne room. He was sitting on the throne itself—a capital crime—dozing in the light of dying torches, sleeping dazed like a snake too full of the sun. I raised the scimitar to strike but as I stared at the white skin of his neck, so exposed and so vulnerable, I paused. I saw a pale yellow eye open in the bun of hair above the regent’s head; the eye watched me steadily, without blinking. Another eye opened, a blue one, then a green one, then an orange one. I heard a voice inside of my head: You are young, it said. Too young. Fall asleep, fall back into the womb. I will taste your blood as I tasted your father’s blood. I drink from every wound made by every sword.
Slowly, the scimitar dropped towards the ground. I had lost something, some vital momentum. I was just a boy again—a sultan, maybe, but still a boy. I didn’t know anything. I was unfit to rule, unwise and naïve, the voice told me, and I felt the spell settle into my body and through my will. My limbs grew heavy, and the scimitar seemed to weigh a thousand pounds—but I still gripped it fast. My head buzzed, flickering with skittering butterflies, as it does when the mind slips from consciousness into the pouches of slumber.
The scimitar was jerked from my hand, and I seemed to wake up. I was standing, numb and muddy-headed, 20 feet from the throne. The torchlight fluttered, casting long shadows in every direction. I could see the fingertips of dawn push up into the bottom of the stained glass window. Still, the regent slept, but next to him, standing tall and steady, was the princess. Looking very afraid, she held the scimitar at the height of a long stroke, and then she heaved the blade downward. With a thick snap, the regent’s head slipped forward and rolled crown over chin towards the door of the throne room. Briefly, his headless body rose up to a standing position before toppling forward with a thud. From underneath the hem of the robe a long serpent’s tail unrolled and then, after a few ticks and tocks of a pendulum, lay still. Oh how I loved the princess in that moment! She was a dragon killer! She was strong, and smart, and beautiful, everything a sultan—even a very lucky one—would ever want in a sultana.
After I grew to adulthood, the princess and I got married. We made peace with the sky people, and they were happy to send dignitaries to the wedding. Even the witch showed up—but we didn’t know who she was until she gave us a bowl of chocolate chip cookies. How the witch laughed when we finally recognized her.
“You sultans,” the witch cried, chuckling, “you always expect frankincense and myrrh as wedding gifts.”
“Cookies are better,” said the sultana, patting the witch on the shoulder.
A year later, our daughter was born. Sybella was beautiful and dark, like her mother. As she grew older, Sybella liked to take markers and draw horses, deer, and birds on the glass windowpanes. She would make elaborate batik designs there, so we started calling her Batik as a nickname. It suited her better than Sybella, anyway.
One day I asked my daughter, “Why do you always draw these designs?”
“What designs, Daddy?” she asked.
“These feathers, these shells. These wings.”
The sultana shot me a look. “Let children be children,” she said. “Everyone has to be young when they’re children.”
“I draw these shapes because they’re beautiful!” my daughter said.
I paused, tracing my fingers along the curves and parabolas she had sketched on the glass windowpane. “Do you remember when you first started drawing these figures? Do you remember the time before?” I asked.
She laughed at me. “I’ve always drawn them,” she said. “I can’t remember when I started!”
I decided to let the matter lie.
I loved my daughter so. She had a taste for raisins, like me, and when we ate pizza I took raisins and piled them on her slices. On sunny days, we drove the Mercedes to the river, bought ice cream cones, and watched the fishing boats dawdle along the shoreline. I was so happy I was ashamed of myself.
“We’re all going to be very old someday,” I told my daughter one sunny afternoon, when she kissed me on the cheek. “We’ll all grow old together!”
And we did.
____________________________________________________________
Timothy Ziegenhagen grew up in rural southern Minnesota and attended college at a small university on the prairie. He worked for a time as a bartender in a casino before going on to get a Ph.D. in 19th Century British Literature which, as he explains to his students, is the closest thing you can get to a degree in monsters. He teaches at Northland College, an environmental liberal arts college in Ashland, Wisconsin, and he lives within walking distance of Lake Superior. He loves observing the great lake’s many moods. His story, “Explorer,” was the winning piece in the Spring 2024 Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award competition.