Illustration by Andy Paciorek
HONORABLE MENTION, Spring 2024
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY JACK SANGER
This is how I remember it. It was toward the end of 2025. The property was everything I wanted in a new house. It was designed to be off-grid, with wind turbines, solar panels, thermal pumps, the lot. It looked like it was made entirely of glass, and at the touch of a button, it could have any of its transparent walls turn as smoky as the windows in a Mafia Mercedes. The interior and extensive exterior enjoyed boundaries that sort of bled into each other so that inside was outside and vice versa. You never felt imprisoned. What else? Oh, right down to its last physical centimetre, it was impervious to data mining. A private world of light and shade, firewalled from the prying, probing proboscis of Big Government and its multi-national co-conspirators.
So when my sole remaining parent died, leaving me his 19th century London terraced house, I was quids in. I sold it for a fortune and bought into this new gated community of zero carbon, hi-tech sustainability beside a picturesque lake. I was in clover both literally and metaphorically.
I moved in, opting for a kind of brutal minimalism. Clutter was the past. Sleek lines, bare, hardwood floors and built-in cupboards were everywhere. Its encrypted intranet enabled it to learn and adapt to my habits. It enfolded me in its personalised, unique modernity. I loved it. I needed no human companionship.
Then I had the setback. I don’t remember too much about it. The office party. I know I can be obnoxious. I was diagnosed early as being far along the scale but I was not hired for my manners. I admit I was a bit worse for a few. I started bad-mouthing yet another of the girls who refused my offer of a date. Her new boyfriend took it badly. We went outside to sort it out. We ended up rolling around on the road until a taxi braked on the ice and skidded over us. That much I remember. Afterwards everything melted into nothingness and I was floating in it.
I suppose I must have been in some kind of coma. It could have been days. It could have been years. Floating in a disembodied half-life. At some point they must have discharged me. I was back in the house feeling as though my mind was still in a soup, going through the motions. Trying to piece my life together.
Then the manifestations began. It was jaw-smacking. I woke up the first morning and went downstairs to find the framed line drawings I’d bought at an art college end-of-year show removed from the wall and piled on top of each other in the corner of the room. I must have stared at the scene in jelly-legged horror for several minutes. Of course I checked the closed circuit TV for intruders but they revealed nothing. Kitchen and shower taps started turning themselves on and off. Then, the house lighting defied its learnt behaviour. Fortunately, the opaque setting for the external walls remained intact, otherwise anyone walking their dogs might have seen me in my preferred naked state as I moved from room to room doing my business. I saw little reason to wear clothes in a perfectly modulated climatically controlled environment.
I must still have been suffering from mental meltdown. I heard voices inside my head like a bizarre form of tinnitus. Almost constant. It was as if the ghosts—for what else could they be?—were cruelly teasing me.
“Haunting” became my word for it. The house had become possessed. A typical example: I was grinding coffee, and when the grinder finished, in the sudden silence I heard two children, maybe seven or eight years old by the sound of them, on the charge, pounding down the stairs. I couldn’t make out what they were shouting but their high-pitched squeals and raucous laughter were clear enough. Then I heard an older voice, which sounded like it was trying to quieten them. But, weirdly, they only shut up when I managed to find my own voice and yelled fuck off at them. I heard them running off, crying.
How could you live with it? I can hear you thinking. Weren’t you shit scared? Yes, I was at the beginning. But I was getting used to it and there didn’t seem to be a threat to my person, only my psychological state. Also, it was my bloody house. I wasn’t going to be fazed by bloody ghosts.
Everything rose to an even more ominous level one evening. It was a Friday night and I had stripped off, rolled a joint and put on a new heavy metal album.
I got high quickly and, feeling a certain pouting bravado, began dancing. By the third track I had just begun to pant and sweat when the system abruptly shut down and the lights went off. It was pitch dark. As my eyes became accustomed to it, a sort of phosphorescent glow grew brighter beneath the sitting room door. The door swung open and I could just make out a woman dressed in shiny one piece metallic grey fabric, half silhouetted against flooding light. Her face wasn’t at all discernible. Just a blob. She was waving a baseball bat and two children were half hiding behind her. Her yell was muffled. Then the door shut and the lights came back on with the third track again blasting full volume. It really freaked me out. I came down to ground zero a lot faster than it took to get high, I can tell you.
It was this encounter that finally convinced me I should do something radical. The question was, what. The traditional course would have been to hire a priest to perform an exorcism. But I’m an inveterate atheist and to do that would have thrown my entire sense of self into disarray. What a come-down. I could also invite in some ghost hunters to camp out in the house with all their specialised gear. Or I could take the spirits on, solo, with my own battery of improvised and acquired weaponry.
I opted for the latter.
It was hard for me. I couldn’t focus. I was in a constant daze. The ghosts seemed all around me. Somehow I bought, on-line, a kind of apparition-registering geiger counter with coloured lights that switched from white to red, the nearer a spirit approached. Also—at great expense—the Phasm Cam, a 4K full spectrum and night vision recording camera for ghost hunters. I bought a silver cross on a chain to hang round my neck, since this was just between me and the ghosts and no-one else would know how pathetic I was, wearing it. I readied a bag of salt to pour into a circle so that I could stand inside it for protection. Lastly, I printed out an invocation in Latin from the Internet to send the spirits back where they came from.
It seemed possible to me that I’d be able to goad them into manifesting themselves. My plan hinged on the fact that they seemed to appear whenever I made a lot of noise.
So on went the sound system. Loud. I started dancing like a dervish. All my ghost equipment was laid out on the table. My naked body started to throw off sweat. Finally, the door opened a crack. I turned on the Phasm Cam and aimed it, checked the geiger counter, and gripped the cross between thumb and forefinger.
The door swung wide. For the first time I could see them clearly. A woman, waving an incense holder and calling out in Latin: Vade retro satana vade retro satana, entered the room. Her two children followed, holding up crosses as if they were processing after a priest. At that moment all my equipment disappeared. The sound system went silent. I could feel myself drifting, losing my grip on reality. The last thing I heard was the woman laughing a bit hysterically, saying, “We did it. We got rid of the ghost. He’s gone. He’s gone.” Their voices faded as they continued chanting over and over, Vade retro satana. . . .”
And I was sliding back again into that terrifying state of nothingness, losing my thoughts, my very reason and being forced to let go of my one love—the house. . . .
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Jack Sanger was born in India during the Second World War, and he is 80 years old. His career has seen many changes: social worker, teacher, director and professor of a UniversityResearch Centre, and now a writer of fiction: novels, poetry, and plays. He lives in Vernet les Bains, a beautiful mountain town in the French Pyrenees once frequented by Rudyard Kipling. He has traveled and worked in over twenty countries, including Uzbekistan, Russia, Bulgaria, Canada, Ghana, and much of Western Europe—experiences that have fed his prose. His beliefs involve a humanitarian regard for equality, fairness, and the development of critical consciousness in all humanity. His fiction—social, historical, science, comic, and horror fiction—can be found on Amazon Books. Learn more about Jack and his work by visiting his website: www.jacksanger.com