HONORABLE MENTION, Fall 2025
The Ghost Story Supernatural Fiction Award
BY GERARD J WAGGETT
The night I met Sean Hicks, I was a tall blonde with bright blue eyes and long red fingernails. I was sitting alone in a hotel bar, sipping at a glass of chardonnay, waiting for what I did not know until I heard his thick Boston accent.
“Have you registered those nails as lethal weapons?”
It was a line, but not one I’d heard before.
I did not care for the pairing of white athletic shoes with the black suit, especially not on a man in his thirties. The hair dye was not fooling me. My eyes could discern natural black from store-bought. My eyes could also see into the future. Like so many humans I had observed over the years, the man’s pretty boy features would not age well.
We chatted for just a few minutes. He had stopped in for a quick beer before his hockey game—“But maybe I could get your number.”
“Do you believe in fate?” I asked.
“To a degree,” but not to a degree he had time to discuss. His teammates were waiting.
On his way out, he paused at a table near the front door. Within minutes, he was exchanging business cards with the young woman seated there.
The following night, I decided to try my luck as a brunette. My hair, now midnight black, curled in at the shoulders. I had darkened my eyes to the deepest brown imaginable. Then I added a beauty mark just beneath the left one. My eyebrows, bold brushstrokes of black, I shaped into hockey sticks.
I spotted Sean in a restaurant around the corner from the hotel. He was sitting at the bar. He had positioned himself on a corner stool, the perfect vantage point for surveillance.
While he was eyeballing a redhead three stools away, my nails sliced through his line of vision.
“I took your advice,” I told him. “I registered these as lethal weapons.”
“Have we met?” he asked.
“Last night,” I replied as I settled myself onto the stool beside his. “You tried to explain how playing hockey helps you sell real estate.”
He remembered the conversation—“But that woman was blonde. And her eyes were blue.”
“My eyes are blue.” And just like that, they were.
He leaned in for a closer look. “How’d you do that?”
“My family is descended from The Morrigan.”
Being an American, he had no idea what that meant.
I told him, “You really should read up on your Celtic folklore.”
“I know all about banshees.” That did not surprise me. What did surprise me: “I heard one crying the night my grandmother died.”
“Most humans cannot hear the banshee until she is wailing for them. You must be a very special man.”
The man liked hearing that.
“So tell me about this morgan,” he asked.
“Mor-ri-gan, The Morrigan. She is the goddess of war, death, and fate. She can transform herself into any living creature she chooses. Being descended from her is how I can make my eyes . . .” And just like that, they were brown again.
“That’s one hell of a trick,” he said.
“It’s not a trick. It’s a family trait.”
To accentuate my point, I placed my hand on top of his thigh. When he looked down, he counted seven fingers.
Sean lived a short walk from the restaurant. He had recently bought himself a condominium in one of those obscenely tall high-rises. The place listed for 2.2 million, but he had negotiated the price down to 1.6.
“That’s my magic power,” he said.
In the elevator, I reintroduced Sean to the tall blonde from the night before. The transformation caught him off-guard—”Holy Fuck!”—but once he regained his composure, he was very happy to see her. He appreciated her long legs. His right hand appreciated them all the way up to just under the hem of my skirt, which was now a mini.
Sean lived on the fifteenth floor. His bedroom was illuminated by an aquarium built into the wall. The tropical fish swimming back and forth added the only splash of color to his otherwise grey surroundings.
I pointed at a rainbow shark and asked, “What is this one’s name?”
Sean told me, “I don’t name them.”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because they’re just fish.” He said this as though the answer should be obvious.
“What’s my name?” I asked.
Sean Hicks, Hickey to his friends, could only remember, “It begins with an L, and it’s very pretty.”
“Lorna,” I reminded him. “My father was from Scotland, and he was even more of a rake than you.”
Sean took that as a compliment.
He insisted upon helping me undress. By the time he removed the last of my undergarments, my hair had turned as red as autumn leaves ready to fall. My first time with a man always needed to happen in my virgin body.
During the frenzy that followed, my fingernails grew two inches without my realizing. They wreaked havoc across Sean’s back. In more than a few spots, they had drawn blood.
While I applied iodine to the cuts, I promised him, “I will watch myself in the future.”
The scratches had not bothered Sean, but word “future” unnerved him. He stood up and stepped away from the bed. Then, in the most serious of tones, he warned me, “I don’t have the best track record with women.”
I reminded him, “I am not a woman.”
“But you do very good imitations,” he said.
“I have been working on them a long time,” but I would not reveal how long.
And he was gentleman enough not to ask.
A silver frame was sitting on top of the dresser behind him. The young woman standing beside him in the picture was quite pretty with long brown hair and wide blue eyes, the typical All-American girl next door.
I asked, “Is she part of your bad track record?”
“She’s my fiancée,” he said, then corrected himself, “my ex-fiancée. We broke up last month.”
“Did you cheat on her?” I asked.
“No, but it was just a matter of time, and she doesn’t deserve that. She’s a wonderful girl . . . pretty, smart, caring. She’s a pediatric nurse at the Brigham. When we got engaged, everyone congratulated me on finally making a good decision. Even my mother was proud, but . . .”
I finished the sentence for him, “she is only one woman.”
“So you get that. Most women don’t.”
Once again, I reminded him, “I am not a woman.”
“No, you are not a woman. You are a thousand women rolled into one. And this may sound like a line, but I swear to God it’s not. I think you are literally the answer to my prayers.”
Sean’s words surprised me. Up to this moment, he had not struck me as a religious man. Because he had grown up in an Irish family, I assumed that he had been raised Catholic, but I also assumed that he had left those beliefs behind when he moved out of his childhood home.
“The other night . . . I haven’t done this in God only knows how long. I got down on my knees and prayed.” He pointed at his side of the bed. “I got down on my knees and I prayed, ‘God, please send me someone who will be enough.’”
I told him, “The Morrigan must have heard you.”
“Isn’t that blasphemy?” he asked. “Getting my prayers answered by someone else’s god?”
“Goddess,” I corrected him. “And the only blasphemy would be desecrating her intercession.”
“Is The Morrigan a vengeful goddess?” he asked.
“Her worshippers can be quite vengeful,” I said, “but so can you Christians.”
“We’re not as bad as—”
I cut him off before he ruined the moment. “Let’s focus on the rewards. If you can remain faithful, I can give you all the variety you crave.”
Having experienced one small fraction of who I could become, Sean saw a future with no need to ever cheat again, no reason not to pledge his “fidelity in perpetuity.” He swore to it on his very life. Then, as he stood there naked in front of me, he swore on what mattered most, his manhood.
Sean never invited me to move in, but he never asked me to leave. In the mornings, I would wake up just long enough to kiss him good-bye. I would then sleep until noon and spend the rest of the day planning my look for the evening. For inspiration, Sean had supplied me with every fashion magazine still being published, including the ones from overseas. He loved the thrill of walking into a surprise. One night, he would be greeted by a petite blonde and the next by a leggy redhead.
Within the first two months, I had paired every shade of blonde, red and brown hair with every eye color found in nature along with a few that weren’t. The red eyes unsettled him. He found them “a bit demonic.”
In terms of height, Sean preferred his women on the tall side. Once, as a joke, I turned myself into a 6’8 Amazon. To my surprise, he loved it. Ever since high school, he had fantasized about a woman towering over him.
Like most men, he loved large breasts. Nothing excited him more than watching mine grow from A to Double D.
Some of his limitations disappointed me. He could not find the beauty in plus-size women or women forty-plus. To be more accurate, he was not attracted to women who looked older than forty. My true age would have horrified him.
Six months into the relationship, he finally asked, “Doesn’t it bother you that I can’t change?”
“If I wanted that,” I told him, “I would have stayed in my village.”
“So you don’t get bored being with the same guy night after night?” Given his own insatiable lust for variety, Sean found that hard to believe.
I assured him, or at least I tried to, “I appreciate the stability of one man, one body.”
“At least, it’s a pretty good body, right?” He stepped into the light to give me a good look at what I had already seen hundreds of times.
I told him, “It’s a very good body. It’s an amazingly good body.”
The man’s insatiable need for compliments ruined every movie we ever sat down to watch. He always had to pause the film to ask if I found this actor or that actor better looking than him. Unfortunately, there was no right answer. If I didn’t tell him that he looked better than Leonardo DiCaprio or Brad Pitt, he turned the television off. If I told him that he looked better than Leonardo and Brad Pitt combined, he accused me of humoring him.
One night, we were watching The Changeling. Halfway through, he asked, “Can you make yourself look like her? Not just that type but her exact double.”
“Doppleganging takes considerable effort,” but I promised to do my best. Two nights later, Angelina Jolie was waiting for him on the couch.
Unfortunately for me, that opened Pandora’s box. I then had to transform myself into every movie star, every TV star, every singer and model on whom he had ever harbored a crush. Not every crush, I should say. I drew the line at Anna Nicole Smith. Doppleganging the dead bordered too close to necrophilia.
Sean stopped making requests after that. He also began coming home later and later and climbing into bed wanting nothing more than a good night’s sleep. When I finally complained, he relocated himself to the living room couch.
One night, I found him out there, sitting in front of the television with the sound muted. He was holding an engagement ring, studying it as if he were searching for flaws.
“Is that Sarah’s ring?” I really didn’t need to ask. Given our sleeping arrangements, I knew that he wasn’t planning to propose any time soon.
Sean said, “She gave it back the other day.”
“Why now?” I wondered.
“This Saturday was going to be our wedding day. She said she needed closure.”
I disagreed. “She wanted you to put that ring back on her finger.”
“She’s better off without me,” he said.
“And you’re better off with me.” I was getting sick of having to remind him of that.
“You have been great. Exactly what I need. Exactly what I prayed for.” These were the first compliments he had paid me in weeks. Unfortunately, they were leading up to a request. “What I need right now—and I hate asking you this, but Saturday is going to be a really tough day for me.”
“So how can I help?” I asked as if I didn’t know what was coming.
“Is there any chance you would consider making yourself look like Sarah? Just this one time,” he added.
I told him, “I will think about it.” No part of me liked this idea, but I wanted him back in our bed.
Saturday night, when Sean came home from playing hockey, Sarah was waiting for him. She was sprawled naked on top of the sheets. That, as it turned out, was my first mistake. Sarah never would have laid herself out on display like that. She needed to be sweet-talked into bed.
My second mistake were the fingernails.
“Sarah wouldn’t grow her nails that long. She handles children, babies.” And the complaints continued. “Sarah wouldn’t do that. Sarah would never touch me there. Sarah would never say anything that crude.”
After a few minutes, Sean climbed out of the bed almost more frustrated than me. On his way to the bathroom, an idea came to him. At least, he pretended that this idea was coming to him for the first time.
He turned around and asked, “Would you be willing to bringing Sarah into this relationship?”
“What makes you think she would be open to that?” I had to know, “Have you already discussed this with her?”
“No, but I think she’d be intrigued once she found out what you are, what you can do.” He sounded very confident that he could sweet-talk her into this.
“And then what?” I asked. “How long do you think that arrangement will last before you get bored?”
He could not see that happening, but I could.
“You don’t need someone who can turn into a thousand women. You need a thousand women telling you you’re the only one.”
“Holy fuck!”
Sean was not responding to my criticism. He was reacting to my fingernails. They had not only grown several inches, they had sharpened into claws.
If he apologized right this second, if he begged for mercy, if he swore up and down that he would never bring this matter up again or even mention Sarah’s name, I would want to believe him. Unfortunately, he was not to be trusted. So before any sweet talking could begin, my claws ripped the words right out of his throat.
Sean dropped to one knee. While one hand applied pressure to the wounds, the other was trying to sweep the blood back inside. He looked up into his beloved Sarah’s face for help, but my eyes glared back at him. They glared back red.
In five minutes, maybe less, he was going to lose consciousness and with it the ability to feel pain. If I was to avenge his blasphemy, my claws needed to act fast.
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In addition to 11 books of soap opera trivia, Gerard J Waggett has published several crime stories in Mystery Magazine (formerly Mystery Weekly Magazine). The latest was a Sherlock Holmes adventure. In late 2022, his one-act play “Elizabeth” was published in the premiere issue of Dracula Beyond Stoker. Last spring, Archer’s anthology Dark Mirrors included his horror/science fiction hybrid “Operation Rat Poison.”