Ghoster

by Jason Arnopp

  When you’re falling for someone, it’s like you shift into another dimension. Nothing else matters, besides staying there forever.

  The afternoon stretches on so peacefully that it feels as though we’re on holiday. Actually, come to think of it, are we on holiday? I can’t remember the last time that Scott or I did any work, but I’m sure we’ll soon be back doing… whatever it is we do.

  I find myself fleetingly preoccupied by the balcony’s sliding door. Did that thing get broken at some point? It certainly isn’t broken now. We must have got it fixed, if indeed the break happened at all. Sometimes I remember things, little flashes of things that don’t make sense, only to dismiss them as the lingering traces of a dream. For instance, I have this dim memory of wearing a uniform and some kind of badge, but this may have only ever happened during REM sleep.

  Here’s a strange thing, though: I can’t remember the last time any of us slept, or even went to bed. Neither can I recall the sun ever having done anything but scorch through these windows, me leaving this sofa, Scott leaving the breakfast bar or ever finishing his G&T, the kids getting up from the floor, or the flat having smelt like anything but hot copper.

  I’ve Instagram-ed my mushroom risotto with a Gingham filter, branding it to die for, but my complete lack of appetite means I can’t seem to get around to eating the thing.

  I’m sure all of these things will happen soon. Or if they don’t, that’s fine too.

  Now, then. If I was a type of cheese, which cheese would I be? I’m going to take this quiz, then compare the results with all my friends. Yay!

  You know what? For a while now, this thought has continued to nag at me. So very easy to lose track of time at the moment, because I can’t actually remember when the sun last went down, but it might have been days or even weeks.

  Our window-door really was broken once. Quite a long time ago, I think, but I’m increasingly convinced that this happened.

  I have this mental image of me – me, of all people – using some kind of…

  … hammer…

  … object or other, to smash the glass.

  It was a fucking hammer; why can’t you remember?

  Coupled with this vague recollection is the image of a pile of broken glass that once sat on the floor over there.

  Now, why ever would I do such a thing? Makes zero sense.

  Remember. Come on, Kate! There’s something huge to remember here. Someone was thrown out through the hole in this window.

  LOL! Don’t cats do the funniest things? I swear to God, they’re a law unto themselves.

  This person was someone you knew very well. Someone you loved.

  Do I merely Like this picture or shall I actually retweet it? How much value would a retweet bring my followers and how much visibility might it bring me? How much pleasure would I gain from a retweet versus a Like?

  Fuck this picture of a cat standing upright. Try to keep your eyes off the screen for one second and think hard. Remember why you broke the glass and how you felt. Remember everything.

  Remember Izzy.

  What is this feeling? This is really strange and I don’t like it at all.

  I think this is something called anxiety, welling up inside me. The growing sense that something is wrong here. Very wrong.

  The phone throws several pings at me, but I’m looking at the sliding window-door that I once smashed.

  I’m looking at the sun, which burns as brilliantly as it ever did.

  Actually… I’m looking directly at the sun, without even having to blink. Shouldn’t that hurt me?

  Yes! That’s right. This sun could never burn out your retinas, because it’s fake. All of this is fake. You know this. There’s a major realisation, teetering on the tip of your brain.

  Across the room, Scott has his phone in one hand, while pleasuring himself with the other behind the breakfast bar. Thank goodness he behaves like a responsible parent would and only masturbates when he can be sure our children aren’t looking.

  No, no, this is all wrong. You still can’t even remember the twins’ names, can you? That’s because they’re fake, like everything else. Hold onto that anxiety you felt and let it explode, because it’s the only way you’re ever getting out.

  Switching to WhatsApp, I drop Scott a message.

  “Baby, I feel weird. Something’s wrong here.”

  I wait a while for a reply, but now I can see he’s typing. And then his reply appears. U ok hun? Let’s talk in 5 – I’m just about to shoot.

  My chest coils up, leaving me short of breath. My natural instinct is to reply via WhatsApp, but I force myself to physically speak aloud. “No no, Scott, please listen to me. Everything’s wrong. None of this is real. Think! We never had kids – and if we did, you wouldn’t be jerking off in the same room as them. We have to get the fuck out of here!”

  Scott’s reply does not come, but he does. On the other side of the room, his face contorts and his back arches.

  The muscles in my legs feel limp, as if they’ve lain dormant for a long time, but now I’m somehow standing at the balcony door. There are yachts on the sea and people milling around on the pier and around the zip-wire tower, but none of them look real. They’re like a matte painting in the background of an old movie. Looks fine from a distance, but on closer inspection…

  Izzy’s body, flying through the air, missing the zip-wire tower, then plunging out of sight.

  Oh God. Oh my God.

  “Mummy,” says our little girl, without looking up from her tablet, “what are you doing?”

  Tapping intently at his screen, the boy says, “Please come back to the sofa.”

  “You’re not our kids,” I tell them. “You’re not even real.” Cold sweat trickles down my back as I try to slide open the balcony door.

  “Stop it, Mummy,” says the girl, without raising her voice. “Please stop now.”

  “You’re scaring me,” says the boy.

  This door is so much stiffer than I remember. Takes my entire body weight, combined with repeated yanks, to even break the seal.

  Beyond the inch-wide gap I’ve created lies a stripe of pure black. The full dark of what could easily be deep space.

  This darkness is what you need. Seize your chance! Pull harder.

  “Scott,” I call out, “please come with me now. I’m begging you. Can’t you see that none of this is real?”

  There’s no reply, but I daren’t look back at anybody, in case the illusion regains control. My vital new knowledge feels slippery, as if it could so easily leap back out of my head and send me back into the trance.

  Panicked, I wrench at the stubborn door. Every new inch reveals more black.

  “Silly Mummy,” says the boy. “Why don’t you come back, have a nice lie-down and catch up on what your friends have been doing?”

  God, that sounds good. I really should close this door and go back to my old life.

  No! Your old life is not here. It never was. Your old life, your real life, is somewhere else, through the gap in this door. Somewhere beyond the black.

  With a roar of frustration and fear, I yank at the door handle, again and again.

  There’s a cruel smile in the girl’s voice. “Kate, you’ll never escape your master. You now exist only to feed me.”

  One final concerted heave exposes more black. Enough for me to squeeze out through. And then I’m gone.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-SEVEN

  The air smells of incense. Lemongrass.

  I find myself standing in a bedroom at night. A nearby window tells me this is an upstairs room. Yellow rapeseed fields stretch forever away from the house, with a full moon suspended above them.

  I’m pretty sure I’ve never been here before, but I know I have to get out before something absolutely terrible happens.

  My feet barely touch the ground as I fly straight out of the door and onto the dark landing. Here, blue lights activate, making it easier to see where the fuck I’m going.

  Seen
closer, through the landing window, those rapeseed fields actually look real. They don’t have the same bullshit matte painting feel about them as the view from the flat. Have to reach them, and reach them fast.

  More lights flicker on all around me as I hurtle down the staircase towards the front door. A stained-glass circle embedded in the wood depicts the multi-coloured head of a horse.

  Why does this door look and feel so very familiar? Who cares? All I need to do is get outside. Need to taste the fresh air, smell those rolling fields and everything will be fine. I’ll be free forever.

  As I make for the door, something throttles my speed. Feels as though my feet are tied to the bed, back upstairs, and the length of rope tethering me has started to run out.

  By the time I reach the wood of the door, some kind of force tries to pull me back up the stairs.

  Fuck that. I’m never going back to that fake bullshit life of cats and near-misses on American roads and personality quizzes and endless video games and deeply inappropriate masturbation. Hard and fast, as if swimming through glue, I power myself towards the door until my fingernails graze the wood.

  Outside, someone presses their shadowed face up against the stained-glass horse’s head.

  Maureen’s mournful eyes gaze at me, through red glass.

  The force upstairs exerts a stronger pull, greater than I can bear.

  Consumed by the urge to resist and survive, I cling to the door. My fingers gouge through the varnish and into the wood, which cracks and bursts under the pressure.

  Only as I’m hauled back away, spraying the doormat with wood chips, do I notice all the other gouge marks. Some of these are identical to mine. Some bear testament to the failed escape attempts of others.

  Oh Christ, I’ve done this before, haven’t I? That’s why the horse-head door looked so familiar. I’ve tried to escape, only to get hauled up these stairs like I am now, and I’ve ended up back inside the belly of the beast. Once I ended up on that sofa with my phone in my hand, I must have forgotten, all over again.

  No, no, please, don’t let me go back up there.

  Don’t let me go back into the coma.

  And yet back onto the landing I come. My whole body gets twisted around by this force, so that I fly back into the bedroom face-first.

  I am a seagull, driven against its will by overpowering winds.

  I am a woman going backwards up a zip-wire.

  On some level, my brain always knew this was going to happen.

  For the first time, I notice the two people in bed. A man and a woman, neither of whom I recognise. On the bedside table beside the guy, sits a phone.

  Nope, not a phone. The phone, in that same cracked protective case.

  The master, drawing me inexorably back inside.

  This guy in the bed, he must be the next victim.

  Whipping across the room, I catch my own reflection in a wall of mirrored wardrobes and really wish I hadn’t.

  I am a flickering, airborne, corpse-blue thing.

  A crude animation in a child’s flip-book.

  I struggle to recognise my own eternal eyes, like holes punched into cloth. Then I see the black tongue poking out of my mouth at a jaunty angle. Oh yeah, that’s my stupid avatar all right. Looks like I’m stuck with it.

  During this whole escape attempt, my feet genuinely never did touch the ground, because I don’t have any feet. Those lights on the landing, and on the stairs, they all came from me.

  The woman murmurs, “Phil, I got that weird taste in my mouth again.” She opens one eye, sees me, gasps, then flinches back against the headboard, waking Phil with a start.

  My blue light strobes their silent-scream faces as they haul the duvet up over themselves.

  The phone, the master, becomes a whirlpool. The screen spins like a luminous buzz-saw blade as it drags me closer. Very soon I’ll go back to the flat, the sofa, a phone, Scott, the twins and our perfect bubble. As I post my latest banal survey results, or a picture of a meal I’ll never eat, I’ll remember nothing about trying to flee.

  Until the next time.

  The smell of lemongrass fades, along with the terrified cries of the bed’s occupants. Like a spider circling a plughole, my mind scrabbles around, desperate to find even one grain of positivity.

  As the master sucks me back in, there’s no time for three gratitudes.

  Even so, a pretty good one springs to mind.

  At least I’ll never be alone.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Having been a music journalist in my time, I was familiar with the concept of That Difficult Second Album, and yet it still somehow came as a surprise when I faced That Difficult Second Novel. Fortunately, I had the world’s finest people on my side, starting with my unstoppable and unthinkably dapper agent, Oli Munson at A.M. Heath.

  My editor Anna Jackson once again proved a mighty tower of strength and insight, as did spectacular Orbit personnel James Long, Joanna Kramer, Nazia Khatun, Ellen B. Wright, Brit Hvide and copy-editor Maya Berger.

  My titanic beta-readers John Higgs, RJ Barker, Helen Armfield, Florence Rees and William Gallagher all offered vital thoughts and support. These people are thoroughly great, as are the ever-encouraging Ray Zell, James Moran, Danny Stack, Sarah Lotz, Louisa Collins, Scott K. Andrews, Kevin Allington, Lee Allington and Esther Dickman.

  In terms of research help, no one could possibly have been more helpful than Victoria West. Despite being a virtual stranger, a friend of a friend, Victoria went above and beyond the call of duty to help me make Kate Collins a convincing paramedic. No question fazed her, and God knows I tried. By the way: the Deranged Naked Guy story is based on truth.

  Further research assistance came from multiple kind souls including Julie Mayhew, Steve Roberts, Lucy V. Hay, Sara Baroni, Leila Abu El Hawa, Erica Brackenbury, Jordan Paramor, Della Williams, Sammy Andrews, Natasha Von Lemke, Kat Wakefield, Emma Johnston, Sparrow Morgan, Malcolm Franks, Tiff Franks, Dijana Capan, Helen House, Anna-Lou Weatherley, Sarah Jane Harries, Lisa Howells, Amanda Herbert, Sarah Lavender, Eleanor Piper, Tabitha Wild, Claire Lambert, Culzean Driver, Beki Hobbs, Michael Moran and all my other Facebook friends who endured my random questions about phones and dating apps on a semi-regular basis across an entire year.

  Some of the Brighton bars and restaurants in this book are real. I can’t recommend them all enough as places to visit in the awesome city where I live. So, a big thanks to Sally Oakenfold at the Hope and Ruin, Luke Semlekan-Tansey at Beelzebab (yes, those kebabs do exist – rejoice!), Marion Rees at the Basketmakers Arms (where some of Ghoster was plotted out across various evenings, with indispensable help from John Higgs), Food For Friends, James Dance at Loading, Two Wolves Kitchen and the Foundry.

  I’m so grateful to Alan Moore, Ron Howard, M. R. Carey, Andy Nyman, David Schneider, Toby Whithouse, Chuck Wendig, Paul Tremblay, Nicholas Kaufmann, Edward Cox, Jamie Sawyer, Kealan Patrick Burke, Kim Newman and Chris Brookmyre, all of whom blew my mind with their praise of my debut novel The Last Days of Jack Sparks. And oh my God, I started to write a list of the book bloggers and sites who supported Sparks, but we would run out of space here and I’m terrified of forgetting anyone. So please check out the “Jack Sparks” tab at JasonArnopp.com for a list of those fine people, plus links to their hugely appreciated coverage.

  Big love to everyone who follows my Instagram account @jasonarnoppauthor, joined my mailing list legion (bit.ly/ArnoppList) and subscribes to my YouTube channel (bit.ly/ArnoppTube). The biggest love of all, though, must go to those who support me on Patreon (patreon.com/jasonarnopp) and every single reader who bought The Last Days of Jack Sparks, then maybe wrote a review or recommended the book to others. I literally could not carry on writing without you incredible people, because my landlord stubbornly resists the concept of letting me live here rent-free, no matter how often I campaign in his back garden at 3.33 a.m.

  Right, I’m pretty sure I just felt my dopamine level dip. Time to check my phone for the 268th time t
oday.

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  extras

  meet the author

  Jason Arnopp is a British author and scriptwriter. He has written official fiction for the worlds of Doctor Who, The Sarah Jane Adventures and Friday the 13th and co-authored Inside Black Mirror with Charlie Brooker and Annabel Jones.

  Before Ghoster flew out of his tortured brain, Arnopp wrote the 2016 Orbit Books novel The Last Days of Jack Sparks. He has also written the likes of Beast in the Basement, Auto Rewind, How to Interview Doctor Who, Ozzy Osbourne and Everyone Else, From the Front Lines of Rock and American Hoarder – the latter being available for free when you join his mailing list at bit.ly/ArnoppList.

  While Ghoster and The Last Days of Jack Sparks may seem to rail against the online world, they’re probably best read as cries for help, given that Arnopp can be found on more than one Instagram account, YouTube, Facebook, Mastodon, Snapchat, Twitter, Medium, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Patreon, Discord, Ko-Fi and of course at JasonArnopp.com.

  Find out more about Jason Arnopp and other Orbit authors by registering for the free monthly newsletter at www.orbitbooks.net.

  if you enjoyed

  GHOSTER

  look out for

  THE LAST DAYS OF JACK SPARKS

  by

  Jason Arnopp

  “Ingenious and funny.… Magnificent.”—Alan Moore, creator of Watchmen and V for Vendetta

  Jack Sparks died while writing this book.

  It was no secret that journalist Jack Sparks had been researching the occult for his new book. No stranger to controversy, he’d already triggered a furious Twitter storm by mocking an exorcism he witnessed.

  Then there was that video: forty seconds of chilling footage that Jack repeatedly claimed was not of his making, yet was posted from his own YouTube account.