Twist and Scream - Volume 6 (Horror Short Stories) by Bartholomew Jayne

Author:Bartholomew, Jayne [Bartholomew, Jayne]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Published: 2014-08-03T16:00:00+00:00

Ghost Writer

Sometimes if felt as though the youth of today had no work ethic at all. Grant blamed the relentless flood of reality shows and brainless celebrities flaunting their fancy holidays and flash cars all over the internet.

Celebrities, ha! Even the word made Grant want to recoil. He’d yet to meet one of the new batch that was worthy of a second glance. Admittedly most looked pretty but then if you spent your entire life primping and preening you were likely to get your money’s worth, weren’t you? The women, well, girls mostly, made him deeply uncomfortable. If you got too close to them and looked into their eyes you could see hunger and pain in equal measures, it chilled him, it really did.

Grant had never been one of life’s beautiful people but he’d always taken pride in his mind and yes, his commitment to his career. A man knew where he was with a purpose and ever since childhood he’d been aware that his calling involved writing. He’d learned his trade working in newspapers and then when cut backs had left him unemployed he’d turned to writing novels.

He paused outside an exotic shop front in one of the less salubrious neighbourhoods and attempted to muster up some enthusiasm. He hadn’t had much luck with this type of establishment over the past few years but he really had very little option nowadays. He walked through the door and surveyed the people waiting on chairs at one end of the room. Inevitably the rest of the room was taken up with shelves stuffed with factually inaccurate books about the dark arts, display cabinets of amulets and something that looked suspiciously like a preserved badger in a jar.

The trouble with the spiritualists in this area was that most of them were rubbish. When he’d been alive Grant would’ve given these places a wide berth but it seemed the dead had less options. He’d tried taking a train to the next city but when the train had moved forward, he’d found himself floating over the track watching the last carriage leave the station. It had been, quite frankly, embarrassing.

Another ghost was sitting with a nervous looking woman who was next in the queue; Grant tried to see this as a good sign.

He really hoped this medium would be able to take clear messages. The others were split between those that didn’t have a clue he was there and those who practically wet themselves on contact. Seriously, you were either a medium or you weren’t, anything else was pure fakery.

Of course, Grant would know all about fakery. When his fiction novels had failed to attract an income he’d moved to autobiographies of the great and famous. People who had earned the title ‘celebrity’. Explorers, world leaders, artists; Grant treated them all with respect and detailed their histories with pride.

The autobiographies had sold marginally better than his attempts at fiction, which made him attractive to agents as a ghost writer. It paid well and if

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