Ghosts of Dead Stories

I was awakened by the sound of my laptop starting up on its own.

“Damnit!” I muttered as I got out of bed.  The dog looked up at me, big doe eyes and tail flailing in quick, short strokes as if he thought I was angry at him.  I walked past him and out of my bedroom.

I’d heard this sound before.  “Vundo,” I thought.  Or, some other nasty piece of malware.  Clean laptops don’t just wake themselves from sleep mode.

It’s time to do a full clean on this machine.  I have both Malware Bytes and Spybot Search and Destroy installed, but neither had been updated in a while.  I’d need to download the latest definitions and do full scans with both tools, which could take hours: reboots, rescans, updates.  I guess I should be more careful about some of the links I click from lesser viewed Reddits. 

In the meantime, though, since it was after three in the morning, I would just shut the laptop down.

I raised the screen so I could see what the laptop was doing and to shut it down.  The screen was filled with dozens of open Microsoft Word documents.  “Now, that’s unusual for a Trojan,” I thought.  I clicked the ‘x’ at the top-right corner of a window to close the top document.  As soon as it closed, a new Word doc launched.

“What the hey?” I puzzled, channeling my inner Kermit the Frog.  I closed another window and another instance of Word launched.  I clicked, faster and faster, but as fast as I could close them, they reappeared on the screen.

I gave Windows its three-finger salute and launched the task manager.  Forget all this clicking; I’m going to kill the processes.  When the task manager finally rendered on my screen, it was empty.

There wasn’t a single item listed on the applications tab.  As far as the computer was concerned, there were no programs running.  I clicked over to the processes tab, but was met with the same lack.  Not a single process registered as using any memory or CPU cycles.  Not even system tasks were listed.    The performance tab was just as barren.  Both the CPU usage history and the page file usage history were empty.  It was as if, according to system diagnostics, the computer wasn’t even on.  So, how was I doing any of this?

“I get it, I get it,” I said with a chuckle.  “It’s a dream; a Halloween dream.  I ate too many Reese’s peanut butter cups and now I’m paying for it.  There’s sure to be heartburn in the morning.  Such is my reward for turning forty.”

I turned to go back to bed, to leave this dream and try to get some restful sleep before the morning alarm.  Before I could take a single step I caught a flash from the laptop’s screen from the corner of my eye.  I wheeled to see what it was.  The Word documents leapt from the laptop’s screen and began to encircle me.  I was frozen in my tracks.  As they swirled, they began to take form: twisted and incomplete visages comprised of ether and words. 

As these strange poltergeists swept about me I could hear them wailing in my head.  “Save us!  Free us!  Complete us!”

“Who are you?” I shouted, hoping to drive the din from my brain. 

“We are the ghosts of your dead stories, Greg.  Only you can save us.”

“Preposterous!” I barked.  “You stories aren’t real.  You come from my imagination.  Stories cannot be ghosts.”

“But we are.  There is a place where art and spirit meet.  We are of that.  We want to go there, but we cannot.”

“This isn’t real.  This isn’t real.” I continued assuring myself.

“Our existence begins the moment of your inspiration.  You make us whole with your words.  You make us real when you share us.  Finish us.”

“But I can’t,” I stuttered.  “I can’t always…”

“Look at me,” said one of the shades as she floated before me.  She looked to be a completed bust of a teenage girl, but below, where the rest of her body should have been, she was skeletal.    

“You began writing me fifteen months ago.  I am your teen paranormal romance story. Finish me.”

“I lost momentum,” I pleaded.

“You know where you are going with this story.  You even sketched out the skeleton of the story.” She said, waving her arm at her skeletal lower half.  “You have everything you need, except here.”  She pointed at a nebulous area where her pelvic bone should be.  “You know what goes there, Greg.”

“But the mood, the tone.  I’ve lost the tone I had in mind when I started you.”

“And what of me?” spoke up another.  It was a near completed man, pale and bloated.  It was wrapped in kelp as if it had drowned in the Pacific.

“Again, tone.  You’re nearly done but something doesn’t feel right.”

“You still have my inspiration.  Listen to Giant Squid again.  Complete me.  Let me exist.”

“And us.”  A group of peculiar specters came forward.  They looked like misshapen teddy bears with eight limbs.

“How many times have you started us?  You even spent ninety-nine cents on iA Writer so you could complete us on your iPad on the flight to Alex’s wedding in August.”

“Have you ever tried typing on a tablet?  Miserable.”

“As miserable as our existence in limbo?”

I had no answer.

“Save us! Complete us!” they continued to intone as the vortex of phantom tales revolved.

I began to recognize my stories in the mist.  Some, nearly formed visages of science fiction and fantasy and others faint wisps of passing ideas.  I could feel their anguish of partial existence.  I had to release these spirits from purgatory, but where to start?  There are so many.

I awoke in my bed, sweating under layers of blankets.  Bach’s Tocatta and Fugue in D minor was playing on NPR.  I took a deep breath to calm myself.  It was only a dream. 

It’s Halloween, I thought.  Today is Halloween.