The Long Walk

Flash fiction: a ghost story. ~800w.

Welcome to The Story Scrapbook, a fiction newsletter by E.B. Howard. If you’re new in town, check out my Fiction Directory for navigation.

Say, did I ever tell you my ghost story?

This was last year, just before Halloween, and the sun had started setting earlier. The peach glow above the city skyline was already disappearing into night’s ink-blue when I looked up from my maps app and strolled up the steps beneath the signboard: LEGACY WALKING TOURS. The receptionist and I exchanged a pleasant but businesslike greeting. “You visiting, or local?” she said, the motion making her dangling skeleton earrings dance.

“Local, I guess,” I said. “I just moved down here for work a few weeks ago, and I thought I should get to know the place a little better.”

She assured me I had come to the right place and cheerfully booked me a spot on the evening’s ghost tour of the historic district, due to start in ten minutes. I basked in the air-conditioning and congratulated myself on my good luck. Not much else had gone right since I arrived in this city, though I couldn’t complain too much: I’d taken the assignment selfishly, seeing all the digits on the housing allowance my employer provided for temporary placements. Mine paid most of the rent of a beautiful second-floor apartment downtown, just recently built out in one of the old buildings, and not too far from where I often saw tours like this one finishing up. I shouldn’t even have much walking to do to get home.

At the appointed time, we all assembled on the sidewalk—the usual types represented, I supposed: tipsy bachelorettes, ungently aged couples, solemn-looking young Goths, and me, of course. Our guide led us down the street to the first stop of the night, an unassuming brick carriage house, and paused to look over his audience before he began the story of the place. Had any of us ever had a ghostly encounter? he asked with a flourish. Glowing orbs? Cold spots? Mysterious voices, perhaps?

One of the girls launched into a gleeful tale of a spirit orb spotted while touring horror filming sites in New England. Another volunteered the story of an old apartment of hers where a boy had been strangled, and the back of the kitchen was always icy-cold, even in summer. I’m as open-minded as they come, but that sounded more like dodgy building maintenance to me. I had been waiting almost since I moved in for someone to come and take a look at the HVAC system in my place; there was a vent in the bedroom that seemed to be permanently stuck on full blast. You expect these things in old houses, you know. It was just like the pipes knocking when someone downstairs started the shower, and the beams in the attic groaning as they contracted in the cooling night air. I’d accepted the creepy noises that half-woke me between sleep cycles and left me staring into the swirling darkness, wondering if I’d imagined the high-pitched screams beside me, only to wake in the morning to an empty bed, reassured. Having lived in new builds all my life, that was almost charming. The A/C on my face was really too much for me, though.

Over the next two hours, we zigzagged slowly across the neighborhood on streets I hadn’t given second thoughts to before, and I admired the architecture while our guide spun legends of gruesome accidents and yellow fever tragedies. It was enjoyable, but my feet were starting to ache by the time we stopped in an alley that looked almost familiar. I hung back to stretch my ankles, only half listening to the Civil War story of a woman brutalized and murdered in her bed by Union soldiers. That didn’t even seem like plausible history. And would a building this size really have had a second story for them to climb up and find her on?

“I used to be able to get people right up next to where it happened, but the owner turned this whole place into apartments last year and he doesn’t like us bringing tours around,” the guide was saying as I rejoined the group. “You can kinda see it from here, though. Her bedroom was the third window back from the corner—somebody’s put an elephant ear plant in it.”

Well, that was funny, I thought, glancing behind us at the graffiti behind the dumpster and the flag hanging in the window across the alley. From this angle, the view was much more recognizable. And I had an elephant ear plant in my bedroom window, too.

This story was inspired by Scoot’s Flash Fiction Friday! Go see this week’s prompts and other stories here:

FFF - Long Walk

And if you like flash fiction that’s just a little creepy, check out my 500-word story “Helpers’ Cake”, a found fragment of the history of Ynysfall.

Helpers’ Cake