Tame (NiaD 2024)

Como amenazavisé ayer, hoy comparto por aquí el relato con el que contribuí a la antología de relatos de fantasmas «Villa Diodati», la edición de Novel in a Day de 2024. Es un relato de menos de 2000 palabras en inglés dentro de un libro que contiene otros 39 relatos. Todos ellos fueron escritos, enviados y publicados el 27 de octubre de 2024 y se pueden descargar gratis en ePub, Kindle y PDF.

Tame

1.

The ghosts were not sprouting.

Joanna kicked an old drink can, scuffing her Louis Vuitton pump. She didn’t care. She watched morosely as the can rattled and scraped across the cracked cement surface of the parking. Why wouldn’t the blasted things come?

She went into the main building through one of  the formerly bricked up loading bays. She tapped her phone, launched the Ghostprouted app, and held it aloft. The camera showed a purple-and-grey colorised, high contrast, starkly outlined image of a barren and decrepit industrial warehouse. There was a smattering of tiny yellow and orangish motes: background energy, no more.  The app remained obstinately silent: no little three-note chime that would indicate a nascent ghost. No coalescing, no presences, certainly no physical manifestations. She sighed: she would have to check all the seeds, one by one.

***

Ghosts had been a sensation three years back. It started as a huge world scare, reminiscent of the pandemic: manifestations of dead beings that jumped suddenly out of the fringe realms of pseudoscience and fiction and became a stark reality. There was religious panic, social panic, moral panic, philosophical panic and worse: economic panic. Many business ground to a halt as millions of dead worker ghosts manifested in a myriad ways.

There were translucent blobs, faintly humanoid auras, horribly realistic dead bodies, disembodied sounds, silent distorted apparitions: as all folklore and fear came alive, humanity reeled. 

During the first months, ghosts created more ghosts. 

People died of fright, and accidents skyrocketed. Drivers were surprised by former victims reliving their deaths on the road, construction workers fell to their death as they saw former construction workers fall to theirs. White collar jobs suicide rates went up as they were made aware of the pain lingering in the psychic makeup of their companies. 

After one year, ghosts created change. 

The ghosts stayed, never changing their endless death loops, and so governments and societies squared their shoulders, metaphorically, and adapted. New safety codes were written, special filters and screens were developed, new laws and social norms emerged. The ghosts were not leaving, so humanity learned to live with them.

On the third year, ghosts created money. 

Some daring entrepreneurs discovered that, given the right conditions, the terror of the ghosts could be marketable: people liked being scared in a safe environment, right? It was only a matter of finding the right balance between the nature of the ghosts — not too scary nor too tame — and the space they lived in: not too mundane, nor too frightening. 

So ghosts started to be farmed. You could transplant a ghost if you took the object they were more attached to: the rebar that pierced their heart, the weapon that killed them, the armchair where they died crying, alone and unnoticed. If you put that object in the right environment, even if it wasn’t the original one, they would thrive and take root. Or you could disperse them, eventually, if you took them someplace with no humans and no pain, where no stories had ever been told. This last technique was difficult and seldom attempted, except in the most extreme cases.

And ghosts could be tamed: some objects were not associated with a manifest ghost, but retained enough measurable energy to know that a ghost had been there. Researchers discovered that you could manifest those ghosts if you could create the right environment for them. Those ghosts were the safest: sad, tremulous entities, eroded by time and oblivion, barely tethered even to the half-life of a spectre. 

 Ghost Rooms were born. Groups of friends or coworkers were given a flimsy plot line so they could make-believe they were ghost hunters, and walked a maze-like old house, or an abandoned theme park, or a cold, dilapidated hospital. The tamed ghosts were kept in closed areas, behind safety screens and ghost-filters. And the users could be scared for fun. They could look at all that death and horror, and experience life through its opposite. 

It hurt no one. It was fun. It was real. And it saved a ton of money on actors and makeup.

Joanna wanted in.

2. 

Her business partner Brian had tut-tutted when he saw the factory.

«It’s too big, Joanna. And it’s not old enough.»

«The sixties is old enough, you old fart,» Joanna said. «And yeah, it’s big, but that means more visitors. Look at all the parking space!»

Joanna waved her arm to indicate the grey expanse of cement flanked by low cinderblock buildings on two sides and a tall, ugly brick building on the third. A faded logo in white, green and orange proclaimed this had once belonged to a fruit juice company. Strangely-angled lines of green sprouted from the cracks in the pavement. Someone had made a half-hearted effort at graffiti but left it unfinished. They clearly could not muster enough enthusiasm for the place. 

«It’s — boring,» Brian said. Joanna winced. It was.

«All the better, right? That means that only the tamed ones we bring will manifest,» she said. Brian nodded, clearly trying to show an enthusiasm he wasn’t feeling.

«Yes, of course. We seed them and when they’re well-rooted I’ll start working on some itineraries.»

«Not a Ghost Room, but a Ghost Theme Park,» Joanna breathed, eyes alight. «Think about it, Brian!»

«I am,» Brian said, wiping his glasses on his shirt. He put them on again, blinked, gave a good hard look at the lot. «We’ll need a lot of them.»

He was talking about ghosts, of course. Joanna nodded.

«I know. But I have it covered. I’ve bought tons of ghost seeds. I will plant them this weekend and the moment they sprout I’ll tell you.»

«Fine, fine. I’ll start working on some ideas.»

«Think big,» Joanna said, and smiled. This was going to be sensational.

«I will, if you think ghosts,» Brian said. «Remember that seeds are not always guaranteed. And that there’s a lot of fake seeds for sale out there.»

«I’ve made sure,» she said, a tad defensively. «All the seeds I’ve bought come with provenance.»

«Then it’s settled,» Brian said. He started walking back to the car. 

Joanna didn’t follow him immediately. She looked lovingly at the bricked-up windows. Pigeons flew over to hidden nests up in the second floor. The buzzing staccato of their wings always reminded her of someone using pruning shears, fwhip-fwhip-fwhip. It made her feel both relaxed and alone. Around the corner of the main building she could see some cement blocks, strewn as if thrown carelessly by a giant hand. She took in the shapes, the brown-and-grey palette of the whole area, the odourless dead air, and visualised ghosts into existence: lovely scary ghosts and happy visitors and food stalls and kiddie parks and a high-end café there. Surely this was the ideal place.

It will be great, she thought, firmly, and went after Brian.

3. 

Joanna remembered the conversation with Brian as she checked all the seeds through her app. No positive chimes, no indication on the screen. None of the seeds showed even the slightest change from when she had planted them, five weeks ago. Which was more than enough time for ghosts to sprout. 

But nothing was changing, not even with the bullets that she had procured through her contacts in the Dark Web. The sale of spent bullets, or indeed any murder weapon or part of a weapon as a ghost seed, was illegal, but she happily took the risk. Could she have been scammed? Probably. She kept hoping that not with each and every purchase, though.

She wasn’t happy; the seeds had taken a big chunk out of her budget. Especially since she had bought more after the first batch gave no signs of sprouting. Her checking became increasingly fast and frustrated. 

«Why don’t you give me anything!?,» she cried, angry, when the app stayed obstinately silent at a broken doll that had been one of her more hopeful purchases.

She still had the raised gallery to check: a metal walkway that went along three of the four walls of the main area. There was a chair there that had been tethered to a real, manifest ghost. That chair had to work. Thinking dark thoughts, she took the metal stairs up to the gallery.

She was on the last step up. Her heel went through one of the holes of the metal grating. She grasped the handrail by reflex.

The handrail, rusted and weakened, broke. 

She fell backwards, grasping at nothing. 

The fall was a blur, and the impact went completely unregistered by her shocked brain. She thought I’m gonna have to put some serious money into bringing this place up to code. Then she noticed she was on the floor. 

Okay, she thought. That was ridiculous. At least Brian isn’t here to see me fall on my arse.

The next thing she thought was Something’s wrong.

It should be hurting by now, and it was, but it was a strange pain: removed, vague. A sort of corrosive, vibrating pain that seemed defined by her head but not felt by her body. She was dizzy.

She saw her phone nearby. She tried to get it. 

Her body would not move. Her pulse throbbed in her ears. 

Something is very wrong.

Maybe it was just the suddenness of the impact, so she forced herself to relax and wait for the strange, remote feeling to pass.

She tried to stretch the hand she could see, extended outward to her side.

But the hand didn’t move. She couldn’t even tell the position of the rest of her body. Her neck hurt, now, fiercely. As her internal inventory kept rising red flags, her brain raced.

Calm down, calm down, it will pass. You’ll be able to move in a minute. 

Brian would not come to the property until Monday. But he would be expecting her call about the ghosts. She just had to get to her phone. She just had to move her hand.

By the time she realised her body would not move again, her phone rang. She could see the screen: it was Brian. 

She gasped, trying to tell the phone to answer. But she couldn’t make a sound. The phone kept ringing, then fell silent.

Her mind flopped inside her useless body like a dying rat, trying to will herself to move. Two feet. Only two feet. Her head jerked, as if it could drag the rest of her body with it. Her vision darkened. Too late, she realised she hadn’t been breathing.

The screen lit up. The logo of the Ghostprouted app showed up.

No.

The app offered a happy three-note chime.

No! No, I will not!

Two pigeons flew overhead. Their wings sounded like shears.

The Ghostprouted app chimed again in confirmation.

I 

                            will not be

                 a 

                                         tame