THE SWING

‘Where’s Jamie?’

Phil tilted his head, seeking the sound of his son’s footsteps in the empty house.

Sue turned to the estate agent, furrowing her brow.

‘He was here a moment ago!’

The agent nodded, peeking at his wristwatch.

Phil hurried from room to room. Each had ghosts – cupboards, tables and chairs draped in sheets.

Beyond the gallery lay the master bedroom. Phil peered through the bay window, his heart ticking.

The lawn was a tangle of weeds bordered by oak and Scot’s Pine.

Something moved, beneath the trees.

Phil murmured his son’s name.

Jamie stood alone.

A breeze sighed through the pine needles, lifting the swing.

Phil rested his hand on his boy’s shoulder.

The knotted ropes, green with age, screeched against tree bark.

‘A swing! Climb aboard, kiddo. I’ll push.’

Jamie glanced at his father.  ‘Maybe…’

His gaze fell to the empty seat.

‘When she’s gone,’  he whispered. 

tonyglover11@mac.com

The challenge is to write a complete story which can be read on a phone. The limit is 150 words – an interesting challenge. I find that one of the most enjoyable tasks is editing my work – keeping meaning and sense yet  conveying that in the most economical way . The Swing is a ghost story – I’ll be uploading it on here and possibly on the Rudham Books site soon. https://rudhambooks.com

http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/80025

A script that I’m working on right now has a supernatural element. Writing in the ghost story genre you are faced with a set of conventions which don’t sit easily within the usual shape of a three act, redemptive drama.

Most feature films are based on a familiar  pattern – a character is faced with a problem. They decide to solve it. Their first attempt fails. They try something else. They fail again. Finally,  using their  ingenuity and their own, special qualities, they succeed. They solve  the problem. Through their own efforts they catch the murderer, rob the bank, woo the lover, kick the alien out of the spaceship… The world is back to rights – different perhaps – but order is restored.  And your central character has changed too. Wiser, richer, happier.

Even the  briefest glance at the genre reveals that things don’t usually turn out that way in the ghost story. In tales of the supernatural,  the central character usually ends up dead. Or crazy. Or, if they’re really lucky,  haunted for all eternity…

Ghosts warn, or attack, or  exact vengeance. Whatever they do, the result is rarely pleasant for the living. In The Beckoning Fair One, by Oliver Onions,  the writer Oleron is driven to madness, then death, by one of his characters.

In the Western, The Pale Rider, the entire town of Lahood, California, suffers the vengeance of the Preacher, played by Clint Eastwood.  The town thugs kill Megan Wheeler’s dog. She buries the hound and says a prayer. Then a  mysterious rider, the Preacher, appears from the mountains. The rest is mayhem…

The MR James’ story, ‘Oh Whistle and I’ll Come to You,  My Lad, ’ was made into a  TV drama starring John Hurt.  Parkins is a professor who decides to spend a few days in winter on the east coast, in the village of Burnstow.   His pleasant stay at the Globe Inn is marred by an eerie whistling sound. Soon his solitary walks on the deserted beach are disturbed by a strange, indistinct shape:

‘Rapidly growing larger, it declared itself as a figure in pale, fluttering draperies, ill defined. There was something about its motion which made Parkins very unwilling to see it at close quarters…’  And, without wishing to spoil the plot, The Woman in Black, does not end well either…

So the challenge for any writer is to create a ghost story which fulfils the expectations of the audience, without writing a predictable ending.  One way may be to mix genres. The Swedish writer, Johann Theorin,  achieved this in The Darkest Room, a crime story which has a chilling, other worldly atmosphere.  Another may be to give the familiar, doomy resolution a twist.

I’ve recently finished reading The Woman in the Fifth, by Douglas Kennedy. The story is set in modern day Paris – a twist, since most ghost stories are set in the past. The story was recently turned into a  film starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Ethan Hawke. A film lecturer flees the US to escape from  a broken marriage and a college scandal. At a literary salon,  the man meets a mysterious and attractive older woman, Margit.  Though the book contains moments which teeter on the daft, it works. The tricky issue of the resolution is handled well.

‘Do I believe in ghosts? No, but I am afraid of them,’ said the marquise du Deffand.

One of the terrors we feel about ghosts is paradoxical – the idea that in fact they may not exist. One of our greates fears is that the visons and sounds we are experiencing are not coming from from any any supernatural being, but originate within ourselves…