Chapter 1:

“The Ghost”


The alarm wasn’t supposed to go off yet, and it woke Buster quite suddenly with a start. He opened his eyes a little and glanced at the clock perched atop the bedside table next to him, it read “03:47”. “Goddamnit” Buster grumbled to himself as the alarm started sounding again. It took him a few more moments to realise that the alarm wasn’t in fact coming from the small silver alarm clock beside his head.


McNally “Buster” Milgrath didn’t really believe in ghosts, at least, he didn’t beforehand. In fact, Buster didn’t believe in much at all, he had no real desire to explore a life of faith, or to search for things that weren’t already readily available and transparent in nature. He lived in a place called Nowhere, Oklahoma, which was 5.5 miles south-southwest of Albert and 14 miles northwest of Anadarko, and he rather liked living there. The town had the bustling population of just three people, Buster being one of them, and he had never met either of his neighbours, so Buster felt completely isolated from civilisation, or at least, he had.


As his head cleared he realised that the alarm seemed to be coming from somewhere above him, and he looked up at the smoke detector in the ceiling expectantly, but the light was still blinking steadily, and he couldn’t see or smell any smoke about him anyway. Suddenly he heard a voice crying out, it sounded scared, and desperate. Despite the fact that he knew there was no way that it was in fact an actual person, given that his closest neighbour lived some 45 minutes from him, he felt the hairs on the nape of his neck rising as he threw back the covers and stumbled out of bed, almost naked but for the boxer shorts that he routinely wore to bed each night. “Vincent!” screamed the eerie voice with a sudden, startling clarity.


The door to his bedroom burst open with a staggering amount of force, almost tearing it from the hinges in the process, and the temperature in the room plummeted almost 40 degrees (Fahrenheit) all but instantly. He could see his breath in the extreme cold, the hot air he expelled mingling with the freezing air around him and creating a misty fog every time he exhaled, and it almost looked like he was smoking a cigarette. The window opposite the door imploded, shattering glass throughout the dark bedroom and adding an eerie whisper of wind to the bizarre scene that was unfolding.


Moonlight spilled into the room through the hole in the wall where the window used to be, a slight draft lifting the curtains and pushing them aside, and the room was quickly filled with the scent of the outside air. There; in the spattered white light of the full moon, Buster saw a figure, and it almost seemed to be getting sucked into a vacuum or a portal the way its body seemed to disappear and trail behind it. The freakish vision lifted an arm, at least that’s what Buster thought it was, and pointed a closed fist towards him, one finger/appendage extended in a gesture that indicated that it was pointing at or toward him. “Why?” queried the ethereal voice, seemingly emanating from the apparition floating by Busters bedroom window. And just as suddenly as it began, it was gone.


The end.