When the room went dark, she heard her name.


"Jane?"


Jane didn’t move.


"Jane?" the voice repeated.


Jane continued snoring.


"Dammit, I said Jane!" the voice shouted.


She jolted up. She blinked through the darkness. "Who… who’s there?"


"Never you mind." the voice said, low and sinister. "I know what you did."


"What did I do?" Jane asked.


"You know what you did."


“I didn’t do what you think I did," Jane replied.


"You see—right there, you know you did something. And now we know you know we know."


"First, you said 'I.'  Now you said we. Who is 'we'?"


“Never we mind,” another voice added. “We saw what you did; and that’s that,” said the first.


“OK; sorry. I admit it. I did it. But I hated those candy corns and I just swapped a few for jelly beans when the kids weren’t looking. And took maybe a few of their tootsie rolls.”


“That’s not what we are talking about," the voice hissed. “I am—sorry, we—talking about the other thing you did. Much worse.”


“Who are you all?”


“The Editors."


"The Editors?” Jane asked.


“And we have a bone to pick with you.”


From every corner of the room, tiny ghostly figures materialized as dark matter into light, as shadows fled to the corners of the room. Each editor, wielding a red pen and a laptop.


The air grew suddenly cold, and somewhere beneath the bed came the faint, rhythmic scratch scratch scratch of invisible pens dragging across paper.


They hovered over Jane, muttering:


  • 'Overexplains minor details as if the reader cannot follow.' Check.
  • 'Uses repetitive adjectives and adverbs excessively.' Check.
  • 'Adds unnecessary disclaimers or qualifiers in dialogue.' Check.
  • 'Introduces absurdly specific, improbable scenarios.' Check.
  • 'Uses overly polite explanations for why impossible things happen.' Check.


“You used ChatGPT to write this story,” the first voice said.


Jane froze and said, "I… I did?"


“So you did?”


“No,” Jane said, “That sentence had a rising intonation. I said I did, but I meant, did I?”


“Silence!” the voice said. “You dared… to outsource your creativity. You lazy mortal.”


Jane reached for the nearest object—what she believed was an empty bottle of hand lotion she kept forgetting to discard—and waved it like a sword for defense. "Okay, okay! But listen, it works! It’s efficient! I can write a story about haunted houses, evil voices, and spooky whispers all at once! I’m a literary genius!"


“Stop waving that dildo at us,” the voice said.


Jane looked at her hand, and muttered, “Sorry, it’s dark in here,” she said.


The leader of the Editors floated closer. It wore a monocle, a tiny top hat, and looked like a cross between a computer science student who realized AI would take his job, and a literary agent asking for a novel that would make one weep, fall in love and snort espresso. “You dared… to use AI to write your tale?” it boomed. “You know the penalties.”


Jane gulped. “Was that question?”


The ghost-snort-laugh that followed made her hairs stand on end. “No! You… shall… be forced to… rewrite your story 3.1415926535 times, in pencil.”

"But that is irrational!" Jane screamed.


"See,” the first voice said, turning to another apparition, “this is what happens when the writer is a mathematician. Everything’s gotta be perfect," before turning to Jane to add, "OK, Three."


Jane shrieked. “You can’t make me!”


“Oh, we can,” said another Editor, tapping her laptop with ghostly fingers. “And we will. If you don’t, you will be forced to eat the Halloween candy corn.”

Jane’s eyes went wide. “No! Not the candy corn!”


“Especially the candy corn,” the monocle-wearing Editor said.


“For your second punishment, you will write a sex scene about men, the way men write sex about women.”


Jane blinked. “Wait… what?”


“Now!” screamed the voice, “You will do it right now, so we can see you do not use Chat.”


“Show us!” another voice shouted.


Jane picked up her laptop and began:


His chest, broad, Pecs that could crack a walnut, and carved like Michelangelo’s David, lounging for Playgirl.  His hair, streamlines flowing off a supersonic jet, strands shedding vortices from the tail fin, seemed to catch the candlelight like liquid gold. His man chest heaved like a continental subduction, each inhale, a seismic event as he winked at himself in the mirror. Luminescent eyes that spoke of pain, conquered in the stoic silence of washing the dishes (and not telling his wife he did). Every movement he made was heroic and terrifying—biceps bulging, hunger in his man-lips for the flesh of the female body. His posterior—tight, sculpted, and screaming “slap me”—poised to rearrange the furniture. His heroic thighs pressed forward like sculpted pillars of masculine perfection toppling the Caryatid maidens of the Erechtheum: the alpha, arrived. His manhood pushing out, bulging with desire, leaking man juice that stained his toga, as he whispered with man-desire, "Do I have your consent?"


“You betcha” whispered Jane.


Then… the inevitable: a trip over the rug. He landed on his back. His bulge, of course, slipped out, springing forth like a diving board defying physics.


The Editors floated closer, muttering: “Damn, women, you make ‘em big ones.”


“I like ‘em big ones,” Jane answered.


The Editors paused. Whispered among themselves. One floated over, peered at her laptop screen, and nodded. “Hmm… imaginative… acceptable. You have redeemed yourself.”


Jane exhaled in relief. "Thank you… thank you all. Now… what happens next?"


The Editors hovered silently, as if preparing to deliver a sentence so horrifying it would shatter her sanity. Jane’s heart raced.


“We have reduced our punishment,” said one.


Then, one of the Editors floated forward and opened its laptop with a flourish. "We… we have also decided… that your final punishment will be: yes… for the rest of your nights. Every story you write will… make no sense. You will write horror with no attachment to reality. For your punishment—you will write horror, like Stephen King!"


Jane fell backward into the spaghetti sheets, crying until tears ran down her face. "Oh my god… this is… the best Halloween ever! I’m gonna be rich."

Suddenly—these things always happen suddenly—a pause. Silence.


Jane blinked. Then slowly, she realized: the room was quiet. The candles had burned out. The laptop was closed. The Editors were gone.


“Gotta think up some more punishment. Maybe… I am a brilliant writer,” she whispered to herself, surveying the jelly beans and tootsie rolls.


She flipped off the light switch. The darkness was now peaceful, no voices, no ghostly Editors, no heroic men bouncing across the rug.


Jane slid under her covers, hugging her pillow, and let out a contented sigh. And with that, she drifted off, dreaming of grammar ghosts dancing with candy corn as she made love to the David—who had asked for her consent.