Have you ever heard of ghost writers that write solely about ghosts, about all things horror and nothing else? That’s because writers like that rarely existed. I mean how, ultimately cliché was it? A ghostwriter who wrote about ghosts.
But Saliu was happy about his position. Every three days, he had the sole opportunity of shattering people’s dreams and bringing their worst nightmares to life through his stories. He didn’t take this self-imposed job lightly. On the contrary, he felt it was necessary. People needed to be reminded that there were things that no one talked about roaming this world.
They needed to know that each time they slept, there were things that crept around that could shatter their sanity forever. Or maybe they were all figments of their imagination, or possibly his deranged imagination. Either way, his job was to make sure they read it, they felt it and for the rest of the night and many more nights to come, they meditated on it.
It was why he always posted at 2am. When the demons came to play, he'd say to himself. Saliu looked at his profile that evening and smiled to himself. People thrived on this stuff. Yes, he received several comments on his stories like “sicko,” “you need help, “you’re depraved, “you should be arrested for this,” “who thinks like this?” Lots and lots of similar comments. But yet his followers grew. The same people who criticized his stuff kept asking why he didn’t post regularly, kept wanting him to make more stories.
One even though he was a woman. He remembered a commenter writing that he could bet his life that it was a lady behind the account. “Ghosted.” He had said, only a woman would have the stomach to write something this ugly. Comments like that made him laugh. He had no words for misogynistic statements. He didn’t care about gender wars or whatever it was men and women did these days. His own was to make sure that once it got dark, he had his readers looking behind them with wildly beating hearts. That was enough for him. That was his life’s purpose.
This night was going to be a masterpiece, Saliu thought to himself. It was going to be the piece that would destroy every concept of reality that his fellow fickle and fallible humans had. He was going to ensure that their minds were shattered forever because he had found the key. Most people thought that he was just a guy who wrote horror and ghost stories because he was bored. But, he read. He read a lot.
And now he found the key. Horror was good. But horror mixed with manipulation, psychology mixed with psychotic, now that was world-class. Whipping them together was going to bring to existence a brew so deadly, they’d be addicted and destroyed all at once. No one in the history of ghostwriting had done it, but he Saliu Ghosted, would achieve it. Because he could.
And so, he wrote. He spent two days without a wink of sleep perfecting that story. He wrote with drool slipping down his lips, and eyes bloodshot and bulging with exhaustion. And when he was done about 7pm, he waited. Quietly. Patiently. It had to be perfect. And perfection was only achieved for those who could wait. So he was going to wait. There had been a failure in the national grid so that meant no power supply till God knows when.
But it didn’t matter. He had candles everywhere. 2am was a far time away, but he had no choice. He couldn’t break the cycle of something would go wrong. By 12.30 am though, he was panicking. He felt his eyes shutting down on him and he didn’t know what to do. But he had to wait till 2. When it was 1am, he knew he had reached his limit. And damning the consequences, he published.
It all happened in a flash. The candles blew off on their own. The shutters clapped maddeningly against each other. Saliu was still trying to understand what was happening when his phone began to vibrate in his hand. It suddenly turned monochrome, blinking and twitching like an old TV.
“Wait, who are you? Did I break a code? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”
According to the neighbours when the police asked questions after invading the apartment, no one knew who was in that flat that never opened. No one knew what exactly happened. All they heard were the shouts of I’m sorry from 1am till 5. By 5am on the dot, the screams stopped.
To date, no one knows what happened to Saliu, the ghostwriter. Maybe he’d become a dead ghostwriter. But in the depths of the hearts of the people who had followed his writings, they knew what had befallen him was way worse.
Thumbnail created with NightCafe Studio.
