Ghost Writer

I was between three filths and two thirds of the way through what had become for me a very standard length of short story when the block happened. It was a somewhat mawkish love story. Fellow writers will know that once characters are established in a piece of writing they take over and carry the plot down lanes that the author in no way envisaged when pen first went to paper, or finger to keyboard as the case may be.

This star struck couple proved supine in this respect. Not only did they make none of the usual attempt to override the tale of what happened to them, their supine nature thwarted any devising of an ending to the story that was in the slightest bit interesting or believable. Spineless! How had I come to bring such a couple of drips into imaginary being. My finger even hovered over the DEL button, but I never had been able to summon the strength to erase any work over which I had spent time. Pending folder perhaps.

It was my wife who produced the candle. It would invigorate my karma, she said. I had long learned that there were some subjects upon which it was fruitless to enter into argument, and this touched upon one of them. If my thanks sounded heartfelt, that was a tribute to a well established skill of emulation. The pong it gave out was pronouncedly eastern, heady.

But it helped not a jot.

It was a couple of weeks later that I decided to try to see whether I could stiffen the backbones of the characterless young couple and drag the tale to some vaguely plausible termination. Even then my publisher might well spit it out, but it might be worth a few thoroughly needed pounds. I lit the candle in case Samantha, who was in the habit of poking her nose over my shoulder when working, were to come in. I re-read. I tweaked bits. No plausible climax, nor even an amusing anticlimax came to me.

I had been hearing thunder for a wee while, and now the sky had darkened significantly. I was close to getting up and tuning on the light, late morning though it was. Then the flame of the candle, in a saucer beside the keyboard, flickered, enlarged and reddened slightly but also with a tinge of blue, detached itself from the candle and hovered above the monitor. I can only describe the voice as a husky hiss, although that does not convey its nature well. As my hearing is fading but I have yet to give in to Samantha’s insistences that I should spend money we do not have on hearing aids, I struggled to comprehend and had to ask it, half in unbelief, to repeat itself.

“Is is plausible” the voice said again “that some assistance would be acceptable?”. Now I have noticed before that, when the near unbelievable happens one’s social autopilot kicks in and takes over. Thus “that would be very kind!” I was slightly bemused to hear myself say.

I later came to suspect that the first attempt at co-authorship failed by design, and I do not mean mine. The flame hovered over my left shoulder, I could feel a warmth on my ear, as it asked me to scroll through the story so far. Its voice as it made suggestions seemed higher pitched, more hissy and softer than before, even though it was now near my ear, and I many times had to ask it to repeat itself. Its suggestions did not seem to meld with the story as written so far. Eventually “this is not working” I declared.

The flame moved over the keyboard and seemed to speak much more clearly. It adopted a highly tentative, even pleading tone. “Would it be conceivable that you would permit me to enter your PC? It would be much easier for me there.” it asked. My reply took some time, a review and eventual dismissal of the little I knew about computer viruses, arriving in the end at a somewhat rash “in for a penny, in for a pound” decision. “OK” I said, and, like a flash, the flame shot into the nearest USB port.

It was a bit like when, some time back, I had clicked a link to give a computer engineer control of my machine. The mouse cursor zipped about all of its own, and changes were made to the text at high speed. A paragraph that had taken a morning to write was highlighted – then gone. The mouse and keyboard were non-responsive, and I knew better than to turn the machine off while it was doing things – fatal corruption could be caused. I couldn’t stand this, and went and made a cup of coffee and ate a digestive biscuit or two.

On my return, the automatic editing had finished. To my horror, the story was radically changed. Not for the better. The two young people had been walking in the woods as in the original, but had quarrelled. She had stabbed him with a paper knife and buried his body which was found by a walker’s dog. She was duly identified as the murderer, tried, convicted and committed suicide in an evilly run prison. Not nice. Not my kind of story at all. Not even in a plausible simulation of my style. Not remotely commercial.

Worse followed. Messages came up that the file was locked, I was allowed neither to change, move, copy or delete it. Track changes were not enabled. There was no backup copy. It was irrevocably lost, and I had not even printed out a copy. I realised that I should have listened to Samantha, who is much more tech-aware than I am, when she said that I should back my stuff up, even if just to the Cloud – whatever that is.

And more bad news followed that. All of my stories that had been sent to my publisher were intact, unchanged. However a good few that I had written but set aside to “mellow” before final re-reading and polishing had been subjected to similar atrocious distortion, all useless, and all lost. I next checked my email and Aaaaarrgh, all had been sent to my publisher, to which he had replied in distressed puzzlement following an initial scan and statement that he did not want to consider these further.

A cluster of notifications them brought even more bad news to my notice. A whole slew of responses on Facebook had come in, some hurt, some “more in sorrow than in anger”, some simply angry. It appeared that not one, not two but three highly unkind, critical and offensive posts had been made in my name. That flame, that fiend as I came to think of it, had effectively destroyed both my career as a budding writer and my social life.

It had long been a habit, when things were not working out, when a plot would not gel, to go dig the garden. This I did then. As I dug I could not suppress the occasional muttered cursing and windy sigh. “Are you OK?” came a familiar voice from over the fence. It was Ted, known to his flock and to most of the rest of the town as Father Brown. Slowly and with a confessors skill he got the whole sorry story our of me. Then he stroked his chin.

“’Implausible situations call for implausible measures’ to misquote I forget whom” he said. “Hippocrates” I said, dredging a random fact from the junk room of my education, then looked at him expectantly, with an implied invitation to go on. “As you know, even if you never come to church, I am well on the Catholic end of the Anglican spectrum. Even so, I have never believed in exorcism. However, the tale you tell is patently true, I can see that from its effect upon you, and just possibly this is a situation where a casting out ceremony might be worth trying. Er….. you won’t tell the Bishop, will you.”

“Nothing venture, nothing gain” was the second trite saying that had popped into my mind that day, and it occurred that the first such had led me into this pickle, but there really was nothing to lose. I agreed.

For a really quite moderate if slightly high churchman, Ted seemed to know a surprising lot about the form of ceremony he proposed to conduct. It would be, he explained, more based upon an excommunication by anathema than an exorcism, the latter being rather out of favour. Strictly, the presence of a bishop and a dozen supporting priests were needed, but for a simple personal computer he felt that a cut down version might be worth trying. Bell, Book and Candle were essential props. The bell was readily settled upon. Ted said that the church did, of course, have a bell that might even have been consecrated that he used in Mass – communion rather. However, the verger was a stickler for proper process, a noticer of small displacement and a wonder around at strange times, and borrowing it even for a short while was not perfectly risk-free. And, Ted repeated, the Bishop must not get to hear of this prank (Ted used then bit back the word) or he, Ted, might find himself invited to a ceremony involving the presentation of a document embossed with the runes P45. So I remembered, located and fetched an old brass school bell that I had bought in a junk shop and had adorned our fireplace until Samantha banished it, complaining that polishing it was too heavy a chore.

Candles also required discussion. The church naturally had an ample supply, but the verger issue again stood in the way of a borrowing and replacement. However we had in the garden shed quite a large collection of part used, red Christmas candles which Ted agreed would suffice in the circumstances. The book was the least of the problems as Ted was a bibliophile and had spent what some deemed an imprudent amount of a recent legacy on antique religious books. He could offer a Tyndale bible, but recommended a sixteenth century prayer book, which seemed fine to me.

So we went upstairs and the ceremony proceeded. The bell was rung (muffled a bit so as not to arouse Samantha’s questioning), The book having been opened at an appropriate page before the start was slammed shut. The candles, all pre-lit and stuck down using their wax on a strip of wood were all blown out. Ted said that they should have been snuffed simultaneously, but the only thing that might have sufficed were our sherry glasses, and the thought of explanations to Samantha about any wax residue on these ruled this option out. Ted then recited, apparently from memory a long Latin imprecation, ending with a heartfelt Amen.

The fireworks on the screen were amazing. I envisaged that the whole computer had been devoured in holy fire. However, once these had subsided I gingerly approached and tried mouse and keyboard. Relief flooded through me in multiple waves as I found my stories all restored to their original state. Neither my email record nor my Facebook page showed any trace of the mayhem that had been caused. I do not know to this day whether the messages from my publisher and friends had only ever been simulated on my PC or whether the exorcism had stretched its tentacles out into the real world and undone actual mischief now reversed.

Ted was delighted with the bottle of single malt, carefully paid for in cash to obviate any risk that Samantha would ask about a credit card entry for £21.16 to the local off license. What is more, the story came together. The idea of a gentle and lovingly made up tiff between the lovers gave it a shape, even if I judged it a somewhat soppy one. Publisher loved it. Public loved it. Great royalties. Financial worries eased for a good while. Critics say that my style has got softer, more popular – I ma not sure about that but the money is good.

Oh. The candle went into the dustbin, with he half-burnt red ones, carefully under the contents of the sitting room waste-paper basket which I untypically emptied. I had to tell Samantha that I had inadvertently forgotten to blow it out and that it had burned right down. She did not seem to mind.