The Writer by Amy Cross

“I saw them too. I never thought anything like this was actually possible, I thought it was all…” Sighing, he seems lost for words, which I guess is fitting; after all, for as long as I’ve known him, John has always insisted that ghosts can’t be real. “I need to think,” he mutters, opening the door and climbing out. “I need to… I need to work out what the hell happened tonight.”
    “I told you they were there,” I reply, getting out of the truck and following him toward the cabin. “Something was different tonight, though. They seemed more angry, Hannah was asking why I abandoned her. I’d been starting to think that I didn’t mind having them in the house, but tonight…”
    I watch as his trembling hands fumble with the key. After a moment, he manages to unlock the padlock and swing the door open.
    “If we go back,” I continue, “I can talk to them.”
    “You want to talk to two ghosts?” he asks, switching on the light to reveal a small kitchen, with a couple of doors leading off to rooms at either side. “You want to negotiate with them? Ask them not to bother you again?”
    “I have to go back to my house,” I tell him. “What am I supposed to do, stay up here forever and just leave the place alone? I have to…” I pause as I think back to the moment when Hannah’s face seemed to collapse in on itself. “I can’t let this carry on. Anyway, even if I don’t go back, they’ll probably just follow me. I need to make peace with them somehow.” I watch as he opens one of the cupboards and takes out a bottle of whiskey. “It’s like in that book you wrote, The Devils of Caulfield . Remember? The one with the haunted house and the -”
    “I remember the goddamn book,” he mutters, filling two glasses, “but that was all made up. It was fiction. This…”
    He downs the whiskey before sliding the other glass over to me.
    I shake my head.
    “Suit yourself,” he mutters, gulping it down in one go and immediately filling it up again. “That book, all my books… Everything in them is just fiction, stuff I plucked out of the air. You can’t go looking in them for advice on how to deal with this kind of situation. That’s not how the world works, Beth. This…This is real.”
    “And you’re certain you saw them?” I ask, desperate to believe that finally someone else has seen the ghosts.
    “I saw them!” he shouts, momentarily losing his temper before taking another swig of whiskey. “Sorry, I just… You don’t have to keep asking me over and over again. I saw them, they were there, your dead husband and your dead daughter, they…” He refills his glass and stares down at the whiskey for a moment. “Jesus Christ,” he mutters. “I was wrong all that time. All my life, I was convinced ghosts were just a story, just something made up for amusement, and now…”
    We stand in silence for a moment. He lifts the whiskey glass to his lips, pauses, and then sets it back down again.
    “I’m sorry,” I tell him finally.
    “Sorry?” He turns to me. “For what?”
    “For dragging you into this.”
    For the first time tonight, a faint smile crosses his lips.
    “I’m sixty-two years old,” he says after a moment. “I might have gone my whole life without ever realizing that I was wrong about all of this. I might have reached my deathbed, still convinced that ghosts aren’t real. At least… At least you’ve opened my eyes.”
    “I don’t know what to do next,” I reply.
    “Neither do I.”
    “There’s still no proof,” I continue. “Where can I go? Who can help?”
    “You said they were different tonight,” he replies. “Exactly what did you mean by that?”
    “They were angry,” I tell him. “Hannah, in particular. It was as if she was upset that I went out with Jason, and upset that I asked him to describe her injuries. I just… Maybe she’s right. Maybe it was a bad idea.”
    “You had that psychic in,” he replies. “She didn’t like that , I