About Ghosts in the Machine
by Ariel Graham
74 pages / 19700 words
ISBN: 978-1-61040-143-2
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html, lit, Adobe and Sony optimized pdf, prc, epub
Evan's just wasting time on the internet when he finds the photo essay
on abandoned buildings in Detroit, but his curiosity is aroused when a photo
of a once-luxurious hotel room captures the image of a handsome young blond
man, an image that changes every time Evan looks. As the man in the photo
becomes increasingly panicked at something offscreen, something Evan can't
see, Evan's need to play white knight and fly to the rescue from his
northern Nevada home grows.
Evan knows he might be chasing a ghost, and being a hero isn't always easy.
Sometimes it's hard to tell who's doing the rescuing without a scorecard.
Evan finds Jonathan, the man in the picture, but while Jonathan isn't a
ghost, he is trapped in time inside the hotel and the hotel itself is full
of ghosts. If Evan's going to have a chance at a life with Jonathan, he has
to get both of them out of the hotel while protecting and sometimes relying
on a man he's just met and may not be able to trust. No one ever said the
path to true love is easy.
Review
Angela Benedetti, author of A Hidden Magic, writes:
Ghosts in the Machine is a creepy paranormal story about a young
man named Evan who sees a cute blond man in a photo. The problem is that
nobody else sees the man, and the photographer very emphatically doesn't
want to talk about it. As time goes on, the man in the photo moves --
he's looking frightened and trying to escape from... something not quite
visible in the picture.
Evan ends up investigating an abandoned hotel, and that's where it gets
really strange. I was trying to figure out what was going on,
what Evan should do about it, and even who the bad guy was, because
toward the middle of the story it seemed there might be a few
candidates. Jonathan, the young man in the photos, is hard to pin down,
alternating between victim and threat until Evan's not sure what to
think for a while.
This isn't quite a ghost story, despite the title; the creatures aren't
anything I remember seeing before, which is a welcome feature. Ariel
Graham has come up with an original and intriguing supernatural
situation, and a story I was eager to finish.
Sample
From the doorway, Evan could see into the room.
Everything was the same as in the photo. Laced curtains from the jagged
spikes of window glass. Part of the ceiling hanging down, all HVAC and
dented shiny tubing bits. It looked disturbingly like a body leaking
internal organs in a horror movie. The bed had been abused and was covered
in plaster and water stains. Across from the bed, beyond the tumbled
wrongness of the chair, was the mirror. Cracked and spider-webbed. Broken
beyond repair.
Evan stepped inside the hotel room and jerked to one side as movement
startled him. Something was dragging the blond guy back toward that mirror
and Evan shouted, incoherent and panicky. In the next breath, he wasn't
seeing the guy already at the mirror, he was watching the guy from the photo
struggle to escape from the confines of the mirror.
The guy's mouth opened. He reached toward Evan, and Evan finally saw what
was behind him. just a glance, at something that seemed made up of shadows
and darkness, bones and damp, mildew and decay. To Evan it looked as if the
guy had gotten stuck somehow, pulled in and made a part of the hotel. Beyond
the triple rings of cracked mirror Evan no longer saw lace and elegant
decay. There was nothing atrociously lovely or surreal about what dragged
down the blond and nothing even vaguely metaphoric about it.
Hands grabbed him. Claws snagged him. Pain played across his face. The thing
that dragged the guy into the mirror had a face full of fury and denial and
nothing and anger, and if the thing was anything at all, it was the opposite
of life and light, the opposite of everything that built and grew and caused
to be and created. The opposite of everything that celebrated sunrise and
eschewed the dark.
It was every bit as real as Evan himself.
But the guy soon wouldn't be. He faded. Light streamed from him, and started
to dim. He screamed, and his screams were growing distant.
The thing reached one hand past the boy toward Evan.
Promise. Threat.
Evan hefted the axe and chopped the fingers off the straining hand.
The thing screamed and threw itself back, snapping its head forward,
lowering its mouth toward the man from the photo, trying to bring the fangs
down as if it had some other, longer, slower plan in mind, but Evan had
showed up and ruined everything and now it needed to work faster.
Evan swung the axe and brought the handle up under the thing's jaw, driving
its head back. He was shouting, something incoherent, dire warnings or vile
threats, trying to drive the thing back.
So he could get closer.
The thing flailed and screamed. Blood sprayed from its fingers, reeking and
gruesome.
Evan let go of the axe with one hand. His free hand reached for the other
man. Touched his face. Evan's fingers wrapped around the back of the guy's
neck and drew him from the mirror, pulling him, shoving the creature.
Evan's mouth came down over the other man's mouth..
The guy from the mirror tasted of ripe peaches and sunlight and that salty,
cinnamony taste Evan's skin took on if he spent a day at one of Nevada's
desert lakes, his skin caking with alkali the way it would cake with salt at
the ocean.
The guy bit Evan's mouth, sharp, like wind snagging a curtain on broken
glass. His hands, which had reached and warded off the thing in the photos,
reached and went up around Evan's neck.
The thing in the mirror howled and pulled harder, and for an instant the guy
slipped, then slid back into Evan's arms. He mumbled something incoherent
and Evan pulled, got purchase on the white button-down and shoved with the
axe at the same time. The creature lost purchase and the other man tumbled
free, squirting from Evan's hands and sliding from the mirror out onto the
floor of the hotel room.
Evan didn't wait or turn or look. He shouted to stay down and he yanked the
axe away from the creature as hard as he could, sending the thing off
balance again and partly into the hotel room.
He reversed the grip, swung the blade, and buried the axe in the creature's
face.