Okay, so here is a short (500) 'ghost' story I've just completed. I don't normally write this kind of stuff, so it may well be dreadful! It's for a writer's competition, saw it and thought I'd give it a go.
It's set in the catacombs of Paris, and is loosely based on the 'man gets lost in the catacombs of Paris' video (links at the bottom of the page), which is well worth a look...v spooky but undecided if it's genuine or not. The catacombs are real passageways under the Paris city, which were used mainly in the 18th Century as a storage for dead bodies(!) There's a relatively small section which is open to the general public, but most of it is unmarked and illegal to enter...however 'cataphiles' (yes, really) often find ways down there to explore and map out the vast network.
Anyway, thought it would make an interesting setting for a ghost story. Here's my take on it:
A whisper, screamed
The poor sap in the rucksack was lost, no doubt about that. They'd been watching him for hours; noticing the slow prickle of desperation overtake him some kind of cancerous sweat. His pupils were stretched open, forcibly pulling in the empty blackness around him as he staggered from one dead end to the other. A tiny passage out of the bowls of catacombs and into the black Parisian air was but two hundred metres away, not that the man in the rucksack knew. It could be hours.
They
watched as he steadied himself against the dank sides of the left-hand
passageway, their dead mouths exhaling icy ether against the pallor of his
face. Hands shaking, he removed the rucksack from his back, forcibly tearing at
the zip and pulling at the bag's insides. What did he hope to find?
Whatever it was, they doubted it would help him. Not now.
Hope was a far more precious thing down here than any kind of possession,
and that had slowly bled into the darkness hours ago.
Still
curious, they encircled him, eager to see what the man was so desperate for. He
stopped. Eyes bulging, his throat tightened like the crack of a noose:
something was there. He stood alone in the silence, until fear finally left his
mouth. "Hel-lo? Is anyone there? HELLO?" The voice that he once knew
to be his own echoed down the passageways, unfolding and scattering into
nothing; reminding him shard-like that nothing existed down there, save for his
own empty fear and desperation. The worst kind of company.
They
stepped back, letting the man with the bad friends rip the insides out of his
rucksack. They watched, mouths mortified, as he finally revealed the entrails
of his search: a rudimentary map; palm-sized and dirty as a secret. 'Les Passages du Mort':
The Death Trail. The eyes peeled back even further, his pupils desperately
cloying at the discordant shapes and letters bubbling centimetres in front of
his face.
Slowly, a
tear left his eye and trickled down the right of his face, friendless and resigned.
He would never work it out. The map was bound up by the subsuming nothingness;
undecipherable and useless. It left his hands and dropped silently to the
ground.
Inside the warm cavern of his skull, he felt his mind begin
to pop.
The claustrophobia
of silence began to be replaced by an incessant chatter of humans; a noise
water-falling down the passages, until the tendrils of its insanity seemed to
grip his throat with such a force that he thought he might pass out. A choking
of all logic. They could only watch on, as he left himself and slowly became
one of them; the rotting thought of helplessness taking over every fibre of
his body.
And in
those final moments, he screamed a whisper as his mind blew in. He ran,
suddenly and uncontrollably, disappearing into the labyrinth of
darkness forever.
'Den of Geek' - Ghost story competition
Video on youTube of lost man in Parisian catacombs
