Content note: suicidal ideation, suicide planning and other extremely dark themes. Please do not read if this is likely to distress you. Check out some of the past Halloween erotica instead – in the past I’ve done a vampire, a werewolf, a succubus, a siren, a reanimated corpse and even the monster that lives under your bed. This time, I thought I’d have a go at writing a ghost story. As I say, there are very dark suicidal themes here, so please don’t read on if you’re not in the headspace for that. Any sexy stuff that happens is fully consensual, though it might be the only part that is.
I’m not dead: that’s the first thing you need to know. Don’t expect a twist ending where you shudder over my demise. That’s not to say I won’t come close: I have welcomed death. In fact, I fell so deeply in love with death that I almost embraced it forever. The second thing you need to know is that in the end, love will save me.
At its heart, this is a ghost story. I know you don’t believe in them, I never have either. It doesn’t take much to frighten a believer – a smear on a CCTV camera or a door that slams at too perfect a moment – it’s almost too easy to strike fear into the heart of someone who already wants to be afraid. You and I are far cleverer than that. We know there’s no such thing as ghosts. They only exist in our minds. Nevertheless, this is a true story. And I promise that by the time I’m done, you’ll believe me.
I was lonely. That’s important, I think. Tired, vulnerable and so desperately lonely that the physical ache of it would sometimes shut me down. I would wake up sometimes on the kitchen floor from a sort of trance, to find my face wet and my jaw aching from ugly sobs. Once I woke up in the bath like this, with only hazy memories of ever having run it. There was a Stanley knife balanced on the rim of the sink. The water was ice-cold, with a thin film of white scum left over from the bubble bath floating on top. I remember thinking how pathetic that was: bubbles! Who pours bubbles into a bath for their future corpse?
My only friend was Andy. I’d met him on a dating site three years prior, though we never progressed far beyond drinks and semi-bored friendship. There was no chemistry between us, but he was keen and I was flattered, so I invited him on outings. Even introduced him to a couple of my single girlfriends, just in case. It was only when my other friends left me (as friends have a tendency to do, when you are me), that Andy became my best friend by default. I didn’t like him very much, but I was grateful.
The morning after my bubble bath, I remember thinking that I’d happily welcome even an imaginary friend if it would take away this ache.
I’d been getting these headaches for a month or so. Should have gone to the doctor, but it’s really hard to go anywhere when you can’t get up off the kitchen floor. Andy hadn’t had much success in getting me a phone appointment, so I was surviving mostly on paracetamol from breakfast through till bedtime. Truthfully, I’d only managed to get out of the building twice in the last few months. My contact with the outside world was limited to the delivery drivers who showed up occasionally with oversized Amazon boxes and blue crates of shopping, and Andy, who came over once a week to check in and help around the flat. Fixing the kitchen cupboard and the crumbling, damp plaster in the bedroom. That dodgy old gas fire in the living room, the occasional shelf or two. Sometimes he’d cook dinner or change my bed sheets and put a wash on if I couldn’t face doing it myself.
That’s the state I was in when I first met my ghost.
It started with a sense of being watched. In the bathroom, weeping (again) on the toilet, I’d get this sense of closeness. Almost like someone was standing guard. It got more intense when I started brushing my teeth – a feat I rarely managed, if I’m honest. That feeling might have been why I brushed my teeth in the first place. The prickling skin-tingle that told me: someone’s here. Someone’s with you. I know, you don’t believe in ghosts, so you think I was imagining it. I am, after all, the woman who put bubble bath in her would-be coffin. But it was real, I promise. Someone was watching.
One day, I felt myself responding to that sensation. Performing for it, almost. Like I wanted to show I welcomed it and I wasn’t afraid. I stripped off in the hallway, leaving my clothes in a pile. For the first time in a very long time, I let myself touch my own skin. Really feel it. Run my palms over my hips and thighs as I slipped down my knickers. Cup the swell of my breasts as I lifted my t-shirt. Something pulsed inside me – arousal and shame. As if someone was peeking in through the window. I turned to where the curtains were pulled shut, and slipped one finger into the slit of my cunt to touch my clit. The middle finger, like ‘fuck you’. In response, I felt this kind of shimmering in the walls.
I know this makes no sense. It’ll get more insane before it gets rational. But all of this is true and you’ll believe me in the end, I promise.
I fell into my bed that smelled like loneliness, and closed my eyes against the pounding in my head. There was this pulse, like a heartbeat, and the sense of someone next to me. The shimmering I’d felt earlier grew stronger, and I had an urge to throw off the duvet and lie naked and open – welcoming it. My hands wandered over my body again, but this time it felt more purposeful. Almost eager. It had been months since I’d actually wanted to touch my own body, and now the desire to do it felt almost like a command.
That was the moment I started to feel afraid. Arousal blended with fear as my cunt grew wetter at my fingertips. One either side of my clit – teasing, edging, fluttering. Not the purposeful rubbing that I’d instinctively turn to if I were alone, instead it was like the unseen hand of someone who wanted me hot but not sated. I started breathing more quickly, in time to the slick back-and-forth of my fingertips. I felt a sharp bite of pain and realised my left hand was pinching one of my nipples. Hard and vicious, nails digging into skin, like it was trying to wake me from a nightmare. My skin crawled. But my right hand, quivering against my clit, was tugging me onward towards bliss.
Locked into this now, I couldn’t stop my hands from moving, and couldn’t force my legs to move either, to haul my body from the bed. A rock sat on my chest. Somewhere in the back of my brain, an ancient instinct told me ‘danger’, but I didn’t have enough control to run. I wanted it. Whatever ‘it’ was. A ghost, a poltergeist, or just the next phase of my blossoming madness: I wanted it to keep on rubbing, pushing me over the edge and into oblivion.
The left hand crept from my left nipple to my right and just as the first waves of orgasm were about to crash, my breath caught in my chest. Hot. Choking. When I tried to gasp I realised I couldn’t. It’s a terrifying feeling, that.
Stop breathing now, go on. Just for a couple of seconds. Hold your breath.
Now start breathing again. Breathe in, then out. As soon as you have to think about it, it suddenly seems like a conscious choice. You wonder if breathing in and out without thinking is a skill you’ve lost and may never regain. For a while you start to panic, wondering if you’ll ever go back, or if the rest of your life will be punctuated with the metronome-regular thought ‘breathe IN, you idiot, now breathe OUT.’ Dizzy, confused, and heaving at the air like there was almost none left in the room, I wondered if my body might give up completely.
But remember I told you about the ghost? My ghost was with me. My ghost loved me.
A gust of wind blew in through the bathroom, and the bedroom door whipped wide with a loud bang. That only happened when windows at both sides of the flat were open, but I couldn’t remember having opened them – it was cold, why would I? The freezing blast slapped me out of that hazy state, and I sat up. Panting now, breathing sweet cold air. The shock of the door had shaken me out of that trance.
That night, when I slept, I dreamed of strong arms wrapped around my chest, hugging me tightly like I mattered. And when I woke up in the morning, I found a note in the kitchen. Pink post-it, black biro, handwriting so faint I almost couldn’t make out what it said.
It said: “GO”
I know. You definitely don’t believe me, and fair enough. I wouldn’t either. When I told Andy about what had happened he talked me down – reassuring me about the laws of physics and making jokes about whether we should ask the poltergeist to pass him the screwdriver when he was trying to fix the window latch. It didn’t help that by the time he got here, I’d lost that creepy note. Where did it go?
I was great at losing things. I could lose everything, me! From a glass of water I’d only just poured to a group of friends I’d known since school. Perhaps the note had disappeared into the same timewarp hole to which my friends had retreated. Dropping off my feeds and out of my phone one by one by one. Blocking me, even, some of them. Until nobody was left but me. And occasionally Andy.
And now, apparently, my ghost.
It happened again that evening, after he’d gone. Another headache, more painful this time, and dizziness so bad I almost puked. I was awake in bed making patterns from the swimming colours of the darkness. Not quite counting sheep so much as trying to hypnotise myself. That breathing thing was creeping up again – I could hear the rasps of my own in-and-out. In and out. In… and out. Slower and slower until I started to wonder whether the next ‘in’ would ever come at all.
My hands started moving. This time beginning with a tight hug – right hand on left shoulder, left hand on right, squeezing like they were trying to push the last breaths from my lungs. Then stealing lower down my body, pinching my flesh and massaging that shimmering arousal down to my crotch – engorged and full and so wet I soaked the sheets. Gasping, fluttering, pulsing. At the mercy of whoever was controlling me.
And yes, it was frightening, but it also felt so very full of love. That shimmering in the walls, the sensation of my chest being crushed under the weight of it: it terrified me, but it soothed me too. An intense love – one which watches and controls – but love nonetheless. This time my ghost let me peak, and though the moan I let out was oxygen-starved and weak, the kiss of climax was enough to tip me over the edge into sleep.
That night I dreamed that there were many hands all over me. Carrying me out of the flat like I was surfing an invisible crowd.
The next morning I threw open all the windows, feeling brighter and happier than I had in a very long time. I didn’t even cry when that bloody kitchen cabinet door fell off its hinges again. I texted Andy to come fix it, even made myself toast. I felt weak and drained, but sated. Ready to face whatever today had in store.
Then I saw the next note: “GET OUT” and my limbs turned to ice.
And another, like before, one which just said “GO.” Two more in the living room: “NOW” and “NOT SAFE.” They’d disappeared by bedtime.
Could someone have been sneaking in to hide these notes around? Andy didn’t have a key, though not for want of asking: he worried that if I ever did venture beyond the lobby of the building I might get trapped outside and he’d have to come and rescue me. Besides him, no one else had been in the flat since my final, stalwart friends stopped coming to visit. Who else but my ghost could have written these notes? And why did they want me to go?
The more Andy tried to persuade me the visits weren’t real, the more determined I was to prove him wrong. I realised I was embracing them, even if just to spite him, or maybe spite myself for not believing. Hadn’t I wished for an imaginary friend, after all? Besides, winter was drawing in so the darkness hit early. And the relentless pounding in my head was only ever dulled when those fluttering hands were upon me. Now, too, inside me. Burying, burrowing fingers that felt disconnected from the rest of my body. I found myself staring at the ceiling so I wouldn’t see what they were doing, looking up and away so I could pretend they weren’t mine. They were numb. I was numb. With my gaze drawn upwards and my invisible ghost hand-fucking me, I could pretend that there was someone with me. Someone real. Someone who could help me do what I’d been told to: get out.
That pulsed in my head too: get out. Not safe. Get out. Go. Just as each day it got harder to breathe, so it also got harder to think of anything except the tempting glimmer of life beyond the front door. I welcomed that life, and I feared it. On one hand yearning for company, as I did those waves of pleasure that would send me off to sleep, and on the other hand feeling the pull of it cause my chest to grow tight and my breathing ragged and weak. The unknown. Unfamiliar. Making me dizzy with terror.
On my final ever night in that flat, I got the proof I needed. The proof that I know you need before you believe me: I was being watched. Andy had been round to drop off doughnuts and tinker with the heating again because of the cold. He dropped off some paint supplies too. A vague suggestion I’d made that maybe I should take up art again had somehow stuck in his mind. He gave me a chaste kiss on the forehead, cooked me dinner. Offered to have another go at the kitchen cabinet with the dodgy door. We didn’t talk about my ghost that day, so he never saw the final note. I’d tucked it into a drawer then promptly forgot what it said – I forgot so much in those final weeks, I’m so sorry. Parts of this story are still being knitted together.
After he’d gone, yet another sobbing fit on the kitchen floor drove me once again to bubble bath. I set the taps running, stripped off in the hallway. One finger, again, dipped into the slit of my cunt to taste whether I was still real. A middle-finger ‘fuck you’ to the bedroom window, which was still watching me even now. Even with the curtains closed. I knew it.
I went to the kitchen and rummaged for the Stanley knife, but couldn’t find it. Not in the drawer where it usually was, and not on the kitchen counter. The toolbox was empty too, Andy had cleared it out. Did I throw it away? Did he throw it away? Worried about me? I must look mad. Rummaging through the bin, naked and panting and gasping and panting. Lucky he forgot to take the bins out this evening – I found the knife. At the bottom of the bag. Slimy with God-knows-what but still sharp and still useful.
Buried alongside it, beneath yoghurt cartons and stale pizza and more of last week’s ephemera: new notes. So many! In that same faint wobbly writing.
“PLEASE GO” and “CAN’T BREATHE” and “HELP ME” and – oh look! – “ANDY.”
Notes upon notes upon notes. I hadn’t realised there had been so very many. Couldn’t remember finding these, or stuffing them down in the bag. But that was just like me. I couldn’t remember why my friends had left me either, nor what it was that kept me from unlocking the door and simply walking outside. Or why my only friend was a man I barely knew, who called me mad and silly and made my skin crawl when he ruffled my hair.
What could I remember? Oh yes, the bath. I was going for a nice bubble bath. My final one. That shimmering flicker in the walls appeared again. Told me not to take the knife – I didn’t need it, it wasn’t going to be that sort of bubble bath. But as I stood, my naked body shaking and gasping, in the middle of the kitchen, I saw all those notes, scattered across the floor like dead leaves. PLEASE GO. GET OUT. CAN’T BREATHE. ANDY.
As far as I could remember, there was only one route out.
Blade clutched in my hand. Legs weak and quivering. Head, skin and walls all pulsing with an urgent signal – danger – I headed to the bubbles, and oblivion. The first few steps were hard, the next ones harder, but I made it from the kitchen to the hallway standing upright. I’d have sighed a ragged sigh if my chest had been compliant, but as it was I could barely draw air. I settled for a lurch of triumph – which swiftly turned to nausea – in the pit of my convulsing stomach. My arms were weak too now. Tingling. It was escalating. So quickly. Possessing me. My ghost seeped out of the walls and joined me as I padded to the bathroom – I felt as if its hands were round my waist. Guiding me or pulling me back, or a little bit of both, I wasn’t sure. Like it couldn’t quite make its mind up whether to help me to live or to die.
Where I felt it touch me, my skin throbbed with an urgent desire to stay. But it wasn’t enough. I’d become good friends with the idea of death. In love with it, in fact. As I shuffled to the bathroom, half-dead already, I’d have bet you any money I was done.
But remember what I told you at the start? I am alive.
And it was love that saved me.
I staggered into the bathroom to find the bathtub gushing full. Pouring scalding water down the overflow pipe. Steaming the room like London morning fog. I couldn’t breathe it in – too hot – and I was dry so dry and dizzy. So weak and tired and confused and scared and scared and scared and hopeless. Ready for that final embrace with my ghost and the end of my life.
I reached out a shaking hand to turn off the hot tap, and that was when it happened.
Something inside me quivered like a plucked string. An instinct embedded many centuries before I was born. The one which saved my ancestors from death at the tusks of boars, or rival tribes, or starving wolves: the urgent need to live. It thudded in my crotch like longing… flickered like my ghost in the walls… throbbed like the constant pounding in my head… and I looked up.
Looked around.
One last quick check for predators before relaxing into the death I chose for myself.
In the bathroom mirror, in handwriting that shook but was clearly my own, three words:
DON’T TRUST ANDY
I didn’t promise that you’d believe in ghosts, my friends. I only said that you’d believe me. Because I believed me, in the end. Those notes I’d written for myself, in shaky hand. The ones I forgot I was writing. The feeling of company seeping from the walls. The nighttime visits from someone who filled me with love.
When they arrested Andy, it didn’t take him long to confess. They had a warrant, after all, for whichever computer those cameras were sending their feeds to. The one in the bedroom, just above the window that he’d ‘fixed.’ In the kitchen, where he’d watched those sobbing fits and seen me writing post-its that he’d later gather and be sure to throw away. And the hidden camera in the bathroom too, of course: the one with the lens that poked through a gap in the crumbling grout by the mirror.
See? I told you I was being watched.
The warrant for his computer was the final straw, I think. They didn’t need to hunt to find the rest: he spilled it all. The emails he’d sent to my friends from a fake account, with cheery notes and messages that eventually curdled into the spite which led them to block me. The pictures he’d taken of me before we’d even met. The research he had done on how best to drive me insane.
Genuine monsters aren’t fictional – they’re terrifyingly mundane. Leaky old gas fires and men with broken minds. Did you spot it? Because I didn’t. Shortness of breath, headaches, dizziness, confusion, nausea: carbon monoxide poisoning, apparently. They tell me I was lucky I escaped when I did. The neighbours wrapped me in blankets then called an ambulance – pitying the mad girl from next door. It was one of the paramedics who suggested they call the police.
Andy didn’t want me dead, he just needed to take the edge off. I was too willful before, too ready to refuse him. He caged me and poisoned me not to kill me, but to possess me.
But I’m alive, remember? When I ran from that bathroom and out of the flat, I didn’t know the shape of the danger I was in, but I trusted that writing. I trusted myself. My ghost was with me: within me. A phantom which frightened me with power and paralysed me with love. A spectre that urged me onward even in the face of self-hatred and loneliness and despair. Who nudged me to look around, look up, be wary of predators.
Though I lost my connection with it for a while, this ghost who loved and bullied me into fighting has been with me all my life. An eternal spirit, born a thousand generations ago, who walked with my mother and her mother and hers and hers, ever since the dawn of time itself.
I loved that ghost, in the end. I loved myself.
And it was love that saved me.
Note:
This isn’t really my story. This piece of fiction is inspired by two other horror stories about carbon monoxide poisoning in the real world – one by Carrie Poppy, who I heard speaking at an event many years ago and whose creepy tale has always stuck with me, and one by a Reddit user who asked for legal advice after weird post-its started showing up in their windowless apartment.
I drafted it a couple of years ago on the suggestion of someone (huge apologies, I can’t remember who) who floated the idea of a poltergeist/ghost love story. It was written during some really tough times, and each Halloween that’s rolled round since I’ve tried to summon the courage to publish it.
We talk a lot in the sex world about the value of self-love, and – especially when we’re talking about women – this self-love is often framed as a celebratory/sensual thing: masturbation and bubble-baths and ‘alone time.’ I wanted to try and wrap those tropes into a fiercer kind of self-love, one we don’t mention often but is incredibly important: the self-love which powers us through awful times. Which grits its teeth in the face of despair and forces us to keep putting one foot in front of the other. The love that drags us back from the edge. The love that keeps us alive.
If you’re struggling to find it right now, you aren’t alone.
UK:
US:
988Lifeline (be aware that they may call police if they believe you’re in immediate danger or pose a danger to others)