Alchemisland

Must be what it’s like being a shit, underwhelming ghost more terrified of the world than it is of him.

Daydreaming in abandoned gaffs. Hoping that troupes of tiktok-drunk schoolkids will arrive and, after finishing their dairy lee dunker and club milk lunches, conduct a séance in his gloom.

It finally happens. A gang of children arrive, replete with phones, lunches and necromantic desire. A Wednesday, he thinks. He is unbound now and dates and days bereft of meaning mound like dust, their puzzling associations lost like the siren’s songs. Arbitrary totems marking the ceaseless march of illusory matter hold little luster.

Long this moment his mind nurtured, drawn sustenance from. Now, victorious images born inside his mind are manifested, crudely pinned to physical reality like donkey’s tails; the images are like old gig posters, with peeling corners folding inward like mandalas resting on the edge of black holes, scraped from the tag-tattooed alley walls of his own skull then transplanted to this place, wherever that is.

The ghost adopts the planned position, left of doorframe, although his essence and energy by proximity to this old oubliette have occulted themselves into the building’s timbers.

He hears footsteps, waits 1..2..3…

He anticipates effusions of fear.

Abjuring his meticulous mental map, the would-be victim enters the room at a moment inopportune while the ghost stands unready. The shock of the victim’s arrival, the sheer confusion of his scuppered plans terrifies him and, within moments, or what passes for moments in the great timelessness of worlds beyond, he fills his ghostly pants with a spectral jobbie.