Hopefully this isn’t gonna get me cursed or something, I thought to myself as I finished putting up some signs directing people into the cemetery for candy. Inside I’d even set up some lights and a few bins of candy as bait so I could say it was all in the Halloween spirit.
Crouching in my hiding spot and listening for any folks coming by, I felt something like a light tap on my shoulder, and froze. No way, had I been found out already?
I turned my head to look back and almost ran screaming myself. A host of…Translucent…People were standing behind me. Some sort of trick, right? Someone found out what I was doing and got me first, that’s gotta be it, surely?
The ghost that had tapped my shoulder smirked, and pressed their hand on my shoulder, enough that I could feel it…And then let it pass right through me.
“fuck, are you here to kill me?” I managed to eke out.
“Oh, no, first we wanted to spook you then help you spook others. That was your plan, wasn’t it?” the shoulder-tapping ghost responded.
“Uh…Ye-yeah. Are you…serious?” I asked, baffled. “Hell yeah, usually we only get a few folks roaming through this time of year, but you went and helped us by putting out some bait!”
Uneasy, but happy they hadn’t killed me or whatever worse a bunch of ghosts might do, I told them my plan and a few of them rolled their eyes at how basic it was. It was, really, just wear a scary mask and jump out growling, so I couldn’t blame them. With some more folks to help me, we could make it all more elaborate, and so we did.
Instead of having the bins all in one place, we spread them out around the cemetery and I’d act as a guide to them, spinning spooky stories along the way that some of the ghosts passed on to me or helped to make up. Then as we made our way further in, the ghosts would use their abilities to subtly reinforce the stories, till we reached the last bin of candy they’d reveal themselves and somehow, make me appear like one of them too. I don’t really know how they did the last one, till the sun started to rise and I thanked the ghosts for helping me, and they laughed an eerie, hollow laugh unlike those I’d heard through the night after each scare.
“What’s so funny?” I directed the question to the whole group, and the shoulder-tapping ghost took to answering once more, “Oh, so you know how we said we made you look like a ghost to scare people?”
“Y…Yeah, it was a cool trick, how’d you do it?”
The ghost tapped something just out of sight near where we had put the last bin. I went to look and there was my corpse, hunched over with the ghost tapping its shoulder. On seeing the expression on my face change the ghost cackled a hollow, horrible cackle.
“Least they won’t need to carry your body far!” the ghost said, bursting into yet more laughter.
I liked this a lot! For a short story like this the plot was quite good, and I loved that twist at the end, wraps the story up really well. All in all this was pretty well done!
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