ghosty

Afterthoughts excerpted from Lost Beneath the Surface
My Ghost Writer

This book has a ghostwriter.
Not the kind of ghostwriter whom you pay to write a book which you then claim the fame or infamy for.
My ghostwriter is a real, actual ghost.
I did not deliberately set out to pen a book with a ghost. And while I feel that having agreed to do so is the right decision for many reasons, it has not been easy on me. In the year since I first began this collaboration, I have suffered a great deal of emotional distress, realizing that my choice could open me to attack from various sources. There are individuals who will not approve, including members of my own family. During the space of a year, my hair has gone from having strands of gray here and there to being half gray. There have been many times that I have thought about scrapping this project and my co-author has said that he couldn’t blame me for making this choice. However, I have also made a promise to myself that I would not go to my grave without having done something that would make me feel proud of this otherwise very troubled life. I am proud to have borne my son, but his life is his own and I have no doubt that I will be proud of him. However I have never before accomplished anything on a personal level that makes me feel that my own existence has been worthwhile. Giving voice to someone who has something important to say but who otherwise would have no voice, even if certain truths are couched in a work of fiction, allows me to use my abilities in a unique way and will make me be able to look back on my life with pride, knowing that I had the courage to do something that might be negatively judged by the average person but which nonetheless has great worth.
I did not know anything about my co-author when I created the initial story from which this book was spawned. I didn’t even know of his existence until 2005. And when I initially found out about him, I didn’t want to like him, much less put my already questionable sanity under further scrutiny on his behalf. But sometimes the Universe makes plans behind one’s back and then uses said plans to clobber its unsuspecting victims upside the head.
This being said, I now introduce you to my ghostwriter. He is the real individual who is depicted in some of the chapters in this book. I would say that I discovered him completely by accident. But there are no accidents.
If I were to have deliberately set out to have a ghost writer, this guy would not have even been on my list. Try Edgar Allan Poe, Ambrose Bierce or H.P. Lovecraft as top of the line choices for ghosts that a would-be horror novelist would like to work with. If I had to choose from a list of musicians, great rock poets such as Jim Morrison or Kurt Cobain would have been on the list. Jimi Hendrix would also have been right up there, especially since I once made contact with him via the Ouija board and discovered him to be every bit as nice as I might have imagined. Cliff Burton would have been a possibility for a co-author, as would Ronnie Van Zant, Steve Gaines and his sister Cassie, as well as Duane Allman. But my first choice out of all the great musicians who had passed into the world of spirit would have been Bon Scott.
I worshipped Bon. He was one of the first loves of my young heart. At the age of 13 I imagined some very x-rated scenarios with Bon as my co-star. I imagined that when I reached adulthood I would finally meet Bon, tame his wild ways, and we would marry and live happily and raucously ever after. Of course this was not to be, and I was crushed when Bon died tragically a few days after my fifteenth birthday. My world was cast into darkness. Bon never left my mind or my heart. As far as I was concerned, he was my one true love, and I swore undying allegiance to him. I eventually married and had a son, life took over, and my romantic feelings for Bon mellowed. Nonetheless, if I had been told that I needed to choose the spirit of a musician with whom to pen my novel, Bon would have been it. But as usual, the Universe didn't ask.
I had never even heard of Per Ohlin until 2005. I happened to have the television tuned to the VH-1 channel, which was airing the "Most Metal Moments" program. I really wasn't paying a great deal of attention. I was editing my story, which I had unearthed after it had lain dormant for several years to try and give it the edge that it was lacking. In its initial incarnation, Terry (my protagonist's) story was a two-dimensional Gothic romance. Well-known author's unhappy marriage is falling apart. She's due to collaborate with her longtime mentor, but a family emergency strikes and her mentor asks her to begin creating the story with a new author whom he's discovered. Said new author is actually a beguiling vampire. Author has affair with vampire. Author is rescued from vampire, who is, of course, killed in the resulting battle. Anyone with the merest iota of literary talent could have written it. I wanted to create something unique.
Be careful what you wish for.
As I edited, the narrator on the television was saying that the singer for some band I'd never heard of had committed suicide.
"I hope these fuckers aren't touting suicide as a great metal moment," I said to the cat seated at the end of the couch, not looking up from my work.
The narrator then stated that the deceased's band mate had eaten part of his brain.
"Dude, that is totally fucked up!" I said to the cat, who regarded me with a gaze that indicated taht he thought that I was more than slightly peculiar. But the wheels were grinding in my twisted little mind. An EMT by training, I was prone to enjoyment of gallows humor. This shit belonged on my blog. It was wrong, but as any trauma worker can tell you, certain kinds of wrong make for a good sick laugh.
I looked up and saw the photograph of the deceased and changed my mind. Looking at him made me feel as if I'd been punched in the chest. I no longer wanted to use his misery as fodder for ghoulish mirth. Pain radiated from him, and there was something about his eyes, as if he was silently pleading for relief from his torment. I dubbed the producers of the show asses for touting the sad act of suicide and the appalling act of cannibalism as a "great Metal moment." That and Ozzy Osbourne's slaying of his seventeen cats while on a bad drug trip are right up there in my book with things that have a great deal to do with mental disturbance and very little to do with music.
I decided that I wanted to learn more about the situation, to find out if I could what had caused not only this unfortunate fellow's unhappiness, but to see if I could discern the reasoning, if any, behind the appalling act committed by his band mate. I discovered the book Lords of Chaos and ordered a copy. Meanwhile, I continued my online research. While by now I felt sincere sympathy for the suicide victim, I didn't want to actually like him. He seemed pathetic and deeply disturbed. I didn't want to contact him too closely. What if he tried to possess me? What if he decided to make my life miserable for some kind of a sadistic kick?
When my book arrived, I began to find myself more saddened by than afraid of this individual. I felt that he was not genuinely evil. He was angry, misguided and profoundly unhappy. I didn't know if he was schizophrenic or if there was something else wrong. I still intended to approach him clinically but in spite of my resolve, I found myself developing feelings that were more companionable thatn clinical. It was then that I saw the photograph of the suicide.
As a trained EMT, I have seen gruesome images. I have been around dead bodies. But this effected me profoundly. I felt as if I'd been knocked backwards by a powerful force when I looked at that terrible picture. I was overwhelmed by emotion and began to weep in great tormented sobs. In the midst of this great sorrow I heard a mournful spectral voice in my mind softly say "Please."
"Please what?" I asked gently.
I perceived a maelstrom of emotions. Please let me have another chance. Please be my friend. Please don't let me hurt any more. And there was a sense of terrible loneliness. I looked at the broken individual in the photograph and was overwhelmed by a strange desire to close his eyes, cover him with a blanket and hold his hand while singing to him until he felt at peace.
I mustered all the healing energy I could and sent it with a wish for comfort to this troubled soul. I no longer feared him. I told him that he was welcome to talk to me any time. The blog post that was initially to be a morose piece of black humor became a sympathetic essay. I also decided to feature my new friend in a cameo role in my story so that perhaps people might come to know the human side of one whose tragic demise has been horrifically exploited. What follows is one of those truths that is stranger than fiction.
As I was scanning a photograph of him to use in my essay, there was an electrical surge. The lights in the room flickered and suddenly the external hard drive in which I stored all my photographs started making an unhealthy grinding noise followed by a sickening "clunk." At that point the computer was no longer communicating with it.
"Oh, hell," I said.
"Oh, shit, I'm sorry!" came a voice in my mind. "Please don't hate me."
It seems that my unusual new friend desired to express gratitude towards me for my benevolent efforts on his behalf and wanted to dispel any doubts that I might have as to his existence by making himself visible to me. A spirit body is composed of energy and in causing his own energy to surge, he did something to the electrical current in the house. I asked him to please refrain from doing it again.
"I know you're there," I said. "I don't need to see you. Please don't try so hard to make me see you or the house might blow up!"
The next day I took the broken hard drive to the computer technician, who told me that since it wasn't reading the drive itself would have to be taken out in a clean room and the data would have to be extracted from it. When he told me that this would cost $800, I near to peed myself. I thanked him and got back in the car.
"Fucking destructive ghost!" I muttered, still not 100% sure that the urban legends regarding his character weren't correct and that he might perhaps have been upset with me for trying to display him in a benevolent light. I sensed him beside me, again apologizing for destroying the hard drive and beseeching me not to hate him. I told him that he owed me $1000. $800 for the repair of the hard drive and $200 for the initial purchase price. I then asked him to please consider me blind where ghosts are concerned before I no longer had a working piece of equipment.
"If you were living, you wouldn't poke at a blind person's eyes to try to make them see you, I hope," I said. "So please, treat me as a blind person and don't try to force me to see you.
The hard drive still hasn't been fixed and ghost money is still worthless on the material plane.
I uploaded my blog essay, which turned out to be a sympathetic portrayal of a troubled soul rather than a gruesome piece of black humor. I gave my spectral friend a cameo appearance in a portion of the story. His initial scene doesn't actually appear in the current book. After we really began putting the story together, it made more sense to have it occur later in the story. At any rate, I found him enjoyable to write about and placed him in a few more scenes. He was impressed and seemed quite happy with what I had written.
"There is only one thing--this is better than I could ever be, even if I was at my best," he told me.
"It's an idealized version, of course," I said. "But I truly think that it's what you are inside."
I noted that he seemed quite a bit more mentally stable than he had appeared to be in life. Of course nearly 15 years had gone by since his passing, and his soul had time to mend. I decided to ask what had happened to heal his psyche. I addressed him as "Dead" and he asked if I would please call him Per instead. I later learned that the personality who was speaking to me prefers to be called "Pelle," but I had never heard that name before and at the time it would have been more difficult than it was worth for him to try and make me understand. Unlike some mediums, I'm no good at picking up names or initials. I perceive emotions and energies primarily.
"Dead is my mind," Pelle said. "Fuck, I hate him! But who the hell knew me?"
I said that I would try to let people know him as I was beginning to, using the story as a vehicle. He expressed a surprising, almost childlike excitement at this.
"If you don't mind, I have a couple of suggestions for some things that might be kind of cool," he said. "If you decide you like them, you can use them."
It was exciting to be working with such an obviously intelligent, creative and unique individual and his suggestions were all marvelous. But as it turned out, I was not as comfortable with this collaboration as I first thought I would be. Once I realized just how much impact and input he'd had on the story, it terrified me. I was inches from hitting the "delete" button. And my friend's demeanor turned threatening for the first time since I'd met him. I now know that I was dealing with Dead at this time. Pelle would never speak to me, or probably to anyone else, in this fashion.
"If you delete this," he said, "I will bite you--hard. On the neck. I'm not joking about this."
"I don't care," I said. "I can't publish this. All of my life I've had people telling me I'm crazy. Well, if they read this, that's all the proof they'll need. Especially when they find out that I fully believe that I've been working with you."
"So don't fucking tell them that part."
Some things never change. Such as his propensity for liberally sprinkling his speech with the word "fuck." He does it as much in spirit as he did while living.
"I can't claim that the work is all mine when its half yours," I said. "That would be dishonest. You deserve the credit for what you've done."
"Other people use ghost writers," he said. "Well, just think of it this way. You get to have a real ghost as your ghost writer. How many people can say that?"
"Nobody normal, that's sure. And I don't like the idea of you being my dirty little secret. I never liked being anyone's dirty little secret."
"Fuck normal, and I don't care about being the dirty little secret. Please don't delete the story, ok? If you have to write my stuff out, go ahead. I won't like it, but you've worked too hard to throw everything away. I'm really going to be upset if you delete this. You said you don't want me to be upset any more, right? So don't delete all this hard work, please."
Obviously I caved in, wondering "why me?"
Well--here's the answer to that question!
It's only logical for the troubled spirit of the strangest person in the Universe to have sought help from the second strangest person in the Universe. Morose and mercurial medium meets morbid and mercurial musician. The truth is stranger (although, fortunately, far less nightmarish) than the fictional story we created together. Besides what's already been published we have at least 2000 more pages total material, and we are diligently working on the prequel to the first book, when we are not directing the most vile of hatred towards this despicable page creating program that is fuller of bugs than an infested garbage dump. Neither of us are great webpage creators and neither of us have any damn money to hire someone who is. So we're stuck with me as the webmistress, and I kind of suck at it.
But I digress.
My initial desire was simply to write and publish a story. My current wish includes giving voice to someone for whom abuse and unhappiness destroyed his hopes, dreams and self-regard long before he terminated his own corporeal existence. I am doing for him what I hope that someone would do for me in the same circumstances: allowing him to reveal his feelings and exercise his creative talents, to be free from loneliness, and to heal. I have considered the effect that reading this material might have on his surviving family members and his real friends (as opposed to those who pretended to be his friends in order to exploit his mental disturbances.) It is both his and my most fervent desire not to bring further sorrow to these people. His hope and mine is that reading this story will in fact bring some comfort to them, as he is truly remorseful for the pain that was caused by his actions. I in no way wish to exploit the memory of a troubled individual, nor do I wish to exploit the hopes of a spirit desperate to be heard. Were I an opportunistic medium I would, as I have previously stated, contacted a spirit more renowned to a majority of people, and most likely chosen someone in the field of literature. Would it not make more sense for a writer with mediumistic tendencies to want to channel Edgar Allan Poe, the father of the modern horror novel, rather than Per Ohlin who was a cult figure in the Metal underground and popular in a relatively small circle? His writing abilities extended more to poetry than prose and the personalities which collaborated with me contend that they really had no idea that they possessed any abilities in writing stories.
I genuinely believe that I have worked with this spirit and it is my wish to help him to heal and to achieve peace. I truly have no desire to exploit him. He has already been exploited in a deplorable fashion, both in life and in death. I have experienced the various personalities that make up my co-author's soul to be deeply sensitive and intelligent. This soul deserves far better than he received both during and at the end of his difficult life. That is why I, who am a very reclusive individual by nature, have opened myself to a level of scrutiny that I would usually shun. There is no other way that his wishes can be achieved and he does indeed deserve for them to be achieved.
Since my co-author has no ability to utilize worldly wealth, we have decided that half of the proceeds from our work should be donated to the World Health Organization's mental health division. Both of us know what it means to suffer from mental illness. Neither of us could ever pass for normal. But not being "normal" shouldn't mean having to be unhappy. All people should have access to quality mental health care and nobody should have to endure stigma based on mental illness. I have had experiences with both excellent counselors and with sadists. The latter kind of mental health/medical "professionals" were probably far crazier than I am. I also wonder if my friend might have sought help if he felt that he would have been treated with a modicum of dignity and empathy rather than being patronized, as so often happens to those with mental illness.
By purchasing the book, you contribute to a worthy cause. We hope to both entertain and inform our readers. Perhaps reading this will make you feel really normal, or perhaps it will let you know that you're not alone in your lack of normalcy. If we can achieve our goal of spreading our message and making you want to read more, we "done good." We hope that we'll make you want to spread the word and return to see what happens in Round 2!