Sean E. Britten

All There in the (Monster) Manual are stories based on creatures from the Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual. Over 2022 I released a different story fitting the theme every single week and I’ve now expanded to Dungeons & Dragons’ Monsters of the Multiverse and even the Pathfinder Bestiary. Could be fantasy, science fiction, horror, or something else entirely! Check them out on the main page of the website.

This Week’s Inspiration: Ghost

Out on a midnight stroll, Mike comes across a ghostly scene he can’t quite explain. His heavily gentrified suburb hides a dark and deadly past. As he finds himself drawn deeper into the mystery, will the river give up its secrets?

======

After midnight, the city froze into place. Cold, sure, in another month it might be too cold to take these walks willingly. The night air so crisp it felt like each step carried him through an invisibly thin sheet of frost. But more than that, it felt preserved, waiting for the first rays of dawn to thaw it out again. Like those peas the commercials claimed were picked at the peak moment of freshness, bursting with moisture, and then snap frozen before even the slightest hint of decay could set in, the first inklings of the very thought of rot. Kept unravaged by the passing of time until they were poured into your pot.

Mike heard running water as he approached the bridge. Part of an old rail line that ran parallel to the new one, the bridge had been converted into a passage for foot traffic and bicycles but it still looked rusty and black and gothic. In the distance, he could also hear the clatter and squeal of a late night freight train. The murmur of the occasional truck or vehicle out on the main road. A snatch of television here and there, and the sound of a baby crying from the yellow square of a lit window. Most of the world, however, remained lulled and frozen, dark and silent. He concentrated on the calm of the moving water and watched the sky. Free from emails and calls and scrolling feeds of bad news, responsibilities, the expectations of other people.

The structure of the bridge rang softly underfoot. Breathing deeply, Mike tasted the brackish river in the air. When he stopped at the centre of the bridge, he looked around but there was no one else to observe him and wonder what he was doing there. Downtown, people might still be out and about in numbers but here above the river he felt like he could be the only person in the world. A couple of decades ago, most of the area would have been industrial estates. Now, new apartment buildings clustered the banks but they were filled with young families and retirees who’d all turned in for the night. Upriver, he could see the skeletons of even more apartment blocks under construction. Dense warrens of one and two and three bedroom starter homes on the sites of old factories. Cafes and grocery stores and gyms, and all the associated rental spaces that formed part of the same ecosystem. Dumping grounds soaked with chemicals and heavy metals being buried under concrete, or beneath sod and fresh seed, dog walking parks and children’s playgrounds.

Something floated across the gently rippling water. A child’s laughter, clear as a bell, out of place with the late and empty hour. Sound carried a long way on water but for a moment Mike thought it had originated from right next to him. He turned and looked around, up and down the bridge, but saw no one. Laughter rang again from more than one voice. It sounded both near and far at once but he identified it as coming from the river right below his feet.

“Hello? Is someone there?” Mike said, cringing at the volume of his own voice as it broke the peace.

The walking surface underfoot was a metal grid through which the dark and swiftly moving water could be seen. Mike got a sense of something else down there as well but his eyes couldn’t quite make it out. Glimmers of an ethereal light, pale, tinged with lime. They weren’t boat lights, he wasn’t sure what they were, but anyone directly beneath him would have to be in a boat.

“Hello?”

In order to get a better view, Mike leaned out across the railing. More laughter, and sounds that could have been feet racing across a metal deck. A couple of sharp cracks that sounded like wooden poles being whacked together. He bent almost double over the cold metal. The rail creaked but he was confident enough in its construction, the melding of old and new, not to worry about it breaking. Still, if he toppled over there would be no one around to see it. It could be a funny story, or a mysterious tragedy, depending on how it panned out. He wriggled backward until his feet were on the grating again but kept scanning the river. There was a sense of movement, a weight on the water, but he couldn’t see anything except for a few strange wisps of phosphorescence. Some kind of natural phenomenon, or was it connected to the laughter?

Water rippled below. It was dark, blackness on black, but Mike got a sense of motion. A sharply raked shape on the water like the wake of a ship. It drifted downriver, unattached to any vessel, and then faded and disappeared. The ghostly wisps of green light faded with it.

~~~

“Yeah, right! Good one,” Jon said.

Retelling the story two days later, Mike was surprised when Jon, one of his oldest friends, barked with laughter. Sitting next to him, Jon’s partner Briony, who’d gone to school with them, smiled broadly.

“What? I don’t get it,” Mike said.

“Yeah, right,” Jon replied.

“I didn’t think it was funny? Weird, yeah, I mean, I know it doesn’t sound real, but I didn’t think it was funny.”

Sunlight clattered off the river as it snaked along beside them. The same river Mike had been crossing when he heard the children’s laughter and saw whatever it was he saw. The cafe where the three of them met for breakfast almost every Sunday had a deck looking directly over it. On the opposite bank were the skeletal frames of new apartment buildings he’d been studying from the bridge.

“You mean you haven’t heard the story?” Briony asked.

“He’s heard the story, he’s just screwing around!” Jon said.

“What story?”

“You really haven’t heard?”

“He knows it, he’s joking! Don’t buy it,” Jon said.

It took Mike several minutes to convince Jon and Briony he didn’t know what they were talking about. During that time, one of the waitresses brought out their meals. Plates and cups of coffee sat between them. Jon didn’t look convinced but he accepted that Mike wasn’t really the type to take a joke so far.

“Okay, okay, I’ll tell it,” Jon said. “It was back in the late Eighties, or the Nineties, or something. You know, a lot of this area was factories and warehouses and stuff.”

Jon pointed across the river to the construction sites. Scars of the area’s industrial past showed up more readily along the opposite shoreline, as opposed to the side they were sitting on where everything was finished and shiny and polished and bright. Old concrete slabs and fenced off yards filled with debris. Even rusty pillars belonging to demolished wharves left sticking out of the water. While the river looked clean, nearby signage warned against eating any fish caught in the area because of the risk of industrial pollutants.

“Ships, I guess, would load and unload over there. Anyway, apparently there was this one really old ship that had been tied up to one of the docks and abandoned for years. Like, it was still afloat but it wasn’t going anywhere. Some of the families of people working in those factories lived in the area. You think about that? Like they would have been really working class, shitty family homes, but can you imagine how much just the land would be worth now?”

“Some of the kids around here would apparently play on the abandoned boat,” Briony said, picking up the thread of the story. “It’s hard to imagine these days, a bunch of kids allowed to play on some rusty, dangerous, abandoned ship? I mean, I don’t think they were actually allowed, so much, but you remember what it was like when we were kids, right? We’d just disappear for hours and we didn’t have phones or anything. I’m not even saying it like it was a good thing or a bad thing, it was just crazy different compared to now.”

“They weren’t meant to be there. I’m pretty sure they’d been told not to play on this ship because it was dangerous,” Jon said. “But some of them were playing on it this one night, playing pirates, all of them were, like six to ten years old, and the ship broke loose. No one really saw it happen. Apparently, I think, some people saw a drifting boat with some kids waving on board and yelling but they didn’t realise what was happening. Anyway, the boat drifted a little way down the river, and it was basically coming apart as it was so it sank.”

“And all the kids, what? They died?” Mike asked.

“Apparently. I mean, they never found them, they just disappeared. The boat went down, I don’t know, somewhere past that old rail bridge you were talking about, I think. They found the boat, obviously, but they never found the bodies. It doesn’t look it but apparently this river is kind of dangerous. It moves really fast and has weird currents. Even without all the industrial shit you wouldn’t want to swim in it. They never found any of the kids’ bodies.”

“Wow, that’s messed up.”

“You’ve really never heard about this?”

“No, I mean, I guess I understand why you’d think I was making it up but I didn’t actually think I was seeing ghosts or anything! I just thought it was weird.”

“But that’s the thing,” Briony said. “Because the story goes that the kids’ ghosts appear sometimes out there on the river. Like, people will see lights, and hear them laughing and playing just like you said. There were even stories that people sometimes saw a ghost ship drifting around out there.”

“Really?” Mike looked to Jon, who shrugged.

“You never heard this?”

“I didn’t grow up here, remember? We moved when I was in high school.”

“That’s true, when we met.” Jon considered it. “Someone else mentioned the ghost story when we first moved into our apartment here, but I guess I hadn’t really heard anyone say anything about it for years.”

“I heard it a lot more when I was a kid,” Briony said. “People still remembered when it happened back then. Now, I think most people around here would have forgotten.”

“So, you really saw some ghosts then?” Jon grinned.

“I didn’t say that! I didn’t know anything about all this, I just brought it up because, well, it was weird. It could have been a coincidence, or someone playing a prank.”

“Should see if something turns up on TikTok,” Briony said. “You know, if it was a prank. But what if you saw a ghost? Or ghosts, I guess?”

“I don’t believe in ghosts, so I don’t think that’s what happened.”

Around the table, their coffees and meals had largely gone cold. Talk about the ghosts petered off and the three of them hurried to eat. Mike found his mind turning, however, as he shoved food into his mouth and stared at the water.

“What were you doing out there that late anyway?” Briony asked.

“Huh?”

“How come you were walking across the bridge that late at night?”

“Oh, I just like going out for walks really late like that. When I can’t sleep,” Mike said. “I do it all the time.”

“You’ve been doing alright, yeah?” Jon said. “I mean, you haven’t seen anyone since the breakup.”

“And working from home,” Briony said. “You don’t see people a lot of the time. I mean, I like it, but it’s not like working from the office.”

“Of course, I’m fine,” Mike said, a little defensively. “I have you guys, right?”

After leaving Jon and Briony at the cafe, Mike walked along the riverbank. The park was full of families with their children and dogs. In the shade of a few trees, he sat down and pulled out his phone.

It didn’t take long to find the full story. The ‘Dei Gratia Incident’ it was called on Wikipedia, named for the abandoned ship itself. It happened in 1991. Something about that in and of itself gave Mike a nasty shock. The Eighties at least sounded to him like a time and place removed, even if he’d technically been alive in that decade. The Nineties he often tried to convince himself weren’t actually that long ago, even as they disappeared further and further into the past with each passing year. In fairness, most of the development in this area had only happened in the last decade so it was reasonable to think it would have still been fairly industrial back then. However, it meant that most of these kids, the ones that had died, would have only been a couple of years older than he was at the time.

Mike skimmed through the article. By and large it was as Jon and Briony had described it. The children had been told not to play on the derelict but were known to do so anyway. Around sunset, when the kids should have been returning home, on the 18th of November, 1991, the rotting moorings of the Dei Gratia broke loose for unknown reasons. The ship drifted downriver almost completely unseen. A couple of witnesses came forward in the aftermath and admitted to seeing a boat without lights moving slowly down the river with what could have been children on board, shouts echoing across the water, but they’d failed to realise anything was actually amiss. It was impossible to imagine something like that happening now without it being witnessed by hundreds upon hundreds of people but back then most of the area would have emptied out at five o’clock with only a few families living around the outskirts of the factories and warehouses.

According to experts, the long ignored ship started taking on water almost immediately. While it travelled a good distance downriver, once the point of no return had been crossed the then-icy waters would have swallowed the deck and superstructure in seconds. Lifeboats, life preservers, and all furniture had been stripped from the empty ship. As Jon had said, the bodies were never found. Six names were attached to the article, James Wilson, Michael Kaminski, Rosalyn Packwell, Liam Packwell, Melissa Vought, and Wade Jane Jr. All six had disappeared, swallowed by the river as well. Unlike the Dei Gratia, however, which would eventually be dredged from the water due to its presence constituting a hazard to other river traffic, the children would never, ever reemerge.

Beneath the dry and emotionless retelling of the incident was an even drier retelling of the dredging and removal of the shipwreck, and a subheading labelled ‘Sightings’. Clicking on it, Mike felt a chill.

‘Since the 1991 incident, numerous reports have been made of lights and even sightings of a ‘ghost ship’ along the same stretch of river where the Dei Gratia made its final voyage.^[14] These sightings are typically accompanied by the sound of children’s laughter or sounds of children at play. No serious attempts have been made to verify these claims but rumours of a ghostly version of the Dei Gratia crewed by the spirits of the missing children has passed into local legend.^{[citation needed]}’

Laughter, eerie lights, the presence of a ghostly ship, it matched what he had experienced. Mike had told Jon and Briony that he didn’t believe in ghosts but the truth was he didn’t really disbelieve in them either. When he was a kid, like all kids he supposed, the existence of ghosts and Bigfoot and the Bermuda Triangle seemed to be of incredible importance. But getting older, of course it was the logical thing to stop believing. His feelings one way or the other weren’t that strong though, really.

There was another subheading beneath the section on sightings, labelled ‘Disappearances’. Confused, given the page had already covered the disappearance of the six children, Mike thumbed it open. The section didn’t talk more about the kids though, instead it contained a short blurb about three further disappearances that occurred around the river over the course of the last several decades. One in 1997, one in 2001, and a final one in 2016. Other than names and dates, it didn’t contain very much information. All of them were adults and listed as potential suicides but according to whoever added the section all three had reported seeing the ghostly form of the Dei Gratia shortly before they vanished. There were no links to further information, and almost every sentence was tagged with ‘[citation needed]’.

Mike got an unsettled feeling in the pit of his stomach but reasoned that it was probably nothing, just another part of the ghostly legend surrounding the original tragedy. A way of giving meaning to several more disappearances that really had no good meaning at all. It made him look at the river in front of him differently though. If nothing else, it clearly made a habit of keeping its secrets close.

~~~

Mike went walking around midnight again. It felt a little like the relaxation aspect had been robbed from him, he could no longer meander without purpose but instead picked up speed toward the river. Instead of disconnecting from his phone, he had it in his hand as he approached the pedestrian bridge. He was alert and aware even as the rest of the world tucked itself away and stayed quiet. Curiosity, however, drove him forward.

Returning to the middle of the bridge where he’d first heard the children, Mike stopped and listened. Dark water gurgled underneath him. Somewhere, out on the main road, a truck horn bellowed like an animal. No laughter, however. No voices, no lights, no wake. He waited for half an hour, watching until the cold began to cut through his clothes.

“What am I going to prove anyway?” Mike said to himself. “I didn’t really see anything. Anything I did see would be pretty easy to fake.”

There must be thousands of videos online showing ‘proof’ of supernatural encounters, Mike thought. Thousands and thousands. All of them were fake. Or maybe not, maybe some of them really were real after all. Either way, none of them had ever actually proved anything except to those who already wanted to believe.

Mike returned home disappointed. Every night for the next week, even nights he would have otherwise been sleeping, he went walking down to the bridge. A few times he passed other late night strollers who he acknowledged with awkward nods of the head but he always found himself lingering alone on the bridge. A couple of times, he heard what he thought was laughter echoing over the water but it was distant and nothing more came of it. Another couple of times he heard voices which he eventually identified as having a totally normal, human source, and they made him doubt that he’d ever heard anything unusual at all.

Six kids went out to play one afternoon and never came home. Mike thought often about what Briony had said, how different it was when they were kids. He couldn’t say if it was better or worse but his nephews were nine and six years old and it was unimaginable that his sister would let them go roaming around the neighbourhood unsupervised for hours the way his parents had done. The very thought seemed horrifically dangerous, and yet he wondered if the world was really so much worse now than it was then. Certainly they’d felt freer back then and it wasn’t just the fact they were children. Both adults and kids now spent so much of their lives shackled to phones that meant anyone could get in touch with them at any time and which tracked their every movement, their every purchase, their every thought.

The very fact of the six dead children did point to it being a more dangerous time, but still, freer, more full of mystery, stranger and more magical. Maybe that was the reason he was out here every night now, to try and find a little bit of magic again in a world where adulthood and technology took all that away. And maybe someone should be enforcing a bedtime on him to keep him safe, he thought, as his eyes drooped and he found himself leaning too hard against the railing above the dark, swift, secretive waters.

That next Sunday, Mike forgot to set an alarm and slept through his usual breakfast date with Jon and Briony. He woke up to several messages from Jon.

‘8:12am

Hey, we’re at the usual spot, you coming?

8:21am

We still on this morning?

Were ordering ☕

Let us know if on way

8:48am

All good we’ll catch you next time’

Mike groaned, rolling over in bed, and thumbed back a reply apologising and saying that he had overslept. Jon responded that it was all good and to let him know if he wanted to catch up sometime during the week instead.

Even though Jon and Briony would have moved on, Mike went for a walk down by the riverbank. Sunlight glittered off the water. He confirmed his friends had gone and got a takeaway coffee to drink while he walked. He’d been wondering more and more about the site of the old docks where the ship, the Dei Gratia, originally broke free. Maybe the ghost ship might moor there on nights when it returned from its strange excursions. It made sense, in a senseless kind of way.

That night, Mike went out early, nine PM, with the thought that he had to work the next day. A few other people were walking around as well. Lingering on the bridge, he exchanged uncomfortable hellos with a couple of passersby. It was too early for anything, he thought. If anything was ever going to happen at all, it was definitely too early. He went home.

Mike fully intended to sleep the rest of the night but his mind wouldn’t rest. He thought about work, about missing breakfast with Jon and Briony, and other friends he’d let down in more serious ways, as well as family and a hundred other things. He thought about the kids and the boat and the bridge until he couldn’t stand it any longer. Getting up, Mike dressed in the darkness, got his phone and keys, and went out again.

It was closer to three AM than two and the night had that same feel in the air as the first time Mike heard the laughter, crisp and still, like every movement carried him through a thin film of frost. He couldn’t see lights in any windows or hear a single human noise. The sound and the brackish smell of the river grew stronger. The black expanse of the bridge stretched ahead of him to the river’s far shore.

Mike heard the laughter before he even set foot on the bridge. He immediately picked up speed, leaping forward with his phone in hand. Laughter and distinct shouts echoed across the water but he couldn’t tell which direction the noises came from. They definitely seemed to be coming from more than one direction at once. Standing at the railing, he scanned the river in both directions.

“Where are you?” Mike said.

Tatters of luminosity danced on the water downstream. Like sparks, or shreds of paper caught in a strong breeze. Mike watched them get closer. Chasing one another in the darkness, the pale green glows resolved themselves into recognisable shapes. An arm, a pair of legs, the sketch of a face with mouth and eyes wide in surprise or delight, there and then vanished. They whipped in circles around one another as if at play. Taken together, they mapped out the deck of a ship that couldn’t be seen, deck and railings and superstructure. He realised the lights were heading toward him and the bridge, upriver, rather than moving downriver with the flow. He had his phone in hand but it was forgotten, he didn’t even attempt to raise it and start recording.

And then, it was all of sudden far more spectacular. As if moving out from behind an invisible wall, the Dei Gratia swept into being. Huge and dark and decrepit, it appeared to be built out of black clouds but moulded into lines far too straight for nature. It ran without lights, the only lights were those now taking the shape of fully formed children. Ghosts, swirling and dashing the length of the ship. Shouting and laughing in voices that echoed across the water from up close and far away.

Mike leaned across the railing. The ghost ship, raised from the river twice, at least twice, passed directly beneath him.

“Hey, hey!”

Three of the child ghosts gathered at the nose of the ship. Two more sprinted up and down the deck, swinging makeshift swords. Another peered into the water, legs dangling through the railing, and three more mock-battled at the very tail of the ship.

“Hey!”

Mike was surprised when several of the children actually looked up. Their faces glowed with pale light, their features looking like they’d been drawn onto plates of cloudy glass. He hadn’t actually expected them to hear him. The length of the ghost ship disappeared under the bridge. Mike could still see the glimmers of light through the metal grid under his feet for several moments. As he crossed the bridge, all that was left was the shadow of a wake. It angled toward the shoreline where the old docks used to be and then disappeared entirely. It was only then that Mike remembered the phone in his hands. He hadn’t recorded anything. In spite of himself, he laughed. The sound of genuine delight, amazement, trickled into the night.

Late as the hour was, Mike waited where he was for another half an hour. Stillness settled again over the river. If he waited long enough, he might be found there, half-frozen, by dawn joggers and rowers on the river. Nothing else stirred. All he heard was the occasional truck or car, or a couple of freight trains crossing the bridge further down the river.

It only occurred to Mike as he turned to walk home that there should have only been six ghosts. He reviewed the encounter again in his head. No, he’d definitely seen nine distinct spectres. He wondered if the extra three might have something to do with the disappearances listed in relation to the Dei Gratia Incident on Wikipedia. But those disappearances, citations needed or not, were all adults and not other children. He shook the disorder of thoughts around in his head. While the sighting itself had been invigorating, he was too tired now to make much sense of it all and he just wanted to go home and sleep.

~~~

The next day, Mike struggled to concentrate on work. How could he care about meetings and KPIs and spreadsheets after what he’d seen? A door had been opened that he now couldn’t shut. He spent most of the day wrestling with just how far beyond the doorway he wanted to look.

Part of Mike really wanted to tell someone about his experience. Maybe Jon and Briony would be the obvious choice. They’d laughed at first but eventually they’d listened. They were the only people he’d told anything about the first encounter, although he hadn’t mentioned going out night after night since then to them. He’d thought it would worry them. And now, without proof, they’d think he was crazy if he came to them with this much more dramatic story. He couldn’t really believe it himself.

Mike cursed himself throughout the day for not getting proof when he had the chance. And yet, weirdly, other times he was almost grateful he hadn’t. Proof would have almost been a burden. If he had proof, he’d have been compelled to show someone, surely. But in this day and age, almost anything could be faked. Proof would never necessarily be proof, never enough, it would come down to how reliable he seemed as a witness and source. He’d have to argue for it. And then he’d always be the ghost ship guy. Always defined for the rest of his life by this one, tremendously strange thing, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that.

So, naturally, as the workday came to a close, Mike wondered about what he should do next. Should he keep going out, night after night, watching from the bridge? Next time the opportunity presented itself then he would have to get proof. But then what? He didn’t know.

Maybe Mike was worried too much about himself, he realised. Maybe he should be more worried about those kids. Most movies about ghosts or whatever, they were always trying to convince them to move on. He didn’t know where he’d be moving on to but it sounded right. That led him to thinking about the additional kids he’d seen on the ghost ship. Nine when there should have been six. He wondered again if they had anything to do with the disappearances listed on Wikipedia. If the kids were beyond help, maybe something could at least be done for them.

Through the window, Mike saw the sun sinking in the west. With a sudden impulse, he jumped to his feet. When he’d seen the ghost ship coming and going, it had been in the direction of the docks where the Dei Gratia originally broke free. The docks were gone but their supports remained to show where they’d been. He changed clothes and took his wallet, his phone and keys, and he headed down to his building’s parking garage.

To get to the part of the riverbank where the docks had been, it was easier to drive. Twilight settled over the surrounding neighbourhood. Ten minutes later, Mike found himself amidst old warehouses, empty concrete yards, and construction sites. It was quiet enough that he started to feel like he was doing something wrong, but there were no barricades to stop him driving all the way down to the shoreline and parking.

Mike wasn’t sure what he expected to see. After lingering for a couple of minutes, he got out of the car and wandered right to the lip of the concrete riverbank. Rusting iron supports jutted unevenly out of the water. From what he could tell, this was exactly where the Dei Gratia broke free. It drifted away, probably turning sluggishly in the current, meandering almost unseen past the old rail bridge as it took on water before it swallowed a fatal amount and plunged beneath the surface, taking the nine, no, six children with it. But there was no sign of that now, no plaque, no marker or memorial. He felt a sense of sadness for the six young lives cut short, gone and almost forgotten. Relegated to a Wikipedia article and a half-remembered ghost story.

Darkness settled and Mike retreated to the car. Lights popped on along the bank on the far side of the river where hundreds of new apartments already overlooked the water.

Feeling sad for the kids didn’t seem right, Mike decided. Last night, the children on board that ghost ship hadn’t looked sad. They didn’t look like they were mourning the lives they were meant to have lived. They’d been caught up in play and imagination the way only kids could be. The way he remembered from his own early childhood, which had overlapped with theirs when they were alive. If anything, he felt he should envy them. They’d escaped a life full of responsibilities and disappointments and regrets. They’d boarded a ship to Neverland and that eternal childhood that Peter Pan craved. I mean, dead was dead, but they clearly weren’t all the way gone. Was that why he was so drawn to them? Was he jealous?

“That’s messed up,” Mike muttered to himself, to the lonely car.

Mike sat and waited and watched as the night deepened. Nothing moved on the river. When he started to get hungry, he fished his phone out of his pocket to distract himself. He scanned through the same Wikipedia article he’d already read several times and bounced around on Google for a while, not finding anything new. He’d hoped to find something about the ghost ship being spotted while moored but there was nothing.

Mike’s thumb hovered over the messenger app. Maybe he should tell Jon, or someone, where he was. He wasn’t sure why he felt worried though. It wasn’t like he was going to do anything stupid. He swiped away. Probably just the thought of the disappearances in the back of his mind. There was nothing to worry about. Those ones he’d read about were probably just coincidences, if they ever existed at all. The three extra ghost children, well, they were ghosts, they didn’t have to make sense. Maybe they’d picked up some other drowned kids along the way over the past thirty years.

When nothing happened, Mike found himself falling asleep. He was worried someone was going to come by and ask him what he was doing there but no one did. He put his phone away to save battery. He was used to being alone with his own thoughts. Soon, his eyes were too heavy to keep open. It’s not like he’d slept well the night before. Nestling in his seat, he fell asleep.

Mike woke some time later to a loud thump. He wasn’t sure how late it was but it was obvious at a glance that the night had moved on. Few windows across the river still had lights in them and the stars gleamed with a hard polish. At first, he thought someone must have woken him by thumping against one of the windows but there was no one there. Another hollow thud rippled through the vehicle. The sound of a large ship rocking carelessly against the shoreline.

A dark shape loomed beyond the windshield. Hard edged, like a structure, but faintly transparent like black smoke. Pale green lights flickered up on its deck.

Limbs clumsy with excitement, Mike wrestled his door open and stumbled into the night air. A cool breeze moved off the water. He could hear the river, and from up on deck the laughter and sound of children playing. As his eyes adjusted, he made out details of the ghost ship, its broken railings, its gutted superstructure and scarred sides. But it was afloat, still on the water.

Mike’s phone was forgotten again, left behind in the car. He staggered to the edge of the river. Where before there had been only old and rusty pylons, a dock had reappeared alongside the ship. It, too, was black and foggy, not entirely there. When he tested it with his foot, however, he found it solid enough to walk on.

Ghostly, glowing figures swirled around on the deck. Their cheer floated down to where Mike walked. Ahead, a ramshackle ramp, bowed in the middle, extended to the dock.

A kind of phosphorescence began to spread across Mike’s skin. Rather than feel concerned, a strange lightness filled him. With every step, he felt weight lifting. His arms, faintly glowing, became skinny and hairless. His shoulders shrank into his deflating chest. When he reached up and touched his face, his stubble was gone and his cheeks felt clean. Along with the physical transformations, other burdens seemed to fall away as well. Years of disappointment. Years of striving and falling short. Years of wanting and worries and loneliness. His mind felt smoother and softer and unmade.

A boy of nine or ten stood at the top of the ramp, faintly glowing as well. He wore what might have been a school uniform but with a woman’s scarf tied around his waist and another around his head, giving him a vaguely piratical look. In one hand, he held a floppy cardboard sword with the blade wrapped in aluminium foil.

“Hey, what’s your name?” the boy asked.

“I’m Mike.” The voice that answered was high and unbroken, sounding foreign to Mike’s ears.

“I’m James, are you from around here?”

“Yeah, I mean, I guess so?”

“Want to play?”

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Sean: Nothing I love more than a chance to actually use the word “brackish” correctly. I love that word so much that I frequently use it in contexts I know perfectly well are incorrect, so a chance to use it correctly is such a treat.

As I’ve mentioned before, I have a couple of young nieces, eight and six years old now, and I myself am thirty-eight. And I pretty much covered how I feel about kids having more independence at that age “back in my day”, it’s not so much that I think of it as good or bad but it’s downright surreal that when I was my older niece’s age myself and my friends could disappear for hours without phones and that was just a normal thing. Like, there is no way my sister would ever let that happen now and I can’t imagine my niece being okay with it either. It’s just so weird how much that attitude has changed and I’m not entirely sure why because I don’t think the world is functionally any better or worse.

I also grew up reading Goosebumps and Spooksville and Graveyard School and all those kinds of associated books, and then later Animorphs. And it was an issue I ran into when I thought about trying my hand at my own series of books for that age range (an outright Spooksville pastiche, I didn’t get very far with it). All of those books, it was totally fine that the twelve-year-olds or younger kids could disappear on these adventures for hours at a time but I had a hard time justifying it to myself in this day and age!

If you’ve read your way through all of my Monster Manual stories you’ll notice this isn’t the first time I’ve done one inspired by ghosts. In fact, this marks the very first repeat of an “inspiration” and I can’t help but notice they cover fairly similar themes of nostalgia and a loss of innocence, a longing to go back to a similar time. Really big reach there I guess?

The other inspiration is the suburb of Rhodes in Sydney, which is a suburb just up the road from where I was living up until I moved last year and a place I still visit pretty frequently. It has a very similar history of being a heavily industrial area, including an industrial accident in 1986 that killed five people. Today, it is a genuinely beautiful spot, very picturesque with lots of shops and cafes, albeit very, very heavy on apartment density.