Bedside Manner

By Isaac Thorne

It's easy to tell yourself there's no such thing as ghosts, at least until you meet one face-to-face. Then it becomes a matter of convincing yourself that you are not seeing what you think you are seeing. If you happen to be Jake, a barely school age child who awakens one night to find an elongated abomination in female form floating by his bedside, there is no amount of daylight or parental soothing that can convince you that ghosts are not real.

The apparition arrives at a crucial time in Jake’s family life, just when he’s beginning to notice that his mommy and his daddy aren’t getting along the way they once did. Daddy seems particularly stressed about his job at the hospital, which seems to be making him tired and nearly always irritable.

His new visitor, the start of the school year, and the tension between his parents start to take their toll on Jake as he searches for a way to rid himself of at least one of his triad of problems. His schooling is required by law. His parents don’t seem to be interested in continuing to get along. That leaves Jake with only one option. Can he determine what the ghost wants and send her on her way back to the realm of the dead?

BEDSIDE MANNER is a short tale of dark comic horror from the mind of Isaac Thorne, a nice man who simply wants to provide you with a few fun frights. Throughout history ghosts have haunted the imaginations of young children. On a few occasions, they have reportedly compelled those children to perform unspeakable acts of horror against the living. BEDSIDE MANNER documents one child’s attempts to resist.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Isaac Thorne
• Release date: Mar 1, 2016
• ISBN: 9781311083579

Isaac Thorne

Isaac Thorne is a nice man who has, over the course of his life, developed a modest ability to spin a good yarn. Really. He promises. He also avoids public men’s restrooms at all costs.

Book preview

a short tale of dark comic horror

Lost Hollow Books

Smashwords Edition

Copyright © 2016 by Isaac Thorne.

Cover design and interior illustration © 2016 by Paula Rozelle Hanback.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in print, electronically, or otherwise without express written permission from the copyright holder. You may reproduce brief quotations in articles and reviews.

This is a work of fiction. The characters, events, locations, and dialogue are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Published by Lost Hollow Books in the United States of America.

www.isaacthorne.com

www.losthollowbooks.com

Cover Design: Paula Rozelle Hanback

Interior Illustration Design: Paula Rozelle Hanback

www.paulahanback.com

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page

Copyright

Bedside Manner

About the Author

Also By Isaac Thorne

BEDSIDE MANNER

There’s no such thing as ghosts, at least according to mommy and daddy. So no one was more surprised than Jake the night he rolled over and discovered the aural lady with the blank expression and hollow eyes standing right beside his bed. She floated there, glowing an icicle white and blue, like the strobes cast from television static when all the house lights are doused. Her arms hung too long at her sides, their bony fingertips stretching nearly to her knees. Or where her knees should have been, had she visible legs beneath her billowing nightgown.

Entirely conscious and no longer the slightest bit sleepy, Jake considered himself lucky. Although he might have thought his first instinct would have been to gasp, or to yank the covers over his head, or to wail for the company of his parents, he had not actually physically reacted to the (ghost?) entity. However, he did suddenly realize that he was holding his breath. He allowed his lungs to deflate slowly, an approximation of what, he thought, might be the long exhale of a sleeping body.

The thing in ghostly female form did not appear to have noticed that he was awake. The face that hovered over her body was slack, its hollow eye sockets staring straight ahead, as if over Jake’s body, at the wall behind him. On the other side of that wall lay his mommy and daddy, in their own bed. At that moment they might as well have been in another country.

Now and then, Jake thought he saw something glisten and—he would swear it—move behind the thing’s eye sockets. Then something wet and shiny in the glow of the creature’s own aura slid from the right socket and fell toward the floor. It evaporated in the ghostly convalesced fog of the thing’s gown just before it hit.

Jake thought it might have been a worm. He surreptitiously scanned what he could see of the floor beneath the figure, but could detect no evidence of whatever had crept from her eye socket.

He also could not see the Mickey Mouse clock on the wall behind the floating thing, so he had no idea how much time had passed. An eternity later, it faded from his view. Gratefully, Jake noticed that the shape’s head and those hideous writhing eye sockets were the first to go, followed by its shoulders, its waist, and eventually the cloud at the floor on which it had seemed to