Ghosts: Eight Eerie Stories: A Gaggle of Stories, #3

By Katharina Gerlach

Eight eerie short stories by Writers of the Future Semi-Finalist Katharina Gerlach

In the world between ours and the next, unhappy souls wait for the unwary.

Ghosts are known to scare and torture people, but are they evil?
An oversized librarian must stop a well-proportioned ghost from destroying her beloved books.
Although a young girl has lived with ghosts all her life, coming to term with their existence threatens her sanity.
When a reading addicted teen gets locked in the library, she must face the ghost haunting it.
Struggling with an overpowering craving, a forgetful man must remember to discover the meaning of death.
A young woman's live is in danger when she finds out why the Blue Room is forbidden.
A book addicted ghosts haunts a library, but protecting the books seems more than he can handle.
A bullied school girl must face a haunted house and her only ally is the bully.
A grandmother's life in a haunted house changes when she discovers intruders.

These fantasy stories show how to handle a variety of ghosts (many in libraries) for Light never is without Shadow. Writers of the Future judge Dave Farland told Katharina, "Your writing is excellent and you pulled me in from the start."

To read these eerie stories, pre-order now.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Bookworm
• Release date: Oct 17, 2020
• ISBN: 9783956811609

Katharina Gerlach

Katharina Gerlach was born in Germany in 1968. She and her three younger brothers grew up in the middle of a forest in the heart of the Luneburgian Heather. After romping through the forest with imagination as her guide, the tomboy learned to read and disappeared into magical adventures, past times, or eerie fairytale woods. She didn’t stop at reading. During her training as a landscape gardener, she wrote her first novel, a manuscript full of a beginner’s mistakes. Fortunately, she found books on Creative Writing and soon her stories improved. For a while, reality interfered with her writing but after finishing a degree in forestry and a PhD in Science she returned to her vocation. She likes to write Fantasy, Science Fiction and Historical Novels for all age groups. At present, she is writing at her next project in a small house near Hildesheim, Germany, where she lives with her husband, her children and her dog.

Book preview

Introduction

The third volume of this series goes into much darker territory. The stories are grittier with less humor and less light. Humans carry both in their souls and so it seemed appropriate to illuminate some of the darker corners of my soul.

You might be surprised about the many libraries and books in these stories. They stem from a story prompt I got for a submission to an anthology that was canceled eventually. A lot of the stories contained herein have been written for contests or magazines.

I very much hope this collection will capture your interest as much as submission to the contest captured the judge. Meanwhile, I’ll sit down to write more short stories.

So without further ado, here are my short stories of the second volume. I very much hope you’ll enjoy them.

Please leave a review.

A Slimy Problem

For all of my forty-two years, I loved books more than most people. They were the reason why I'd become a librarian in a wonderful book heaven without ever giving more than a passing thought to marriage. I loved the library's soothing light-yellow walls, mostly hidden by shelves crammed with books. And the big windows were more beautiful to me than any man's eyes. I entered the building every morning 8 am sharp with a spring in my step.

But if I passed a man reading in one of the comfortably-furnished reading corners, my heart hitched and I wondered what a relationship with a booklover would have been like—if one had ever looked past my roundness and nerdiness. And if a man's hands caressed a book cover as if it were his long lost love, I blinked away a treacherous tear or two before I moved on. However, as long as there were books to read, I was never truly lonely, so I worked with pleasure every day.

My first hint that something was wrong came one morning in May, when I slipped on a colorless jelly right in front of the lending desk. At first glance it looked like raw egg-white.

Drat those kids, I said out loud. This early in the morning I was pretty much alone. Staring at the mess, I realized that eggs didn't come without a yolk. This act of vandalism must have been deliberate. Oh, I'll make you pay for this, you…

Wait a moment. Why hadn't the cleaning lady taken care of this? Was she ill? What if she'd had an accident. Or worse. Maybe she was she fighting an even bigger mess somewhere else in my paradise?

I hurried along the shelves (huffing due to my less than optimal circumference) and looked in every nook and cranny, but there was no sign of her, nor of more of the transparent goo. After I'd even checked the toilets (and fetched a couple of paper towels to take care of the slippery mess near the entrance), I relaxed. No injured person in sight.

With the mess gone, I returned to my duty—ready to replace the previous day's last returns to their shelves—only to stumble over another atrocity.

Moby Dick was lying open on the book-return trolley, on its pages drops of goo glistening in the early morning sunlight that fell through the windows. But that wasn't the worst. Where there had been a story last night—I remembered flipping through the pages before I left for home—only the cream pages of paper without print glared at me. An invisible fist slammed into my stomach—figuratively of course.

With tears rolling over my cheeks I fetched my gloves and turned the book's pages. Every single one was empty. My mouth opened and closed but no word escaped my lips as I stared at them. Where had the print gone? Was the egg-like goo a new chemical that could remove ink? I shivered with sorrow and rage. Whoever did this would pay.

I picked up one of the books standing beside it and flipped through its pages too—everything was as it should be. So I called the police.

They sent an officer who was clearly not enjoying being in a library.

Is that the only damage you encountered? His voice sounded insultingly bored. One damaged book?

It was a classic. I couldn't keep the desperation out of my voice. Why did some men have to be so ignorant when it came to books? I needed a better argument. One that would strike the policeman as important. The books are community property, and any damage should be taken seriously. What if the perpetrator returns and destroys more books? This is vandalism! You need to watch this place at night.

Sure, Ma'am. It sounded like, Why do you keep bothering me this early in the morning. So I pressed my lips together and did my best to get rid of him fast. If the police didn't do anything to guard my treasures, I'd have to.

After the officer finished scribbling in his notebook, he left, and I had to work. For the rest of the day I made sure no one, kid, teen, or adult, brought in anything that might do damage to the books. Whenever someone took out a book, I reminded them to be careful, and I watched everyone as best I could on my rounds of replacing returned books to their shelves.

Nothing happened. After re-shelving the last returned books, I double checked the locks on the windows, and on both back and front doors. I went home with the knowledge that nothing would harm my books tonight.

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I found Wuthering Heights on the ground in front of its shelf, as if someone had pulled it out—or pushed it from behind. The spine was cracked and it lay open, with patches of goo glinting in the overhead lights. Its empty pages seemed to accuse me. Hadn't I done my best to keep my books safe? I went around the whole library but not a single lock was disturbed. Had I locked someone in accidentally? Or was there a way into my beloved library that I didn't know?

Dutifully I reported the new damage to the police and once more endured the same bored officer, before returning to my daily routine. This would have been a perfect time for a real partner—someone as widely read as I was. Now I had to solve the puzzle alone. No doubt my patrons wondered why I was so distracted.

When my endless shift was finally over, I made sure every single book in the whole library stood upright in its shelf. And I searched every inch of the premises for anyone in hiding, including the toilets and my behind-the-scenes mini-office. When that yielded no results, and the library was as empty as my sister's cocktail glasses after 6pm, I started looking for a hidden way into my realm. I knocked on all the walls. Nothing. They were as solid as they should be. Using the janitor's ladder, I even examined what I could reach of the ceiling, to no avail.

When I found nothing after more than an hour of searching, I gave up. With a final examination of each room, I locked the library once more and went home, ready to call it a day.

But I just couldn't relax. My thoughts went back to my library. What if the perpetrator came back again? And why did he destroy only one book each night? What if my efforts weren't enough? What if the book vandalizer had a skeleton key?

Shortly past midnight, I couldn't stand it any longer. My empty apartment constricted my pacing. With no shoulder to cry on and no person to share my worries, I decided to do the obvious. Armed with pepper-spray I returned to the library.

I used the back door this time, and it was still locked. But was that a good sign? I tiptoed along the narrow corridor with the doors to my office and the toilet. At its end I peered through the door that led into the main room of the library. A bluish glow illuminated the Fantasy section. Pepper spray at the ready, I approached the strange light (a new sort of LED maybe?)

When I was close enough to the nearest shelf, I went down on my knees and peeked around the corner—a trick I'd learned from a children's spy book. It had claimed that most people looked at things only at eye level, so someone below their line of sight would go unnoticed. It had sounded reasonable to me back then, but right now, it seemed completely useless knowledge because what I was facing wasn't a human. At least not in the usual sense.

Slack-jawed and frozen to the spot, I stared at the scene in front of me. A muscular man surrounded by glowing blue gel crouched on the floor, frantically stroking the pages of a book lying on the ground in front of him. He looked a decade younger than myself.

Long strips of the glowing stuff were dripping from the shelf where the book had once stood, and more goo clung to the pages, dissolving the print. Aside from the man’s startlingly muscular frame, he looked like most men, but his skin had a greenish-blue tinge made even more pronounced by the glow. His hair hung in a limp ponytail over wide shoulders, and his firm bottom, the part I could see best from where I was, was as bare as if he'd just been born. I gasped at the sight. Darn, that guy was handsome, but how did you call someone like this? A ghost?

The aura—or whatever the glowing cloud around