Chapter Three -The Ghostwriter a Serialised Story

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Chapter 3 - Imaginary Friends with Opinions

It started with the biscuit tin.

I wasn’t looking for it, not exactly. I’d been trying to clear out the sideboard, something about paperwork, or batteries, or maybe just revenge against the drawer that always jammed. The tin was wedged behind a pile of expired printer ink. It rattled when I pulled it free.

Inside were old pages. Handwritten, yellowing. Some typed, printed in Comic Sans... God help me. Stories from years ago, before I stopped writing. Before the marriage had fully deflated, before my son moved out with nothing but a laptop and a bag of protein powder.

I sat on the carpet and began to read.

There it was: The Adventures of Parsley and Sage Pemberton, about twin detectives who solved crimes. Even I cringed.

A shadow flickered in the periphery, just long enough to be real.

"That adverb is a hate crime," said a voice behind me.

I shrieked. My elbow knocked the tin, pages spilling everywhere. He... Peter, apparently... was perched on the radiator, one ankle crossed over the other, looking deeply unimpressed.

"You again?"

He gave a short, theatrical sigh. "If I must."

I stared. He hadn't been there a moment ago. Or maybe he had. Maybe he was always just outside my periphery, waiting.

"You can’t be real," I said.

"And yet I’ve read your story about the enchanted bus pass and I still go on."

"That one won an award," I snapped.

"And Dennis Rader, the BTK killer, was a Scout Leader."

"That's meaningless."

"My point exactly."

I should have thrown him out, or exorcised him with incense and a good scream. But instead, I argued. He pulled my stories apart, line by line, image by image. "Too many metaphors. No one cries that much over toast. And for heaven’s sake, stop naming characters after herbs."

I didn’t cry. Not really. But when I was alone that night, I opened my laptop and rewrote the ending of the story he’d torn into. Just to prove him wrong.

And somewhere, between cutting the adverbs and trimming the dialogue, I laughed. At my own line. A genuinely funny, surprising little twist that I didn’t remember writing. It startled me. Then it warmed me.

Peter’s voice drifted in. "That, my dear Sharon, almost makes up for the Parsley Twins."

I looked around. He was standing by the window now, inspecting my bookshelf.

One of the curtain edges fluttered, though the window was closed.

"You’re still here?"

He shrugged. "Apparently."

The next morning, I returned to work. Mrs Dart, who smelled like chalk and moral superiority, handed me a stack of grammar tests and made a remark about unnecessary flair in my handwriting.

I nodded and did the marking. But in my tote bag, beneath the worksheets, was my notebook. Peter had insisted I get a new one: "If you're going to revive your delusions of authorship, at least do it in Moleskine."

He followed me around like a literary dog. Critiquing posters in the hallway ("Comic Sans again? It's like typographic violence"). Snorting at staffroom gossip ("Janet's affair with the PE teacher is hardly Anna Karenina"). At lunch, while I read a novel, he appeared on the edge of my vision and muttered, "Austen again? All sighs and soft furnishings."

"You can be a little bitchy."

"I probably started bitching as soon as I could talk. I know I was sulky, and sulking usually gels into bitching."

During Year 8 English, while Tommy Fletcher butchered Shakespeare, Peter perched on my desk and stage-whispered, "At least he's not setting it to music." I had to hide my smile behind my coffee mug.

He quoted my draft writing back to me, sentences I'd scribbled in margins, fragments I'd thought no one would see.

"You underlined this sentence three times," he said, tapping the page. "You knew, even then."

I didn’t respond. But I didn’t close the notebook either.

That evening, I found myself Googling Peter Elwood writer while he inspected my spice rack with obvious disdain. Nothing came up. No obituaries, no book reviews, no author photos. Just a few Peters who weren't him.

I’d found a Wikipedia entry for him just days ago. Now, nothing. Not a cached version. Not even a broken link. Like he’d edited himself out.

My search history had the word Fugue circled in red. I hadn’t done that.

"Looking for something?" he asked, not turning around.

"Just curious."

"Curiosity is good except for cats. It's practically a death-sentence for them. Though in your case, curiosity might resurrect the writer."

One evening, after a long, silent writing session, I asked him, "Why are you here?"

Peter didn’t answer straight away. He looked at my notes, my crossed-out sentences. Something flickered behind his eyes.

"Maybe I need to finish something," he said.

"Your novel? Or mine?"

He was quiet for a long moment. "I wrote a sequel to Fugue State. About a pianist who loses her memory and finds it again through music. It was... it was good, Sharon. Really good."

"What happened to it?"

"I died before I could finish it." He said it matter-of-factly, like mentioning the weather. "Cancer. I’d have preferred to die of something else.”

“Like happiness?”

He frowned. ”Perhaps a heart attack, found draped over my typewriter like some romantic cliché."

I stared at him. “When did you... pop off?”

“Pop-off. I wasn’t a champagne cork or firework. I was a Master Wordsmith!”

“I love a good humble-brag,” I said. “How long ago did you join the Choir Invisible, Peter?”

“1987. You would have been... what, seventeen? Probably reading Sweet Valley High and thinking you understood love."

“Woolf.”

He raised an eyebrow.

“A Room of One’s Own.”

Peter rolled his eyes. "Exactly the kind of feminist creative awakening that a bright, bookish seventeen-year-old Sharon would be drawn to, especially if you were already hiding notebooks in her tote bag."

The accuracy stung. Know-it-all bugger.

"You never wrote anything as good as Fugue State," I snapped.

"And neither has anyone else," he said.

The lights in the corner dimmed for half a second. Then he was gone.

I was halfway through a second rewrite, this time a new story, one I’d never dared start before, when my screen flickered.

The screen jittered, like it couldn’t decide what year it was. The text blinked. Then vanished.

"Peter?"

Static. A faint echo.

My speakers clicked. One soft, breathy exhale — like someone had leaned in too close to the mic.

Then, his voice: "You're not ready yet."

I slammed the laptop shut. "Don't tell me what I am."

I picked up my notebook. Pen in hand, I wrote anyway. The story poured out, raw and honest and nothing like the herb-detective nonsense I’d written before. It was about a woman finding her voice again. About the ghosts we carry, the voices we silence, and the words that wait for us to be brave enough to write them.

Somewhere, I thought I heard him laugh. But this time, it sounded like approval.