Mind if I make it even harder?
Skyhammer’s, Arty and Stoker were out camping together one summer, and, during the night, as expected, they gathered around the campfire after having Arty’s chicken rice, which he botched because he still hasn’t quite figured out cooking without a stove, for dinner and started telling each other ghost stories.
“I have a story for you lads,” says Skyhammer, “A scary story, and a true story.”
Stoker sipped on his pint and jokingly replied, “Ooh, don’t tell me you’re going to explode into a dripping mass of tendrils, eyeballs and and teeth when you’re done?”
“Nay, laddie…” says Skyhammer, a faint smile on his face, “It’s nothin’ stupid like that they stick in the movies nowadays, pah. Just some kiddies, a dark room and some rope to pull people around.” He took a swig of his mug. Arty didn’t drink. “And a computer. What happened to good old fashioned props? Gone with the dinosaurs.”
“This is a tale taken from the Contaminated Zone.”
And that got their attention.
“It was another day in hell, another day on the job, and another hunk a’ metal we hafta send to Arty’s great-granddaddy, I was movin’ down this wide open place, headin’ for a plate with buttons on it, when I saw her.”
He took a swig. Stoker didn’t.
“Later I’d come to know her name, Proxy, scary maiden of the Zone. Landmines everywhere she wents, and buckshots where she is. Course, I didn’t try to find her biography, respect for people’s privacy, y’see. Anyways, I saw her, comin’ at me face, carryin’ that giant scissor thing on her back and everythin’. Next moment, she was gone. No puff a’ smoke, no pigeons, no rabbits, no top hat or whatever those tricksters use, nothin’, like she was never there at all.”
He paused to take another swig and reach for the bottle. Arty fed another stick into the flames.
“Took me a moment to figure out what I just saw, and in that moment, pain. And a bang. Right here,” he tapped his left shoulder, spilling some alcohol down his shirt “outta nowhere a shotgun caught me in my arm, I turn, and I see her again at the corner of my eye, swing around with my rifle, she wasn’t there no more.”
He poured.
"Now, we got a ghost on our’s side before, remember, Pantie, I thinks his name- "
“Phantom,” interrupts Stoker “his name’s Phantom”
“I call him panties if I wants, Stokes, I hates the bugger. Make whole lotta noise with and without his yap, and his yap’s already too noisy. Just too bad he ain’t gon’ ever live up to his name.”
They all chuckled in agreement, and Skyhammer continues.
“Anyways, we know a ghost, we know they don’t go thru walls, or fly around wearing sheets on their bald top, but her…I dunna know if she’s a ghost, one moment she’s there next to ya, next moment she’s other side of the room, so mebbe so.”
“So she shoots me arm, and I turns around and she ain’t there, then she whacks me with a bat from me back, I swing around with me knife, and then I trip cuz there’s nothing there to stop me momentum. I look around, I see me wounded arm, I see me blood on the floor, and I see the shell on the floor, but no ghost girl. Nuthin’.”
He looks at his mug, sloshing the dark liquid around a little, then continues.
“Also got a funny message that day. Dunna get what it says. ‘TheRyderShotgun…has been kicked due to…to excessive ping’…me thinks it said.”
Arty didn’t sleep that night because he didn’t have any booze to calm himself down.