Ghost Survivor

Where All Stories Should End.

CHAPTER 1

Death. I always used to think that was it, an abyss which lasted forever, nothing but darkness and misery. On one hand people could use this time to reflect on their misdeeds or whatever they could have done right if they did anything right. When someone dies, people seem to all gather round, sometimes in big stone churches and some others on family estates but all that is always the same is that some people that attend don't even know your name till it was spoken by a vicar who was so old you might as well be commencing their funeral at the same time .Ghost stories are common folk tales of those who had departures form their living vessel of a body and chose to haunt and scare the living through a sequence of events, no idea why they would have to scare them and be horrid to them it's like they were being forced to by some fierce power, cause no one would willingly want to scare a beloved to death. This is a story of death, nothing more and nothing less , you will soon come to read my tale as I can not speak it to you cause after all I am at a place between life and death.

I died so long ago that if you looked at my body on it's coffin, seven foot under the cold, wet, dirt of Cromer church, you'd realize that my body has just turned to dust but there you would also find a pocket watch which engraved upon it's lid held the words "For in death, time stands still." You may question how on that watch you cannot change the time or what the engravings mean or how I came into possession of that one fateful watch. The hand of the watch always pointed to quarter past three and as I was unable to change it no matter what I tried it could only be right twice a day. I thought nothing of that watch, apart from it being a most curious item of which was gifted to me many moons ago. At the young age of six years old, I was on a walk back from the supermarket just below the train station and on my journey home I noticed an old homeless man who looked starved half to death, out of pity and compassion I reached into my mother's shopping bag and pulled out one full loaf of bread and with cold shaking hands gave it to the man. With a smile and some tears, the man looked at me, he had a black, soot-like scraggly beard with hair that matched and wrinkles covered his face like a miniature mountain range but despite his appearance he seemed to act with a good heart. He pointed at me with his boney, almost skinless hands then he reached into is coat and pulled out the watch which was at the time covered in dirt and a multitude of whatever he had in his pocket at the time which mainly consisted of small tablet wrappers and miniature shards of glass which probably came from a bottle of some cheap alcoholic beverage. He wiped off everything that was stuck to the watch revealing it to me for the first time, he spat onto the palm on his hand and rubbed the watch to reveal its shining surface, he handed it to me afterwards even though it was still a bit wet and sticky from his spit, I took his gift and looked down to place it into my small blue coat pocket and when I looked back up to thank him, almost everything was gone, the blanket,the boxes, even the man himself, all that remained was the loaf of bread just sat there, I looked round but still no sign of the old man. I never understood how he had just vanished into thin air, I couldn't have been imagining it because I still had the watch in my pocket but at that thought I reached in my pocket to check that it had been there and still was there and to my relief it was, I stared at it in wonder and opened the lid to display to me the never changing time of quarter past three, which I would one day come to fear. The time on which I would die.