You might have heard many a tale of ghosts and ghouls before, and chances are you've heard one or more on this, the day of Halloween. But mark these very words...for when you look back upon them you will see it foretold that you've never heard a tale quite like this before...
It happened one night not too long ago. The moon was new and the thin slice of light visible on its face only moments earlier was now masked by a thick veil of fog drifting over the cold north sea into the heart of Scotland where a wee little village lay sleeping. Not a soul was awake...or so it seemed, as it would have been near impossible for a mortal eye to see the three figures walking in the shadows of the only road cutting through this wee village...but this is not the scary part cause wee little villages are quite nice, especially in Scotland and the three mysterious figures were only us!
We were on our way home and when it’s dark we always walk in the shadows cause shadows are too scary not to walk in them. You are now probably thinking “Oh no! The Picsees stayed out in the cold too long and now their brains turned into jellybeans” but actually this makes perfect sense if you know about philosophy like my brother does. He said shadows are only scary cause you can’t see who’s lurking inside them...but if it’s you who’s inside, you do know who it is and you know they are friendly, so there is absolutely no reason to be afraid. But as we were soon to realise, not all things are scary cause you can’t see them...actually some things are scary only because you do see them...like a ghost!
We were almost home when a sudden gust of wind came rushing down the road. Now a breeze or two is nothing new to this wee road of ours but this one seemed to be in a particular hurry, and it didn't take long to see why...it was being chased by a GHOST! There are lots and lots of people all over the world who knows lots and lots about ghosts, but unfortunately none of them were there with us. This meant we didn't have a lot of guidelines about what to do in a situation like this...but we were pretty sure that when you see a furious white blur chasing up a storm the best thing to do is run like the wind!
We ran and ran and usually we would run some more but we were concentrating so hard on the previous bit of running that we never saw the turn in the road or the very big wall making this turn quite necessary, and with four big thuds three little Picsees were flat on their backs! Now wait just a minute you say...The symptoms of running into a wall is usually a dizzy head and seeing double but the double of 3 has never been 4, and even though Eric is usually double troubles he still only makes one thud noise when he runs into a wall...so how could 3 little Picsees make 4 thud sounds? At first this made very little sense to us also. We quickly counted ourselves to confirm this mathematical and physical impossibility when we found the source of thud number four! It was the ghost! He was laying right there between us. Now 3 wee Picsees making 4 thuds is a strange phenomenon...but a ghost running into a wall is just completely nonsensical! Everyone knows ghosts go through walls, not into them! Our first thought was that we must be dreaming, but a quick pinch proved that this was not the case. Our second thought was to get running again! This time there were only three thuds.
This proved two new interesting things...firstly, you don’t always learn from your mistakes and secondly this time the ghost didn’t chase us. Actually he was not moving at all. It made him look much less ferocious and much less blurry...in fact; upon closer inspection he looked quite crumply.
That was when we realised what the moral of the story is. Just like you should never judge a book by its cover, you should also never judge a ghost by his sheet, cause it turned out our ghost was indeed nothing more than a wee sheet of paper crumpled up by a nasty litterbug and blown down the street by a wind in a rush.
We took the wee little litterghost home to put in the bin and agreed never to talk about it ever again, cause that’s how all proper scary stories end...also we did feel quite silly about it. Who’s ever heard of someone mistaking a wee piece of paper for a scary ghost?
Well...there was this one time my brother told us that toilet rolls are actually very neatly dressed mummies, but that’s a story for some other time...
you can read more of our little short stories on www.thepicsees.com
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