Chapter 3
THREE
MY NEW SWEETHEART
JOHNNY
If there’s one bonus to still sticking around after all this time, it’s that the closer it gets to Halloween, the stronger I become. Not at first. Not right after I died. But now… I used to run the roads.
Now I rule Shadowvale, especially on All Hallow’s Eve.
It’s part of being an apparition, I figured out long ago. A spirit trapped on Earth.
A goddamn ghost.
Most of the year, I haunt my old haunts, watching as Shadowvale grows and changes. And it has. I’ve seen it all, and once I learned how to use my ghost powers to have a little fun in my afterlife, I’ve done what I could to change my town to suit me.
Like how I got revenge on Scotty Hilton for being the racer to survive while my sweetheart didn’t.
Or how I messed with my old man until he found peace at the bottom of a bottle.
I enjoyed that, but I’m not a complete villain.
I was a pretty good guardian angel for my old man’s second family, and if it wasn’t for me, Mac’s Garage would’ve burned down in 1974 when the Mac I knew fell asleep with a lit cigar in his mouth, surrounded by gasoline.
So I’m forced to relive my death every Halloween, stealing a different car every year before I inevitably feel the crunch of my ribs cracking, the steering column embedding itself deep into my chest. If that’s the price I have to pay to manifest for twenty-four hours before it happens again, fine.
Even if it pisses me off every time I remember they named the curve after Scotty fucking Hilton…
He’s been a dead man for almost forty years; like Cassie, he moved on, even after he tied that noose around his neck.
Doesn’t matter. I still hold a grudge, and I’m stewing over the big shot as I take a drag off the useless cigarette, even more insubstantial than I am.
Sometimes I think it’s a worse torture than forever existing in this crazy world, doomed to only race and crash, crash and race, remembering the moment I lost everything.
It’s bad enough that I’m a ghost. But, damn it, it would be nice to actually taste the smoke instead of just puffing away out of habit.
Even worse, I can’t get rid of it. It’s either between my fingers, my lips, or tucked away behind my ear.
Like the shattered glass that falls from my hair whenever I shake my head in my ghostly form, the cigarette was with me when I died, and it’ll be with me until I get closure and can finally be with my sweetheart again.
Still, I guess I should be happy that my face isn’t bloody, torn to shreds, or that my chest doesn’t look like I took a metal steering column to it, but if it did, happy fucking Halloween, you squares.
As a ghost, I can only become Living once a year—and only on Halloween. It’s when the veil between worlds is the thinnest, though I got the short end of the stick that it’s also my death day. I get to be Living, always fated to end Halloween night in a race for my afterlife.
But the hours before it? I can do whatever I want, walking around Shadowvale like a living, breathing man who stepped right out of 1953 and into the modern age.
This time?
I plan on making it count.
I plan on making my sweetheart mine.
Not just for one night, either. She might think so, but I have a plan. One night to make her fall for Johnny Gray, and as many manifestations as it takes over the years to convince Cassidy to choose me.
I know she’s had a bad fella in her past. The things I’ve learned…
that I’ve overheard… that I’ve seen… she’s nothing like Cassie, and I mean that in the best way possible.
If I turn on the Johnny Gray charm, she won’t make me wait so long.
These modern girls are different, and that’s one thing I learned watching the world change.
I can convince her to touch me. I can get her to let me claim her—and that’s exactly what I plan on doing.
I’ve been a virgin for more than ninety years. But this Halloween? I’ll more than make up for it with my new sweetheart.
To be solid. To be a Living. To take my girl into my arms again, holding her close, sliding my hand up her thigh, reaching beneath her skirt…
The real Cassie would never let me.
The real Cassie has moved on. When the crash was cleared, the coppers and the medics trying to pull our broken bodies out of the remains of the Shoebox, I saw them wheel Cassie and me away… but she was gone. She begged me to stay, and that’s what I did, while Cassie fucking moved on.
It started as a promise. Now it’s a fanatical vow. More than seventy years have past since that Halloween and I’ve waited and waited and waited—and, finally, she’s returned.
Cassidy Montrose. I caught her name on the small card she passed the latest Mac down at the garage that’s still standing after all these years.
Her age, too. My Cassie was twenty-three when we died, while the modern version of my sweetheart is thirty.
If I was Living, she’d be five years older than me, and that revs my engine more than it probably should.
I died at twenty-five. It doesn’t matter that I’ve spent all these years existing. I’m a horny twenty-five-year-old greaser who is counting down the minutes until it’s Halloween and I can reveal myself to Cassidy.
It was like fate, the way I met Cassie and Cassidy the same way. Both happened by Mac’s Garage when I was there, and I instantly thought both of my girls were the most beautiful women I’ve ever seen.
The same big, brown eyes. The same bouncy brown curls.
The tits that fill out a sweater perfectly, and an ass that has me sprung behind my blue jeans.
They’d be twins if it wasn’t for how they were born decades apart, and I knew in a moment that this was the girl I’d spent seven decades waiting for.
She’s my Cassie returned to me at last, and there isn’t anything I won’t do to keep her this time around.
Because Shadowvale has been mine for more than seventy years. The race has lasted just as long.
My love for my girl?
That’s eternal.
For Emily’s sake, I try to stay away from the diner when it isn’t Halloween.
Bad news: Cassidy spends most of her time there and that means there are parts of the day where I can’t be right beside her.
Of course. She wanted a paying gig, and you can’t sneeze at being a waitress.
It took a week in mortal time for me to save up enough ghostly energy to plant the idea in Cassidy’s head that she should stop in at the Shadowvale Diner.
I knew that, the moment my great-niece saw Cassidy’s face, she’d see what I did: that she’s Cassie Miller brought back to Shadowvale.
I didn’t have the strength to whisper through the blood that I wanted Em to take care of my sweetheart, but I didn’t need to. She knew what to do.
The last remaining Gray in town, she would do anything to help her ghostly relative with his unfinished business.
After all, she was raised on the legend of Johnny Gray and Cassie Miller.
I visit her at the diner every Halloween like I did her father before her, and his father before him, so she knew.
That’s also why I keep my distance as a ghost. I make my kin uncomfortable, but so long as she never forgets what family means, I can stay away—unless I can’t.
So Emily gave Cassidy a job, and I know that my girl is safe when she’s around Em and that boy, Bruce Lang, that she married after I made sure he was worthy of her.
That leaves me to stroll along Scotty’s Curve, anxiously walking the path that led to my death while puffing away uselessly on my smoke.
If not there, I walk the length of road beneath Cassidy’s apartment, patrolling for her, waiting for her, then meeting her at the apartment we share.
Cassidy thinks she’s being haunted for real—and my girl is a smart one because she’s right.
I’m always there. In her kitchen. In her bathroom.
In her bed.
She has no idea that I am. That I’m watching her. That she belongs to me.
But this Halloween? She will.
There’s a week left until then. I don’t know what will happen when I take Cassidy and do everything I can to get her agree to belong to me for good.
Will I move on? I promised I would stay…
will I? I can’t come back to life, not full-time.
The only loophole is possession, and I’d have to quash another man’s soul and install mine, taking over the body if I wanted to be Living every day.
I wouldn’t be Johnny then. Not really. I’d be a parasite until the host died, and there was never a reason for me to waste my ghostly energy on taking over a human before. With Cassidy here… I’ve waited this long.
I can wait a week longer.
For now, I leave small tokens for my girl.
A leaf that I found on the asphalt. A polished rock.
A clear pin. I’ve been dead long enough that I can move small things with my mind or fog up the mirror in her bathroom.
When the veil thins, mirrors are the first portals between the land of the Living and the dead, and I know she saw me peeking at her earlier after I followed her home from the diner.
If not my blue peepers gazing into her soul, then the fucking need I have for her has her blood racing and her heart pumping. I’m sure of it.
I want her. I want her desperately, and if I could manifest now or had the right sort of body nearby to waste my energy on possessing, I’d have her under me in an instant. The way Cassidy was squirming on the couch earlier, infected with my lust… she’d let me. I know she would.
The veil is even thinner than I expected. I whisper her name, and she freezes, as though she heard my rough voice. I bury the filter of my smoke in my slicked-back hair, dropping my hand to my crotch.
I spent seventy years as a ghost, figuring my spectral body was as dead as the rest of me. That lasted until I caught Cassidy’s scent—cherry… just like Cassie, she smells of cherries and vanilla—and saw her gorgeous face and I got the first woody as a dead man.