Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off

For our third free story of 2025, Margaret Ronald invites you to an all-night jam session with a really tough audience.

~ Julian and Fran, January 19, 2025

January’s stories — by E. Catherine Tobler, Margaret Ronald, Marissa Lingen, and David Bowles — will all be free-to-read, and we hope that you’ll enjoy them and share them. However, it’s our paying subscribers who allow us to keep rolling throughout the year. If you haven’t already, please consider signing up.

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Ghost Rock Posers F**k Off

by Margaret Ronald

We’d set up well away from the worksite, we’d started at sundown with “Higher Ground” (and did it properly, thank you; I was not about to let Alan get hold of it again), and we’d had no problems through midnight, so it took me a while to notice that we had living audience members.

I set down my coffee (half-caff till midnight, or your hands start shaking too bad by sunup) and hurried round behind Lesley, who was lost in the drums again. (“Little Old Fashioned Karma,” and it was terrible; I don’t know how Alan makes everything he plays on that stupid clarinet sound like light jazz. It’s like he’s the bastard child of King Midas and Kenny G.) “We’ve got live ones,” I said as I reached Lizbet, who was halfway through her usual count of the audience.

She frowned—she’d been awake since setup this morning and had overdone the vocal part on a Steeleye Span cover, so she was staying away from the coffee. “You don’t— Oh. Oh fuck.” She squinted out past the trench. “Yeah. Two of them.”

I hadn’t noticed the second. The first was easy to see—a girl with long, curly brown hair, wearing a peasant blouse and a flowing skirt that could either have been hippie-bohemian or one of the local modesty cults. The girl beside her was in jeans and a sweatshirt, with fluffy dishwater hair and an equally washed-out complexion.

“Were they here when we started?” There’s always a few at sundown, before the ghosts start to gather and before the kids realize that this is not a concert for them.

Lizbet shook her head. “Nope. Fuck.” What was worse was that they were starting to get into the music, or at least pretending to do so. The brown-haired girl was swaying back and forth in that proto-dancing you sometimes get at folk festivals, and her friend—

Shit. Alan had switched to “Cloudbusting” (in light jazz style, fuck you very much, Alan), and even though he did it as an instrumental, the dishwater girl was mouthing the words. In another minute she’d be singing along.

“I’ll bring them in,” I said.

Lizbet gave me a worried look, and even Ricci, who’d been dozing by the coffee, looked up at that. “You’re sure?”

“I’ve skipped the last two sets, and I haven’t been humming along.” Light jazz will do that. “Attention’s been off me for a while.” Still, Ricci handed me a tether, and they both watched—as did Murphy and Alan and Lesley, none of whom even dropped a note—as I stepped over the trench.

Our audience—the rest of our audience—turned to look at me. They don’t technically have faces, at least none that Alan’s identified from any of the footage. They don’t even have features; the shape of them is like a smoke person just before the wind pulls them apart. But you know when their attention is on you, on your friends, on someone close by. You know, and if you’re like me, you want it gone.

That was why we were here. Because if their attention was on us, then it wasn’t on the worksite, where double shifts would now be hauling ass to finish the excavation and put up temporary walls by dawn. No one was sure what drew the things to some building sites; Ricci had theories and ideas ranging back to the Winchester Mystery House and old stories of fiddlers asked to play all night, but without hard data to predict it, you really only learned that you had a problem when some unfortunate shift worker started singing.

I raised my hands and tried to look uninteresting. Even compared to light jazz, that wasn’t hard; I’m not what you’d call memorable. The ghosts stared, or whatever it was they did with their head-shapes that probably weren’t heads, and after a few bars, they turned back to “Cloudbusting.” The brown-haired girl noticed me but pretended she hadn’t; her friend was as caught by the band as the ghosts were. Her mouth was still moving, ready to join in on the chorus.

I moved as fast as I dared—faster, enough that the ghosts I slid past turned to focus on me—and slapped my hand over her mouth before she got further than two syllables. “Don’t,” I breathed, grabbing her by the shoulder with my other hand. “Don’t.”

The brown-haired girl gave a sharp, mocking laugh. “She’s not that bad,” she said, the last two words fading out as the ghosts around us turned. If you’re not used to that attention, it can feel like suddenly being underwater. The dishwater girl’s breathing against my palm sped up, and she blinked back panicky tears.

And then Murphy, bless and keep him, broke into “Life on Mars?” In Portuguese, for some reason, because when he sings it that way, it’s practically guaranteed to draw ghost attention. We’ve all got one or two songs each that will do that. I withdrew my hand but didn’t let go of her shoulder. Follow me, I mouthed, exaggerating the words, and the three of us inched our way back as Murphy sang about sailors in the dance hall.

We crossed the trench, one girl looking down with disdain, the other with horrified interest, and I let go. “What are your names?” I asked.

“Christina,” the dishwater girl whispered.

“Willow.” The other looked around at our gear—the lights, the amps, the muttering generator, the camp toilet—with the same expression with which she’d regarded the contents of the trench.

“Well, Christina, Willow, what the fuck were you thinking? This is an active swarm hazard!”

“It’s a concert,” Willow countered.

Christina, who had that good-girl-caught-out cringe I unwillingly recognized, looked down at her feet. “We wanted to hear some ghost rock.”

“Hear, fine. Sing along with, no.” Ricci handed me coffee without me needing to ask. Ricci’s a marvel. “Don’t you know anything about ghost rock?”

“Vespertine Gray doesn’t stop people from singing,” Willow pointed out, less to defend her friend, I thought, than to argue with us.

“Vespertine fucking Gray doesn’t play ghost rock,” Lizbet snarled. I sipped my coffee. “She plays in enclosed structures, she uses recorded tracks, and she does way too much vocal work. I don’t think she’s even done a full night in her career.”

“Chicago,” Christina whispered. “The tour last year. We wanted to go.”

“Where she had backup singers and audio and God knows what else, and most important, no ghosts!” Lizbet put her hands to her head. “Swear to God, I’m going to do something about that woman.”

I glanced over my shoulder at Murphy. He gave me a nod—kids or no, he needed a break. I went to our gear, thought for a moment, then lugged out the cello case. Not my favorite, but it let me sit down, although that wasn’t a good sign this early. “Why are you really here?” I asked as I unclasped it. “And don’t give me that Vespertine bullshit. You could have been here earlier and safer if you wanted to hear it.” I had an idea, though, just from that we wanted to go. Wanted, but didn’t. Wanted, but couldn’t.

Christina looked at me, then at Lizbet. “Willow’s a really good singer,” she blurted out. “And I— We thought that maybe if you heard us—”

“Nope.” I slammed the case shut. “Doesn’t matter how good you are. You could be Aretha Franklin or Cecilia Bartoli, and it wouldn’t mean a damn thing.”

Willow’s mouth snapped closed. Christina looked like she’d been struck. “But—but she’s—”

“Doesn’t matter,” I repeated. “This is ghost rock. Being a good singer is irrelevant.”

“I can tell,” Willow said sweetly.

If she expected a rise, she’d hit the wrong shift. (Lesley, now, she’d defend us, but she was in her groove and would need to be pried off the drums before she noticed anything.) “Your talent’s no good here.” I nodded to Lizbet. “Tell them.”

Lizbet glared at me for sticking her with this, but she started in on the usual spiel we give the few kids who think we’re their ticket out of their small-town lives. The truth is that we’re all decent musicians—we have to be—but actual performing is to ghost rock as ballet is to marathon dancing.

I’m not saying it doesn’t take talent. I settled in on the empty chair and took up the bass line for the duet Alan started, since he could carry it while I tuned. It takes talent to tune on the fly like this, to be able to switch out several times a night and change instruments so that you don’t end up with repetitive strain, to be able to play transcriptions and covers and anything else at the drop of a hat and not care how stupid the combined effect ends up. But it’s not the kind of talent that young virtuosos have.

Beyond a base level of technical competence, the ghosts don’t care. They only care if you stop. Most of us aren’t even primarily musicians. We’re researchers—Lizbet and her spreadsheets, Ricci’s search for worksite commonalities, Alan and his folklore. Murphy isn’t—he played backup for twenty years on the road and moved to ghost rock for reasons he’s never explained—but we’re less of a band and more of a cluster of ongoing dissertations and a drummer. Three drummers, if you count my attempts and Alan’s stupid bodhran.

I could hear Lizbet going over this behind us, could hear the scoff from Willow and Ricci’s answer to that, and then had to concentrate as we switched to a folk music set that risked putting all of us to sleep. By the time I could pay attention again, Lizbet was swapping in for Alan, taking up a concertina, so it was going to be folk music hell for a while.

I glanced over my shoulder to see where the girls had gone, but they’d moved out of easy view. A couple of songs later I saw Christina out of the corner of my eye, walking the inner trench and carrying Lizbet’s clipboard. Lizbet must have talked her into doing data collection, since it was that or try to sleep. Christina paused at the edge of the circle to look at us, and I wondered which of them had really seen us as their way out of this town. Maybe it had been her, with her flinch reflex and need to sing along. Maybe it had been Willow, who was on the other side, staring out at the audience with a set jaw and white lips. Being twigged for lack of talent was one thing; being talented and then told that talent didn’t matter was another.

There were a lot of ways out of these towns. You rarely got the one you wanted, though.

We made our way through folk music hell—I’d guess it was about two, two thirty—and I could tell Lesley needed to swap out, when Lizbet gave a strangled yawp. As best I could figure later, Willow had stepped out of the circle around the back where the ghosts were thinner. She’d been quiet enough to get past them, but instead of sneaking off, she’d circled around so that the ghosts were between her and us. Lizbet dropped the concertina—and the melody, damn it—and ran up to the trench, Christina following after. Willow looked back at us, across the foggy clusters of increasingly agitated ghosts.

And she began to sing.

She had a fantastic voice, one of those husky ranges that would throb with emotion on cue. Put her on the solo circuit and she’d have a following in a few years, maybe even more with the attitude and confidence she had. And the ghosts love that kind of singing. Humans aren’t made for eight hours straight of it, so the likes of us use instrumentals most of the time, but if we could sing all night, we’d have no trouble keeping the ghosts’ attention. Alan’s got a whole chapter drafted on it.

The crowd’s attention shifted, surrounding Willow. Give her credit, she didn’t falter. Behind me, Lesley was whispering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit,” and someone else was hyperventilating. Tether clipped to her jacket, Lizbet edged out past the trench, followed by both Ricci and Murphy. The tether wouldn’t do much good if all of them were swarmed; we might be able to pull one back, but that would mean stopping the music and risking a larger swarm. But they couldn’t just wait for Willow to stop singing. The problem was that without Lizbet, it was just Lesley and me, and with Lesley panicking, we’d dropped that. So now even more ghosts were focused on Willow, and the ones who stayed on us were getting—it’s not angry, but it’s something. Dangerous.

“Fuck,” I whispered, and then, loud as I could, screamed, “All aboard!” and launched into “Crazy Train.” It’s not a song that’s meant for cello and weak tenor, but it can be done if you don’t mind sounding like an idiot. More important, it’s a song that my brother played for me when we were kids, just before he left town, and that emotional resonance is enough to draw the attention of the ghosts.

And it worked, mostly. We don’t mike for vocals, so my own worn-out voice wasn’t that much of an embarrassment, and Lesley, faced with a good drum line, dropped her panic to back me up. But even though the ghosts began to turn to me instead, Willow didn’t use the chance to run. She kept on belting out—I don’t know what it was, it was about love and heaven and could have been either the week’s Top 40 newcomer or a praise band’s castoff. And she made it sound good. She made it sound like— Well, Vespertine Gray wouldn’t have lasted five minutes against her, even with her whole backup band.

It could have stayed like that—a dumbass, deadly battle of the bands—except that “Crazy Train” only somewhat works on cello, and I have never, ever managed the solo at the bridge on cello. And the ghosts weren’t going to let me swap out instruments. I was about to choke, and when I did, the ghosts would turn. We keep the trench full of barley and 1:8 diluted wine, but it would only keep them for long enough for us to get to the trailer, and that’s if our reflexes were good, and that was only for those of us within the trench. I steeled myself for the clumsiest solo of my life, and probably the last, too.

And then Alan, fucking Alan, broke in with his fucking clarinet to take the solo, and that is not right for this song, this song should not even be within shouting distance of light jazz, but it worked. I inwardly begged forgiveness from Saint Ozzy, I’d bite a head off a roadie in restitution, but it worked.

Except it hadn’t, not entirely. I wasn’t the only one who knew how ridiculous we sounded, and Willow broke off to laugh at us. Stopping would have been bad enough, but it was the glance around at the ghosts with a Can you believe this? look that did it. The ghosts paused only long enough to see that she wasn’t going to finish the song.

Lesley thinks that they’re not malicious, that it’s the same as an infant reaching into someone’s mouth to find out how they’re making that noise. While I’m inclined to agree on the lack of malice, generally speaking, infants don’t pull out people’s tongues. The smoky, unreal shapes around Willow dissolved, pouring themselves into her nose and mouth and eyes, seeking the song she hadn’t finished. Light blazed out of them, illuminating the blood in her eyelids and cheeks and throat.

Ghost swarms are never not horrifying, but this one hit harder for the shock of my last-ditch effort failing. My bow dropped from numb fingers. The pressure in my ears increased as the ones closest to us began to agitate, and I still couldn’t think of a damn note.

Then, behind me, another new voice started up, thin and quavery: “I’ll sing you one, O, green grow the rushes, O . . .” Christina, singing a lullaby to her friend, or what was left of her friend. She had a tremulous voice, made worse by terror, but she kept going, and that was enough. I began to improvise around the simple melody, while out in the field Lizbet and Murphy caught Willow as she sagged, and carried her back to the limited safety behind the trench.

Alan waited till Christina got through her final one is one and all alone, then started in on Fleetwood Mac, and Ricci pried Lesley away from the drums. Lizbet returned shamefaced to her concertina, and if you’ve never heard “Rhiannon” on clarinet, concertina, and cello, you’re not missing out, but the ghosts stuck with it.

When I tapped out—Murphy taking my place—I took my time putting away my cello before going to the little cluster by the trailer. Christina had Willow’s head in her lap, and her tears were dripping on her friend’s still face, enough to wake her if it had been a normal sleep. “Ambulance has been called,” Lesley murmured. “They know the danger, but they’ll be here at sunup.”

“Good,” I said, though it really wouldn’t matter how long they took. There might be some unpleasantness once word got out. We video-record all our gigs for Lizbet’s research, so legally we were probably fine, but that wasn’t much comfort to anyone.

Christina looked up at me. “Will she be all right?”

“Maybe.” It hadn’t been a long swarm, but it had been an intense one. “She might not like hearing music after this. Or being out at night. Or she might not talk for a while.” Or she might seem fine, for a few months or so, and then up and disappear.

That’s my research. The aftereffects of ghost swarms, long term. Since this whole thing started, there’s fewer people affected, now that worksites know when to call in people like us. But my research subjects have a tendency to disappear a few months after exposure, and though Lizbet’s count is always fluctuating, I’m pretty sure there’s always one more in the audience after a bad swarm.

If we came back here, would there be one more shape out there, one with a drift of smoke where a mass of tumbling brown hair should be?

Christina might be timid, but she wasn’t dumb. She caught my hesitation, and her mouth trembled, a new wash of tears falling. “She just wanted to get out. She just wanted to sing.”

“No,” I said, and dropped to one knee beside her. “She wanted to be the best. She was. There’s no shame in it, or in the wanting, but she wanted everyone who heard to know she was the best and, well . . . sometimes you have to be content with knowing it yourself.”

Look at us, after all. We’re the best damned ghost rock band this side of the Mississippi, but the only ones who know that are the ghosts. (And Vespertine Gray can go piss up a live cable.)

Christina swallowed hard but, instead of arguing, nodded. I thumped her shoulder, then tore a scrap off of Lizbet’s data collection papers and scrawled my number on it. “Learn to play a couple more instruments. Then call me. If you can handle what ghost rock is and what it isn’t, we’ll see.” I tried a smile. “I’ll teach you to write grant applications.”

“Laine?” Alan had picked up a bodhran to take over from Ricci. “You want to close out the set?”

My fingers hurt, my throat hurt, but it was easier than sitting here with one girl and one near-ghost. “Yeah,” I said, and got to my feet. The sky was already turning gray, the ghosts becoming less smoke and more heat haze, and I had an electric bass that would do what I wanted. We settled in to “Some Kind of Wonderful,” and on the horizon, the ambulance trundled our way.

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Thank you for joining our journey this week.

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Margaret Ronald is the author of Spiral Hunt, Wild Hunt, and Soul Hunt, as well as a number of short stories. Over the course of the past few decades, she has worked in fields from media to academia to biotech, usually on the margins, where the view is better. Originally from small-town Indiana, she now lives outside Boston.

“Ghost Rock Posers F**ck Off,” © Margaret Ronald, 2025.

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