Chapter 1: The Joke's on Me

Chapter 1: The Joke's on Me

The joke, my well-worn, perfectly timed closer, was about a ghost who couldn’t pay his rent because he had no body to work with. It was terrible. A proper groaner. But delivered in the oppressive dark of Edinburgh’s Greyfriars Kirkyard, with the gothic steeple of the old kirk clawing at the bruised purple sky, it usually killed.

Tonight, my audience was already half-dead.

“And that, ladies and gentlemen,” I announced, sweeping my arm towards a particularly menacing mausoleum, “is the final resting place of ‘Bloody’ George Mackenzie, the man responsible for the deaths of thousands. They say his spirit is so restless, so filled with rage, that on quiet nights…” I leaned in, dropping my voice to a conspiratorial whisper, my cheap torch beam wobbling for effect, “you can still hear him… doing his taxes.”

A few scattered chuckles. A pity laugh from a woman in a pink “Stacy’s Hen Do!” sash, who’d clearly had three too many proseccos. A skeptical snort from a lad in a university hoodie who’d spent the last hour trying to catch me out on historical inaccuracies. He was my favourite. Every tour had one.

“Tough crowd,” I muttered under my breath.

This was my life. By day, I was Dan MacLean, comedian, specialising in gigs so obscure they were advertised on lampposts and the back of toilet doors. But by night, I was Daniel MacLean, purveyor of cheap thrills, weaver of third-hand spooky tales, and guide for ‘Edinburgh’s Eerie Encounters’. It paid the bills. Mostly.

My job was simple: herd a gaggle of tourists through the city’s darkest alleyways, known as closes, tell them stories I’d embellished to within an inch of their lives, and time a few jump scares with my colleague Isla, who would be lurking up ahead to rattle a chain or moan pitifully. Tonight, however, Isla had called in sick, leaving me to handle the rattling, the moaning, and the tax jokes all by myself.

“Right then, for our final stop,” I said, forcing a grin that felt tight on my face. “We’re heading down the Blackfriars Wynd. It’s the narrowest, darkest, and by far the most… active close in the city.”

I led them from the relative openness of the kirkyard onto the Royal Mile, the cobblestones slick with a fine Scottish mist that wasn't quite rain. The air clung, damp and heavy, smelling of old stone and fried food from the tourist-trap pubs. We plunged into the wynd, and the city’s already muted sounds vanished, swallowed by the towering stone tenements on either side. The gap between them was so narrow you could touch both walls at once. The sky was a mere slit of deeper blackness above us.

This was my stage. No hecklers, just the eager, upturned faces of people wanting to be lied to in an entertaining way.

“They say that centuries ago, a plague victim was walled up right here,” I began, running my hand along the damp, moss-covered stone. The script was as familiar to me as my own name. “His desperate scratches can sometimes be heard, echoing from beyond the grave…”

I paused for dramatic effect. The hen party huddled closer. The university kid rolled his eyes. I prepared to make a scratching sound with the key in my pocket.

That’s when the cold hit.

It wasn’t the usual Scottish chill that seeps into your bones over hours. This was a sudden, predatory cold. It was like stepping into a walk-in freezer. The mist of my breath plumed thick and white in my torch beam. Goosebumps erupted on my arms, a frantic, prickling wave. Around me, the tourists shivered, pulling their jackets tight.

“Blimey, temperature dropped a bit,” someone whispered.

My practiced patter died on my lips. This wasn't part of the show. The air grew heavy, pressing in, thick with a silence that felt older and deeper than the stones around us. The faint, distant wail of a siren was snuffed out. Even the perpetual hum of the city was gone. We were in a vacuum. A bubble of absolute, freezing stillness.

My comedian’s brain, the one that deconstructs everything, was struggling to find the punchline. Faulty wiring from a pub’s air-con unit? A freak weather pocket?

A shadow detached itself from the deeper darkness at the end of the close.

It wasn't Isla. It was too tall, too thin, a distorted silhouette of a man that seemed to unspool from the wall itself. It had no features, just a vaguely human shape cut from a fabric blacker than the night. It didn't walk; it flowed, a spill of ink moving against the grain of the world.

The university kid let out a choked gasp. Stacy’s Hen Do fell silent, their drunken giggles replaced by wide, terrified eyes. My heart hammered against my ribs, a frantic drumbeat against the crushing silence. My own carefully constructed performance of fear was being upstaged by the genuine, gut-wrenching article.

I fumbled for a rationalisation, a joke, anything to reclaim control. “And for an extra ten quid, we have our premium… uh… spectral manifestation…”

My voice cracked. The words were weak, pathetic things against the sheer wrongness of what we were seeing.

The shadow-thing drifted closer. The cold intensified, burning my skin. An odour filled the air, not of decay, but of dust and forgotten things, of attics that have been sealed for a century.

And then it spoke.

It wasn't a voice. It was a whisper that didn't travel through the air but bloomed directly inside my skull. It was a dry, rustling sound, like dead leaves skittering across pavement.

Daniel MacLean.

Not Dan. Daniel.

The sound of my full name, spoken by that impossible thing, shattered the last of my composure. It knew me. This wasn't a random haunting. This was personal.

Terror, pure and undiluted, seized my throat. Fight or flight kicked in, and my legs, thankfully, chose flight.

“Tour’s over!” I yelled, my voice a ragged tear in the silence. “Show’s finished, thanks for coming, tip your guide!”

That broke the spell. The tourists didn’t need a second invitation. A woman screamed, a raw, piercing sound that finally broke the unnatural quiet. They turned and ran, a panicked stampede of feet on wet cobblestones, shoving past me, their faces pale masks of fear in the gloom.

I wasn’t far behind them. I scrambled out of the wynd, back onto the relative safety of the Royal Mile, gasping for air that didn’t feel like shards of ice in my lungs. The street was almost empty now, the last of the late-night revellers having retreated into the warm glow of the pubs. My tour group had vanished.

I leaned against a wall, my legs trembling, my breath coming in ragged heaves. I looked back down the wynd. It was empty. The oppressive cold was gone, replaced by the familiar, damp chill of an Edinburgh night.

It was my imagination. Stress. Lack of sleep. A collective hallucination fuelled by booze and my own spooky bullshit. I had to believe that. The alternative was unthinkable.

I forced myself to stand up straight, tugging my jacket down. Just a story I could use. A new bit for the act. So, I was giving a ghost tour the other night, and you’ll never guess who showed up… It was a defense mechanism, turning fear into material. My only one.

As I turned to head home, my eyes caught on a figure standing across the street, half-hidden in the deep archway of a closed wool shop. She hadn’t been there a moment ago.

She was a woman, tall and impossibly still. Dressed in a simple, impeccably tailored black coat, she looked like she’d stepped out of a high-fashion magazine, not a haunted close. Her skin was pale, almost luminous in the amber glow of the streetlights, and her long, black hair seemed to drink the light around it.

But it was her eyes that held me captive.

Even from across the street, I could feel their weight. They were the colour of a gathering thundercloud, dark and charged with an ancient power. She wasn't looking at the wynd where the chaos had just erupted. She was looking directly at me.

Her gaze wasn’t curious or alarmed. It was analytical. It was the look of a craftsman judging a piece of flawed work. There was a profound, chilling stillness to her, an aura of absolute authority that made the hairs on my neck stand up all over again.

She knew. I didn't know how I knew, but I was certain. She had seen it all. She had seen the shadow, heard the whisper.

My breath caught in my throat. She gave a slow, almost imperceptible nod. It wasn’t a greeting. It was an acknowledgement. A confirmation.

Yes, that look said. It’s real. And the joke, you poor, stupid man, is on you.

Then, she simply stepped back into the archway and was gone. Not walked away. Just… gone. One moment she was there, a pillar of silent judgment, the next, there was only empty, rain-slicked stone.

I stood frozen on the cobblestones, the sarcastic quips and rational explanations dying in my mind. The whisper echoed in my memory, a venomous hook planted deep in my soul.

Daniel MacLean.

The monsters were real. And one of them was looking for me.