"Deadbolt" in Disturbed Digest
I haven't written many ghost stories, but this one's been haunting me for a while as it's waited to greet the world. I wrote it way back in October 2011 during week #43 of my Write1Sub1 adventure that year. Since then, it has survived 12 rejections (5 of them positive), until landing on the virtual doorstep of the fine folks at Alban Lake publishing.
The March issue of Disturbed Digest is now available in all eReader formats and is chock-full of creepy goodness. Here's how "Deadbolt" opens:
The door won't stay locked.
I checked it just a second ago—I always do, in case I forgot to turn the deadbolt. In a neighborhood like ours, you can't be too careful.
It was locked.
But I walk back into the front room after a trip to the toilet, and the thumbturn is vertical instead of horizontal. I heard the bolt slide out of the cylinder when I locked it. There's no reason for it to have slipped back on its own.
Force of gravity messing around?
Maybe it's possessed. What else could explain why it only does this sort of thing when I'm home alone?