Midnight Thesis is a Historical Ghost Story and Existential Horror I am developing based on an old short story. I am aided in my process by my weekly writing group’s feedback. I am publishing the chapters as they are completed here on my blog first as a serial novel. Here is the first scene: A Troubled Soul.
Early 1970s, Griqualand-East/South-Western Natal: Jochem Kok was doing research on a forgotten literary figure, or so everybody thought. Unearthing a tragic past opened up a conduit to an ancient horror that demands a price for being called to the present.
A Troubled Soul
It took four matches to light all three candles. He should have lit one candle first and used it for the others. The matches wouldn’t last forever.
He had arranged the candles in a triangle on the dusty and cracked cow dung floor. Jochem Kok watched the flames for a moment and then he shook with a laugh that almost extinguished them.
Jochem walked baboon-like on his dirty hands and feet away from the candles and crouched on his haunches with his back against the door. His khaki short pants pulled up and revealed a pale band above his sunburnt legs. The only other thing he was wearing was a sleeveless vest that would never be white again.
In the candlelight, an ethereal veil of gossamer shadows filled the room, far removed from the dusty state it had in daylight. The dark green paint had shed from the walls in irregular scales. Just the right state for a room to reignite a moment in time.
Jochem reached along the wall and pulled a journal closer to him while his eyes remained transfixed by the candles. He scratched his head with the back of the pencil before he wrote, the journal propped up on his knee.
“The empty yet evocative state of the room is a metaphorical representation of the mental and spiritual state of myself, Jochem Arnoldus Kok, in the here and now and Hendrik Brandt Viljoen (renamed as Brandt Verneuk), in the here and then.”
He paused, the tip of the pencil hovering just above the surface of the paper as he reread his words. He nodded in agreement with himself. He, Jochem, was physically and substantially here while he, Brandt Verneuk, was ethereal and distant, obscured by time. But not for much longer.
The window in the far wall had four small panes in the wooden frame. All four pieces of glass were surprisingly intact. The panes were milky pale from years of dust and moisture so that by day only a diffused light entered the room with no view to the outside. Now, at night, it gave a waxy reflection of the candles, turning three lights into a flickering kaleidoscope.
In the right-hand wall there was a built-in wardrobe—a rectangular hole in the wall—originally with two narrow doors but now with only one and a half. The full door closed, the half door hanging limply open.
Jochem paged back through the journal and read the words at the top of each page under his breath.
“As it is auspicious—” flick “—therefore I contend—” flick “—epic in scale and—” flick “—denied his right—” flick “—maimed and stained in blood—” flick “—more like a séance—”
Jochem stopped turning the pages and found the start of the section, marked with an asterisk in the margin. He read aloud. “Unlike other methods, this spell functions more like a séance. The soul is not forcibly…”
He stopped reading because he knew the warnings and instructions off by heart. Firstly a spirit is not summoned. It is called, or rather invited. You send an invitation into the astral dimension where spirits dwell. There, a spirit that receives your message can decide to manifest of their own free will.
Well, not quite a they in the abstract sense because Jochem was very specific in his needs. He spoke to Verneuk. Or rather, Verneuk would speak through him, using psychic writing.
He had the journal and pencil ready. Three candles in a triangle were lit. The diagram was drawn in charcoal on the floor. He had no incense to burn and made do with African wormwood from the veldt. For raw meat, he used a mouse that would not leave his meagre stores of food alone. There was no wine but only a tin cup of black coffee. He had the words.
“Wat voorbij is, is niet voorbij…”
The incantation was not in Latin or Greek or some other ancient language. It was in High Dutch, which, given Verneuk’s heritage, made a lot of sense.
Jochem finished speaking and knelt down on the floor with the pencil in hand, ready for what should happen. He was not quite prepared for what did happen. Nothing.
For what felt like hours Jochem crouched and waited until there was a cold spasm in his lower back and a crick in his neck. He watched the candles slowly burn down and wondered whether he should repeat the incantation. But he knew he should not. The warnings against it were clear. He could inadvertently summon another conflicting spirit. All he could do was wait, or try again in another three nights’ time.
He waited, his eyes drooping heavily as he watched the flickering flames.
He must have fallen asleep because when he woke he had tumbled over and lay on his side, his whole body stiff and creaky. It was still dark. No glimmer of dawn. He’d slept maybe an hour?
Jochem lay still, both unwilling and unable to move. If only it weren’t for his bladder which was full. He had to pee but did not want to make the effort to get up, no matter how uncomfortable he felt. He slowly started straightening one leg, feeling it creak bit by bit as blood flowed back down it, like hot ants were running up and down the inside of his leg.
His leg was only half straight when he stopped, frozen in place as a thought came to him clearly. He did not just wake up. Something woke him. But what?
The candles had burnt down to the floor and two were dead. Only one was still burning with a splutter, a stump of wax on the floor.
There was a sliver of light shining underneath the door from the kitchen. He had left an oil lamp burning and that was still lit. But there was no sound from the kitchen or any noises coming from outside. No crickets, or jackal call, or anything else. Not even a whisper of wind.
Jochem pushed himself onto his elbows. He could not use his right hand yet because it was cramped into a claw around the pencil. His left arm was asleep as he had been lying on his left shoulder. There was a creak as if from a floorboard but that could not be, he was lying on a cold cow dung floor.
Jochem held very still and strained his ears, fighting against the twitch in his neck at the same time.
There was something. Air moving, like a bellows, slow and deep. No, not bellows, breathing. Slow heavy breathing, but nothing human. What human would it be? It was just him here.
It sounded big, like a cow. Something bovine. He could even smell it. Not the smell of cow but something wilder, something that had never been tamed.
The candle went out and Jochem could see nothing. He reached behind him for the torch he had left beside the door. His fingers brushed against it and knocked it over. His leg spasmed and he fell over backwards, hitting his head against the door.
A door creaked. Jochem craned his neck and held his breath. It could not have been the door to the kitchen. He had his back against it.
There was a heavy footstep. He could feel it vibrate through the floor. Something big was in the room. Where’s the other door? The wardrobe? Is something climbing out of the wardrobe?
Jochem felt around on the floor for the torch. He found the cup of cold coffee first. It splashed up his arm and the cup rattled across the floor.
Jochem found the torch with a wet hand and it almost slipped away. With the torch pulled into his chest he found the switch.
The beam of light hit him right in his face. He had the torch wrong way round, blinding himself. He flicked it off and flipped it over, and switched it on again.
But he could see only flashing lights dancing in front of him.
There were a couple of heavy steps from across the room and then a crunch. As if something very big had squashed the tin cup flat. There was some huge presence in the room and Jochem really didn’t want to know what it was.
He could feel and smell a breath moving the air, heavy and musky and hot.
It was huge, sitting against the far wall. Sitting like a stuffed toy bear on a toddler’s bed. But this was no toy. At first he thought it looked just like a bear. But only if you could have a bear with horns like an African buffalo. The tips of the horns dipped and rose slowly as it breathed deeply, sending wisps of vapour into the cold room—staring at the floor like a mindless beast.
As the torchlight wavered over the beast it lifted its head and stared intently at Jochem. The creature curled its lips into a smirk. The creature spoke in a deep but incongruously refined voice. “And pray tell, what may your name be?”
Jochem answered, too startled to think first. “Jochem,” he said, “Jochem Arnoldus Kok.”
“And that be your true name?”
The creature turned its head to look at the window.
It may have been a moment, but a moment stalled. He could not hold the tension in himself and was starting to shake as he sat on the floor. “You are not Brandt Verneuk.”
There was a shaking rumble from the creature’s corner. It was laughing. “Let me ask why you would want to evoke a ghost? Are you comfortable around the dead?”
Jochem felt like he was surreptitiously manoeuvred and placed on the spot, like this was a verbal examination, with the possibility of much more dire consequences than a mere fail. “I need information that only the dead can give me. A specific spirit. Brandt Verneuk. Are you him, in a different form?”
The creature stood up with a heave, revealing massive hooves, claws with impossibly long nails, and unmistakably male anatomy.
“You have figured that whatever you really are will survive the death of your body,” he said. “Souls that will scream endlessly and forever in the nothing.”
Jochem nodded though he was not sure where this was going. Was he being lectured by this thing?
“With no true knowledge you do this? You hope that this Brandt Verneuk will come to you?”
“I have evidence,” Jochem said. “I have been making contact for weeks.” He shook the journal in the air. “Verneuk has been communicating through me.”
The beast growled loudly and snapped his jaws, exposing fangs, as he jerked his head around and stared Jochem down. The words died in Jochem’s throat and he swallowed deeply.
Jochem stared back at the beast. His body trembled with barely contained emotion. “I am leaving,” he said through a clenched jaw, stood up, and walked to the door. “Just try and stop me.”
“I am not here to stop you,” said the beast. “I am here to open you up.”
© 2025 Gerhi Janse van Vuuren
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