Issue 0 - Christmas
Check out our proof-of-concept issue of Emerald City Ghosts! You'll get an idea of what you can expect from us and read some ghostly short stories, poetry, and recommendations while you're at it!
You can read Issue 0 as a digital newsletter, or you can download the PDF version at the bottom of the page!
Editor’s Note
I know what you’re thinking: we’re nowhere near the holidays.
You’re right—we’re about as far away from Christmas as we could possibly be. With cottonwood whispering through the air, temperatures nearing the eighties, and unending green foothills rising up on all sides of my town, it’s easy to forget about the creeping fog that falls over the Pacific Northwest in the winter. It’s easy to forget that the days end at 4:30pm, and that the radiators groan like deep-sea creatures.
Welcome to Issue 0 of Emerald City Ghosts, a proof-of-concept issue of our upcoming paranormal fiction magazine. In putting this issue together, we knew we wanted to give you something unexpected, and since our serialized ghost story takes place during Christmas, we decided to run with a winter theme!
So as you curl up with your air conditioner and cold chocolate, let your mind wander back to memories of fires in the hearth, pine in the air, and peppermint in absolutely everything.
We hope you enjoy!
Lo Corliss
Emerald City Ghosts
Table of Contents
Frosted Windowpanes - Short Fiction
Charlie - Poem
The Winter People - Book Review
The Haunting of Swinomish Channel - Episode One: The Bridge
Frosted Windowpanes
Part One
Everly returns to her family’s winter cabin to confront the ugly truth about her sister’s death.
In the high hills of Eastern Washington, the ponderosa pines fight for ground and nutrients. The old ones grow stronger, and the smaller trees wither and die, crushed by the insatiable need of their elders.
Everly had been coming to the lodge for as long as she could remember. For her, the place was a mosaic of memories, good and bad, full and fragmented. This year, though, as she unlocked the door and stepped into the kitchen, one memory overshadowed the rest.
Her sister died here.
The story goes that Allison got swept away by the river. Even after a year, Everly didn’t believe it. There were too many inconsistencies. Tonight she was going to find the truth. Tonight she was going to put the questions to rest. Tonight she was going to the glade.
Her family had stories about that place. Tucked away at the end of the trail, it was filled with childhood memories, magic, and rituals. She had almost forgotten about it, but slowly, since Allison’s death, it had begun to infiltrate her dreams again.
Everly reached into her pocket and found the three bottles of cinnamon whiskey she’d stolen from Dad’s stash. She would need them.
Toby, Everly’s little brother, pushed past her and raced into the kitchen. Dad came next. He let the food crate clatter down on the kitchen island. “I don’t know about you kids, but I’m gonna get to work on the world’s best candied yams.” He seemed almost too cheerful, and Everly wondered if he was trying to distract himself.
She went to the sink and started running water. The lines coughed and spluttered, but at least they hadn’t frozen over. As she waited for the musty smell to clear, she looked out the window above the sink.
Allison’s boyfriend, Trent, was still hanging back by the car. He popped the trunk, pulled out his warm wool coat, and tugged it on. Then he closed the trunk and stopped to stare into the distance. It was like he was shy and trying to give the family space. She didn’t understand. He belonged here. He seemed to know that when he begged his parents to let him go.
Everly turned off the water and glanced at the others. She didn’t think they would notice if she disappeared for a while, so she slipped out of the kitchen and ventured deeper into the lodge. The halls vibrated with an iridescent cold, like sparkling cranberry and the scent of juniper in someone’s drink. She loved how the air felt when they first arrived. It felt like they were still outdoors.
She passed the bedrooms and the bathroom before reaching the great room at the end of the hall. The walls rose fifteen or twenty feet to a peaked roof, and two iron chandeliers hung from a beam. They would need to lower them to light the candles. Everly paused to plug in a strand of twinkle lights draped over the window. They cast stars on the walls but did little to light the murky room.
She turned toward the East wall. That wall was different from the log walls that made up the rest of the lodge. It was made entirely of stone with an arched doorway that led to the library. Everly had always wondered about that strange little room. Maybe the builders added it later. Maybe the stone room had always been here and they built the lodge around it.
Light filled the windows, and Everly looked out in time to see headlights cut through the mist. Uncle Arlo’s truck pulled into the driveway. Dad’s brother loved these trips. He wasn’t married and he didn’t seem to have any friends, so he hovered instead. It was comforting that some things hadn’t changed.
Everly turned back toward the arched doorway. The library was little more than a dank, stone hallway with shelves of books pressing in on either side. At the far end of the corridor stood a floor-to-ceiling window carved out of the rock. Icicles hung from the eaves. Most of them were normal—maybe a foot in length. Near the corner, though, where the gutter creased and extra water gathered, the icicles were much larger. She counted five long ones, easily twice her height. Toby would like that there was one for each of them—Dad, Toby, Trent, Arlo, and Everly.
She looked beyond the icicles and down toward the river. They swore that Allison died there. After all, they found Allison’s jacket hanging on the dock, and her shoes on a rock by the river. The going story—the best they could come up with—was that she waded into the glacial water and it swept her away, but that didn’t make sense, because they didn’t find Allison’s phone. If Allison had gone into the river on purpose, she wouldn’t have taken her phone. They should have found it somewhere. They never did.
Hopefully, the glade would shed some light on what actually happened.
She unbolted the door and stepped out onto the porch. Waterlogged wood creaked underfoot, and in the distance, the river rushed high. Steeling herself, she drained one of the shots of cinnamon whiskey from her pocket, and then she started toward the trailhead. She knew the path well. It dipped down at the edge of the forest and twisted sharply a few times. At the end, in the glade, the trees bent low as if to worship a particular spot of dirt. Dead blackberries and thick holly vines twisted together and knotted up inside themselves. The snow fell and the wind cried, but they never reached the heart of that place.
***
The first time Everly went to the glade was on her eighth birthday. Mom must have been tipsy, because she cut two slices from Everly’s birthday cake and ran giggling down the path. Everly wished for a pet, and Mom lit the candles on the cake and smashed it onto the ground. When they got back to the lodge, there was a black rabbit with white paws and a pink bow. For a long time, Everly thought the glade was like Santa, and her mom had secretly bought the rabbit to build up the magical lie of the forest. Then, on her twelfth birthday, Everly decided to go back with Allison. It was dark, and they ran along the path, shining their flashlights into the woods and gasping as the nocturnals rustled in the trees. When they reached the glade, someone was already there. Slowly, they pulled back the vines that hung across the entrance. It was Mom. She stood in the center of the clearing with a cup of wine in her hands.
Her eyes darted to the girls.
“What are you doing, Mom?” Everly asked. It was her first hint that the glade might be real.
Mom didn’t answer. Instead, she turned to Allison. “I told you never to come here without me.”
***
Halfway to the trail, Everly heard footsteps crunching behind her.
“There you are,” Trent half-shuffled and half-slid down the snowy path beside her. “Where are you going?”
She thought about lying, but decided against it “I’m going to the glade. I’m going to ask what happened to Allison.”
“Everly.”
She stopped him before he could say it. “I have to try.”
He put his hand on her arm, and she felt a rush of warmth, even out there and even under the circumstances. “It was an accident. I know that doesn’t feel like closure, but we have to be okay with it. We have to move on. We’ve seen what happens when we can’t.”
He was talking about Mom. Everly could still picture her mother, dressed in sweats, red-eyed, caught in the doorway with her suitcase in hand. She had apologized endlessly, nearly collapsing on the couch, but the next morning, she was gone. Allison’s death had broken her.
“I have to, Trent.”
He sighed. “Fine. I’m coming with you.”
“I should do it alone,” she said. “It might be dangerous.”
“All the more reason for me to come.”
His protective streak drove Allison crazy toward the end. She used to complain about how she felt stifled—she couldn’t do anything without Trent hovering. Maybe it would get old in time, but for now, Everly was grateful.
The sparse trees diffused some of the wind, and as they walked, the atmosphere thickened. The bare arms of the alder trees hugged the furry evergreens, and the air took on a humid weight. Everly kept desperately close to Trent.
At the glade, Everly slowed. In a moment she would call out to the keeper of the woods. Her voice would ring out clear and bright. But for now, she held onto the silence as tightly as she could. They pushed back the vines and stepped into the cavern. Darkness covered everything, and Everly wished she had a light. She reached into her pocket and took out the whiskey. Her hand found Trent’s, and she passed a bottle to him. The air smelled like smoke from a bad tree, and she felt dizzy. A wet breath of wind crept through the vines.
If she was going to do this, the time had come.
Everly tipped her bottle toward the ground. Ice crackled as the liquid made contact, and Everly stepped back as it hissed. She swallowed hard and then said, “Please show me what happened to Allison. Please.”
***
When Everly and Trent reached the lodge, Trent paused at the sight of Arlo’s truck. “When did he get here?”
“Right before we left.”
He nodded slowly. Trent and Arlo had never gotten along. Trent thought Arlo was odd, and Arlo thought Trent invited himself on too many family outings.
In the kitchen, Toby, Arlo, and Dad were sorting through the food and searching for the right pots and pans. Something was already steaming on the stove. It felt too early to be cooking, but Everly wasn’t going to criticize.
Trent made a break for the great room before Arlo noticed him.
“Where’d you go?” Toby asked. “Did you get holly?”
“No.”
“We need holly. Mom always does holly.”
“Maybe we should do things differently this year,” She ruffled his hair.
He scowled.
“Everly,” Arlo looked up from the stove. “Your gravy is good.”
“It needs more salt,” Toby muttered.
Everly looked at the pot on the stove. It steamed heartily. “I didn’t make it.”
Arlo shrugged.
“I’m going to light a fire,” She said, though in reality she just wanted to catch up with Trent.
When Everly reached the great room, she was surprised to find that the fire had already been lit, and so had the candles in the chandeliers. The chandeliers still swayed after being lowered and raised by their great iron chains, but it couldn’t have been Trent—he had only left the kitchen a moment ago. All the fine points of dazzling light from the fire and the candles and the strung white lights made it hard to see anything in the shadows. Something caught her eye, though. There was movement in the library doorway.
As Everly stared, something materialized in the archway. A shadow, darker than the darkness around it, hung down from the ceiling. Startled, Everly took a jagged step back. The thing disappeared, disintegrating like it was never there at all. Everly’s hands shook. There were other stories about this place; whispers about things that roamed the forest. Maybe that was the reason Mom was afraid of the glade.
Everly tried to convince herself it was nothing. She had already had a couple of drinks, and even in her childhood, the lodge had played tricks on her mind. But something else occurred to her. A thought sidled up to her like a cat easing onto her lap. What if the woods were answering her? What if that shadow had come for a reason? Everly took a step closer. After all, if she was too afraid to confront the answer, then she never should have asked the counsel of the woods.
“Trent?” she whispered.
Everly entered the library and found Trent standing at the far end of the corridor, looking out the window. His back was to Everly, and he was wearing that coat again—the wool coat with the high collar. That made sense. The library was literally freezing. Frost crept up the inside of the window, and Everly could see her breath. Trent stared out the window. A clinking sound came from his hand. He was holding a goblet filled with black liquid. He swirled it, and ice clattered against the walls.
“Six,” he muttered.
What did that mean? He just kept staring at the window, and so she turned to follow his gaze. It took a moment, but she finally saw it. Six icicles hung from the eaves. Six, when there were only four half an hour ago. Icicles like that took days to form.
Everly stepped closer to Trent. The moonlight hit his goblet, and she saw that the liquid wasn’t black at all. It was blood-red wine, coating ice cubes like syrup, ending bitter notes up into the air.
“Where did you get that?” she asked, dreading the answer.
“It was here,” he said. His voice sounded too distant as if it was being carried over a great divide and artificially magnified at the last second. He glanced at her and his eyes were wrong. The shadows fell in such a way that they looked dark all the way through. He looked away before she could look closer.
“It was here,” he said. His voice sounded too distant as if it was being carried over a great divide and artificially magnified at the last second. He glanced at her and his eyes were wrong. The shadows fell in such a way that they looked dark all the way through. He looked away before she could look closer.
“I have to tell you something,” Trent said.
“What?”
“I have to tell you something.” He repeated, staring at the window.
“Trent—what do you have to tell me?”
Everly turned, too. She could see something in the reflection of the icicles. Something swayed slightly even though she and Trent remained perfectly still. The room felt heavy with a presence that didn’t belong to either of them. There was something in the library. Something told her that the shadow from the ceiling had returned, though she didn’t dare look. She had to get Trent out. He wanted to protect her, but this was her fight, not his. She was the one who insisted on calling out to the woods.
“Trent,” she whispered, dread creeping deeper, “Can you get me a drink, too?” She pointed to the wine.
He looked at his cup, and then he turned, stumbling a little, looking lost. He left the library, and Everly couldn’t help but think it was lucky that he was used to her requests for alcohol. His response was automatic at this point.
Everly turned back toward the window.
In the corner, deep in the shadows, something shifted.
Charlie
A poem from Ghosts of Seattle Future, a collection about what it will be like when the ghosts of today are still haunting Seattle one hundred years from now.
He’s at the edge of the water looking down at his own reflection wishing that it was anybody else looking back up. He would scrub his own identity if it meant scrubbing every memory and he would do it with a twisted smile. He started the morning at the cafe a block or two up —let his duffle bag slouch on the polished concrete floor while he ordered a maple leaf latte and a lox bagel, and it was a weird flavor combination and he made pleasant conversation, and no one thought twice about him, because his surfer hair and sailor’s eyes —the eyes of their brothers, the eyes of their sons— looked just like every other guy wandering the coast. But they had lifted their eyes they would have seen him walk the distance to Gas Works, finish his bagel and pour his coffee into the lake like a peace offering. Now he drops his bag and sinks off the concrete blocking, into the winter lake warmed only by the occasional shot of espresso.
The Winter People
A Book Review
In Jennifer McMahon’s mythical world, the winter people aren’t just ghosts and monsters lingering at the edges of a bleak landscape—they're manifestations of grief, rage, panic, and guilt that follow us like long January shadows.
The Winter People unfolds across two timelines. In the early 1900s, Sara loses her daughter, Gertie, and sets out on a dark path, desperate to see her child one more time. In the present, nineteen-year-old Ruthie wakes to find her mother missing, leaving her solely responsible for her six-year-old sister. As past and present intertwine, McMahon delivers a delightfully atmospheric yet surprisingly fast-paced ghost story rooted in the complex relationships between mothers and daughters. Though fathers and sons make brief appearances, even those mentions serve to illuminate the relationships between women that form the book’s heart.
As Sara struggles with the loss of her daughter, love turns to grief, and grief becomes obsession. We want to scream at her: turn back, let go, stay out of the caves, the closets and the forests. But even if she could hear us, we know she wouldn’t listen—grief doesn’t work that way. It grabs us by the throat and turns us into something unrecognizable. It dares us to act. Sometimes that defiance leads to healing. Sometimes, it unleashes terrible consequences for us and for the people we love the most.
As the novel comes to a close, we’re left with a subtle and quiet horror. Though many of the parents in McMahon’s novel suffer terrible fates, the true horror lies in seeing their children—their firstborn girls specifically—bound to a life that they never asked for because of the sins of their parents.
The Haunting of Swinomish Channel
Episode One: The Bridge
Everything is too loud, too much, and too cluttered, but for some reason I can’t figure out how to stop adding to the noise.
The TV in the corner of the room plays an episode of Gilmore Girls on mute, but the indie Christmas music on my record player and the movie podcast playing on my phone more than make up for the TV’s silence.
The Christmas tree lights blink in what looks like a truly randomized pattern, and a gust of wind shakes needles free from the evergreen boughs hanging on the wall above my head. Needles rain down and lodge in my keyboard like tiny daggers, and I pull my laptop away to avoid further damage.
There’s a mug of eggnog and coffee with the brisk astringency of rum steaming up from it. Next to the mug sits a leftover plate of crab Rangoons that smell like cold, sad oil. I can feel the seam of my sock pressing up against the inside of my slipper.
It’s too much.
My mom always says that I’m making up for my life being too quiet, but I know the truth. I’m trying to drown out all the noise in my head. I’m trying to distract myself from all the thoughts that won’t shut up.
My laptop stares back at me, a crisp white document splayed open on the screen. The document isn’t totally blank—I’m not that much of a cliche—but it might as well be. I’ve been working on this script for three years, and I don’t feel any closer to finishing it.
The problem is that I don’t want to work on my script, but there are promises that chain me to it—promises to my fans and my family and my agent. I wish I could work on my side project instead. I want to take pictures in cemeteries and post them on social media. I want to write the histories of the forgotten places. I still want to tell ghost stories, but I want to tell them in bite-sized bits and pieces—in photos and video clips that don’t feel like a commitment. I want to be unchained from the creative project that I should have left behind in high school.
I decide I’ve had enough for one night. I slam my laptop lid shut. I reach for my phone and turn off the podcast, and then I get up and turn off the TV and the record player, stepping out of my slippers and pulling off my socks as I go. I swipe the Rangoons into my trash can—dinner is going to be here soon anyway. I put the trash can off to the side, and I drink down the rest of my coffee in a single swig. It burns at the end.
I kill and I consume until the room is peaceful and empty again.
Finally I turn off all the lights, force open the window, and let the cold winter air wash over me. From my apartment I have a great view of the courtyard with the frozen fountain and the tops of the dogwoods and the snow drifts. It’s been an unusually cold winter in Seattle, and the air feels alive and sparkling—nearly carbonated.
A soft snow falls passed the window, and I look up at the apartment building across the courtyard. Half of the balconies are decked out in lights or evergreen boughs, and I can see half a dozen Christmas trees through half a dozen windows. I glance at my tree in the corner. It’s there, but something about it feels wrong and impersonal and ice-cold. Nobody helped me with it this year. I drug it up here myself and decorated it myself, string of lights in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.
Something taps in the hallway. I frown. It doesn’t quite sound like a knock. In fact, I’m not even sure why I notice it. The pipes and radiators and vents all clank and tap and click constantly. I’m used to random noises in crumbling apartments.
So what stood out about this one?
I suppose it could be my food delivery, but it seems too soon for that. I only ordered fifteen minutes ago.
My apartment is barely the length of a car, but it still takes an eternity for me to pad across the carpet and reach the door. I lean in, pressing my palm against the hollow metal, peering through the hole. I don’t see anyone out there, and so I lean closer, trying to see around the edges of the fish-eye view.
A feathery shadow floats across my vision.
It reminds me of the shadow of a ceiling fan as the blades swirl, but I know that there aren’t any ceiling fans in my hallway. It’s so faint that I wonder if it might just be a trick of the light. Maybe there’s something smeared across my peephole, and maybe I’m swaying a little, and maybe that combination is creating strange shadows.
As I lean even closer, though, something deep down tells me that there’s more to it than illusions.
Lights flicker in the hallway. The shadows materialize, crystallize, congeal, heavy against the walls. I watch as the darkness snakes up the corner between my neighbor’s door and the wall. It stretches, long and slinky, up and over the door frame. For a second I can feel the darkness pounding in my chest, as if it’s taken up a life there. For a second, I struggle to breathe. For a second, I feel like a rabbit with only a bundle of grass between me and a predator.
What am I seeing? Is there actually something out there? I fight the urge to turn around, go back to my couch and hide in hopes that whatever is going on stops. Instead, I place my hand against the door jamb, turn the deadbolt with a tiny click that feels much too loud, and pull the door open, letting it strain against the chain.
There are no shadows. No feathery lights. There is only a young woman, holding my takeout bag, looking just as startled as I feel. Wide brown eyes stare back at me. She takes a step away like I’m the monster, and I do the same. How did she get there so quickly? She must have been the shadow creeping down the hall.
“Sorry, you scared me,” I say, letting out all of my breath in a whoosh.
“Same,” she replies with a nervous laugh.
I close the door, unhook the chain, and open it again.
“Thank you,” I say. I reach out and take the bag. When I look back up at the girl, she looks like she’s sizing me up. I think there’s something that she wants to say, but she looks too shy to say it. Her wide eyes seem to know something about me.
After a moment she says, “I was wondering if it was you. I took your order because I recognized your name.”
Cold dread washes over me. There’s only one reason that she would know me, and that reason isn’t something I want to talk about. She knows me from the movie. She knows me from the film I made in high school—the festival winner—the one that got optioned by a studio. The one I’ve simultaneously tried to hide from and tried to revive for the last three years.
“I loved The Channel Woman. I’m still waiting for the remake.”
The Channel Woman—the great love of my high school years and the bane of my college existence—the legend so prevalent in my Italian-American upbringing, brought to full bloom in the imagination of a high school senior desperate for a capstone project. Now I can see that I never should have gone anywhere near the Channel Woman. She’s brought me nothing but bad luck.
I want to shrink back. I want to tell this girl that she has the wrong name and the wrong face and the wrong persona, and that the version of Mercury Gray she’s talking about doesn’t exist anymore. That version is an old operating system—a cassette tape in a world of streaming.
Instead I just say, “Tell your friends to petition the studio, kid, because I have a feeling you’re going to be waiting a long time.” It’s a little harsh, but it’s true.
Her face falls, and I immediately feel bad—so bad that when she asks for an autograph, I rummage around the entry table and end up signing a takeout menu almost as an apology. She takes a look at my name scrawled above the butter chicken entree and smiles.
“Don’t give up,” she says with an authority clearly beyond her years. “People are going to remember you.”
That’s a strange way to put it, but I chalk it up to the idealism of a young fan.
I think—maybe I even know—she’s wrong. Still, as I watch the tiny redhead retreat down the hall, walls rising up to swallow her, I can’t help but think that it’s nice to be appreciated even if the circumstances are less than ideal.
I take my foam container of cannelloni and red sauce back to my living room, and suddenly the pile of clutter is reborn. I swipe the extra napkins and plastic bag into the trash, but somehow everything still looks messy.
I’m about to dig in to my dinner when my phone vibrates on the desk. I look down at the screen and see that it’s my cousin Carolyn calling. I don’t want to talk to her. She’s going to try to convince me to come home for Christmas, and I don’t have the bandwidth to have that conversation for the third time. I let it go to voicemail.
To my surprise and frustration, she actually leaves one. What self-respecting Gen Z kid leaves a voicemail? To make matters worse, she follows the voicemail immediately with a text. CALL ME.
She may be annoying, but she isn’t usually that insistent. I hesitate as I reach for the phone, suddenly worried that something is wrong. I don’t check the voicemail. Instead I call her back immediately.
The phone crackles and Carolyn’s voice echoes through the line. I can tell she’s outside, standing in the wind. “Murr, it’s me.”
“I know. I called you. What’s going on?” I poke the edge of my cannelloni with a fork, praying this is just about Christmas.
“Something happened.”
My heart sinks.
“I figured,” I say, but the sarcasm is undercut by the way my voice cracks. My first thought is that it’s our grandfather. He’s 86 and lives a few blocks away from Carolyn in assisted living. He’s always been healthy, but my family isn’t known for extreme longevity. Average lifespans have always been our lot, and Grandpa is already beyond average.
Silence hangs between us for a second, and then her voice falls, ragged and wind-blown. “It’s Ben.”
Everything stops.
It can’t be Ben.
There can’t be something wrong with Ben. Nothing is every wrong with Ben. He’s always fine, always amicable, always content just to be alive. My high school best friend, stuck in his hometown, forever apathetic, has always been fine.
“What’s wrong? What happened?”
For a moment, the staticky wind on the other side of the phone dies down, and I’m left with my cousin’s voice, clear and shaking. “Ben went hiking three days ago. He was supposed to be back this morning, and he wasn’t.”
July News
Submissions for our August Issue (Theme: Seattle) will be open until August 1, 2025! Submissions for our September Issue are open from now until August 15, and we’re looking for stories, poems, and reviews centered on Graveyards and Funerals. As always, we will accept general submissions as long as we can keep up, so don’t limit yourselves to the current themes!
We will be hosting a virtual launch party for the magazine in early August, complete with spooky playlists, exclusive fiction, and a giveaway! Mark your calendars for 9-10pm on August 6!
Thank you for reading! As always, you can support us by submitting your work to our magazine, sharing our content, or subscribing to the magazine!
Download and Read Emerald City Ghosts Issue 0 as a PDF:
Running a bit behind, but I wanted to drop in and say great job on this p-o-c issue! The stories and poetry were amazing, and I'm eager to read more! I have added The Winter People to my TBR list. And yes, thanks for helping us beat this summer heat!
Looking forward to Issue 1!
lovely to read about winter when it’s so hot out!