Romelia walked into the Lord’s chambers carrying a tray with tea and nice, crispy mice. The ghost of Lord Honeymint floated by the fireplace, looking even more miserable than usual.

‘No one fears me anymore,’ he wailed, ‘If I weren’t already dead, I’d have said I lost my purpose in life.’
‘There, there,’ Romelia said on autopilot. She’d heard the same complaint more and more often recently. As she nibbled on the fried mouse, she patted Honeymint on the hand – in so far as that’s possible with ghosts.

‘Look on the bright side, Milord. You have many friends who love you and even more colleagues who respect you.’
‘Colleagues?’ It was almost a sneer. ‘Are they still called colleagues when they’re no longer working? Especially when you’re no longer working yourself either.’
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ said the witch, staring into the flames, ‘I’m pretty sure I scared a few people down the pub the other night.’
‘Well, you would. It’s easy for you, isn’t it? You magically make yourself look like you’re 20, you chat up some unsuspecting youngster and just as he takes you home, you show him how you really look at 163. And even then, they still like you because they think magic is cool.’

Romelia chuckled. Absent-mindedly, she offered Honeymint a fried mouse.
‘A midnight snack, how lovely. I should enjoy it very much. Shall I start by biting off the tail or the head? Oh! But what’s this? I seem to be utterly unable to even hold the mouse in my hand. Ah, that’s right. Completely forgot. I’m a ghost! I can’t eat! I can’t go with the times! The last play I saw was Macbeth.’
‘That’s not saying a lot. It’s being performed at the Gielgud as we speak.’
‘Yes, but not by the original cast!’
Romelia shrugged. ‘Over time, the same roles will be played by different people. It’s like that on stage and it’s like that in life. Or, afterlife.’

The ghost of Lord Honeymint shot up towards the ceiling and expanded to twice his normal size. ‘Well, I’m taking back my role! Time for a revival. A last hurrah for the original cast, so to speak.’
The seemingly young witch shot him a confused look. ‘You want to have another go at acting?’
Honeymint raised an eyebrow and crossed his semi-transparent arms. ‘Not what I meant, no. Like you said, it’s the same on stage, in life and afterlife. My role in afterlife is to scare. But I find some witless understudy is filling in for me. Thieves, terrorists, tax collectors… They scare, but they don’t thrill. It’s about time we nudged these usurpers off the stage and offer the living some proper, old-fashioned scares. We’ll round up the old gang and show those nasty fearmongers how the classic monsters practice their craft.’