1. Video Killed the Radio Star
one
Video Killed the Radio Star
Present Day
I woke up dead.
Okay, I know that’s impossible. A person can’t wake up when they’re dead.
Corpses are corpses. They can’t do anything other than simply lie there. Sometimes hang, but we won’t get into that at the moment. It’s generally agreed upon that once dead, unequivocally no waking up should be occurring. Like at all.
And yet, here I am.
Dead, dead, dead, dead. So very fucking deceased.
Annnnnd awake. Ta-da!
Lots of impossible things are happening right now. But since I no longer possess a pulse, and at this very moment have nowhere else to go, I’m gonna roll with it.
I’m—well, the cadaver version of me—is lying spreadeagled on the fancy-pants hotel bed, and for want of a better word, bug-squished into the springs by an oversized antique bronze chandelier.
The four-poster bed, also most likely antique, has been reduced to luxury kindling, and there’s a fuck-off chandelier spike driving straight through my neck into the feather pillow below me.
Not quite what I had in mind when I said I wanted to be nailed to the mattress.
There’s blood everywhere. Literally everywhere.
Congealing on the bedspread, pooled on the rug, drip drip dripping from my blue-grey fingertips into viscous black puddles below me, and in horror movie slashes across the ceiling and walls, after no doubt my carotid artery had been torn a new one.
There are even spatters on the TV, the windows, and the desk, including over some of my studio kit.
Mum’d always said I’d die from a heart attack.
“Gary, do yourself a favour and go for a run now and then.”
“Those biscuits will be the death of you.”
“A lardy lad like you will wind up dead on the toilet. Look what happened to Elvis.”
Wrong.
Actually, my lardy little heart put up quite the valiant fight. I feel a flush of pride. The power in that aortic pump was enough to reach the ceiling.
It’s going to take forensic officers hours to clean this up.
Hopefully I’ll be able to stick around and watch it, and I won’t be whisked off to some other dimension or afterlife.
I’ve got no idea what happens when a person dies, but since I’m lying right there, dead as dead can be, and I’m also standing here beside the bed feeling not quite so dead, does that make me . . . undead? Unalive? Who knows?
Here’s what I’ve learned in my approximately twenty minutes of being a . . . spectre of some sort.
I can move about and sweep parts of my body through solid objects. The TV, the smashed?up bed frame, the murder chandelier, even my corpse. I haven’t gone all the way through the door or walls yet, mostly because I have this unquashable fear that I’ll “pass on” and never return if I do.
Walking seems relatively easy, but if I let my mind drift for too long, my feet begin sinking through the floor.
I glance down and realise it’s happening again, so I pull them out and plant them back onto the carpet.
They don’t disturb the rapidly curdling river of blood below me.
They just sort of rest on top of it all.
I touch my ghost neck. It’s solid. There’s no gaping hole, no bones protruding, no arteries flapping out like tampon strings. No gore.
I feel no pain, no discomfort, no hunger.
All the aches and cricks I had when I was alive have dissipated, vanished, gone.
And being nearly forty with a penchant for pork scratchings and an abject aversion to all forms of exercise, let me tell you, I’ve had my fair share of unidentified nagging pains.
Even my bladder is comfortably empty, and my gut .
. . well, it’s as though I’ve just taken the world’s largest, most satisfying dump.
But the scar on the back of my hand from Grandma’s feral cat, Tuppence, is still there, and so is the small nick above my lip that crookedly parts my moustache.
I’m wearing a ghostlike and unbloodied version of what I died in. A white vest, black ExorSquad coveralls unzipped to my waist, thick grey socks, and my spectacles. I remove my glasses from my face, and disappointingly, even in the afterlife, I have shitty eyesight.
Still short, still chubby, still blind, still in desperate need of a haircut and a shave. I thought dying was supposed to free you from these mortal trivialities.
If this is Death’s idea of fun, it has a shit sense of humour. I just fucking know it’s British.
I’m not sure what to do now other than stare at my pathetic dead self and wonder why I didn’t at least comb my hair or trim my moustache after my last recording aired.
Do I simply wait for something to happen? For someone to come and meet me? The Grim Reaper? My guardian angel? Lucifer? Or perhaps a tunnel will appear with a light at the end.
Wait, is this purgatory?
Of course it’s bloody purgatory. Being imprisoned between a mortal and immortal existence for an indefinable amount of time in a place with five?star facilities but no physical ability to make use of them seems exactly like something British Death would make me do.
In the increasing likelihood that I’m trapped in this mid-realm for a while longer, I decide it might be worth learning how to interact with my surrounds. Or if I can.
First obstacle: sitting in a chair. Turns out that being corporeal plays a big role in the outcome of said activity.
After several unsuccessful attempts to place my bottom on the blood?smeared desk chair and falling straight through, I give up.
Because if at first you don’t succeed, try again, but like only once or twice more.
Don’t piss away your precious time when you’re terrible at something.
Good advice for life. Good advice for death.
Though, come to think of it, is my time really that precious any more? Perhaps I have endless hours now. Perhaps hell is actually an eternity of learning how to sit in a goddamn chair.
The clock on the wall tells me it’s nearly midday, and the dried blood on my slack face and the livor mortis below my shoulders suggests my TOD may have been a good six to eight hours ago. Right after my radio show aired.
Is it weird that no one’s found me yet? Didn’t anybody hear the inevitably cacophonous implosion when the solid metal eighteenth?century light fixture annihilated the probably even older hand-carved mahogany bed? And doesn’t anyone care?
“Uh, hello?!” I yell, figuring out for the first time since dying that I can still speak, despite the fact that other me is missing his larynx.
Nobody answers, but I never expected them to. Never expected to wake up dead either. Maybe I should start expecting more unexpected things.
Other shit I’m discovering about my new questionable mortality status include the ability to touch myself as though I’m a whole solid person.
I pat my face, head, and body down. Everything seems to be where it belongs, including my junk.
I plunge my hand into my overalls and cop a decent feel.
Dick and balls exactly as they were. Same size, same squish, same amount of hair.
I’m not sure if those are all good things or not.
“Do you still get hard?” I whisper into the valley of fabric.
I glance around the room. I’m alone except for dead me, so I could just . . . give it a quick bash about. Though, I don’t want Azrael to reap me mid-wank, so I pull my hand out again.
My reflection is absent from the mirror, and when I stand beside the window, I have no shadow. So, I’m vampire Peter Pan, then.
My passion is puzzles, riddles, solving the unsolvable, but sometimes the correct answer is the one right in front of your face, no matter how ridiculous it seems.
I’m a ghost.
Twenty-four hours ago, I was on a train to Cornwall’s most haunted hotel.
Forty-eight hours ago, I was being recruited into a semi-professional ghost extraction organisation.
Seventy-two hours ago, I would have laughed in the face of anyone who tried to tell me ghosts were real.
It’s been . . . a journey.
At some point, who really knows when, my soul might get carted off to another realm.
My final destination. But from what Gerald Pickett CEO extraordinaire of ExorSquad explained about ghosts, they tend to be stubborn bastards confined to a single location for a looooooong time.
If an exorcism won’t remove them, or this godforsaken PolterPulse gun that the crazy old git gave me to pew pew them with doesn’t, I highly doubt walking through walls would do it for me.
Even still, I’m . . . too frightened to leave.
What if I can’t come back?
I could probably handle not seeing my bloated, smashed-in, blue-tinged corpse again, but what if I never get to solve another murder mystery? What if I’ve already solved my last mystery, and I didn’t realise it at the time?
Come to think of it, antique chandeliers don’t just drop from the sky without so much as scratching the elaborate plaster ceiling rose. The moulding’s still perfectly intact. Not even a whisper of a crack.
Odd.
There are no broken chain links, no splintered metal, and no pulled electrical wires. In fact, on closer inspection, it looks as though the cable’s been cut clean through.
Very odd.
This could suggest deliberate action.
Ooooh, was I murdered? Death has suddenly become a lot more exciting.
But what if I depart this realm before figuring out what actually happened to me?
I couldn’t live . . . unlive with that notion. Instead, I stay put and practice sitting again.
Damn, it might be the most difficult thing I’ve ever tried.
It’s twelve thirty before someone knocks on the hotel room door. I still haven’t figured out how to not fall through the seat of the chair.
“Housekeeping?” says a youthful, masculine voice from the other side.
There’s no DO NOT DISTURB sign on the handle. All goes quiet, and a moment later the lock clunks within its chamber.
Do I hide? Or stay out in the open? Does it matter?
I don’t get time to decide before the door swings wide.
The room attendant is in his early twenties or late teens.
Dark skin and hair. He’s tall and willowy thin, and he crinkles his nose upon entering.
There is a distinct smell in the air. Not the stench of death, because it’s too soon for that, but it’s an ironlike, metallic scent, no doubt from the copious amounts of blood covering nearly every surface.
After a few moments of surveying the wider damage to the suite—he apparently cannot see ghost me or is pretending that I’m invisible—his eyes fall upon my sad little corpse.
He vomits.
Rude.
“Hello? Alright, mate?” I wave my hands like an air traffic controller, but he’s running from the room.
Approximately six minutes later, Helga, the general manager I met yesterday, runs in through the still open door.
“Helga, hey?” I say, but there’s no response. She can’t see me either.
She’s already reaching for the little black device on her belt, and she hasn’t even looked at dead me yet. Her eyes roam over the congealed blood, and she groans.
“Franny?” she says into her radio. “Call the police, would ya?”
The radio buzzes. “What did you find?” says the feminine voice on the other end.
Helga heaves the world’s weightiest sigh and runs her fingers through her cropped, shaggy blonde hair. She finally allows herself to look at my corpse and screws up her face. “It’s happened again.”