7. Death Is but the Next Great Adventure
seven
Death Is but the Next Great Adventure
Present Day Again (Approximately Nine Hours After I Died)
“Yeeeww! They got you too!” a blonde head says.
Just a blonde head. Poking through the wall like . . . like a fucking apparition.
Which, I guess isn’t inconceivable now, given I’ve already established that I’m dead yet undead. Can’t be the only one, I suppose.
Shortly after the blonde head appears, a torso follows, covered in a black T-shirt or vest and a red Hawaiian shirt with pink and white flowers. Then legs appear. Long, tanned legs wearing board shorts and flip-flops.
Trystan Retallack is in my suite. The local Cornish legend who featured on the cover of the trophy room magazine.
The smiling, carefree, ‘would have been five?time surf champion had he not inexplicably drowned in 1998’ bronzed Adonis is standing in my hotel suite.
A dead man.
A ghost.
Don’t get me wrong, a very handsome ghost, but a ghost nonetheless.
Am I a believer yet?
I wonder if I can touch him. If I poked him with my finger, would it pass right through his body, or would we make contact? Would he feel human? Or . . .
Gary Runcorn! Get that thought out of your head immediately.
“Gutted you’re dead,” Trystan Retallack says. A dead man says that to me.
His accent is an intriguing blend of dialects. Americanised Cornish. A local lad who’s either watched too many episodes of Saved by the Bell or spent a great deal of time hanging out on the Pacific coast of California. Going by the golden?brown hues of his skin, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.
“Gutted, but like, also super stoked. I mean . . . I didn’t actually mean to say that. Uh . . .”
“Trystan, yeah?” I say. There’s a strange mix of emotions swirling around inside me. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that somebody can finally see me and talk to me and I’m not alone in this blood-soaked mess.
On the other, it confirms that I am definitely dead, and not in some kind of fever?induced nightmare.
I mean, I still could be. Trystan may, in fact, be a hallucination.
I decide that either way, I don’t care. My subconscious brain clearly knows what it wants.
“Yew! You actually know me?” he says.
“Your picture’s downstairs in the trophy room,” I reply, but Trystan doesn’t acknowledge my response. He’s too busy looking at my gory corpse, and then the spattered ceiling, and back at my corpse. “What’s going on?”
Trystan cocks his head to the side like a spaniel. He literally looks like a puppy, confused by my question. Or maybe it’s that the answer is so obvious he’s wondering why I asked it. “You’re Gary Runcorn,” he says instead.
I’m robbed of speech. How does he know little old me?
“We’re your biggest fans.”
“We?” I ask.
“The Youngscares.”
“Oh,” I reply. “Ohhh.” I feel like I need to sit down, but I still haven’t mastered that yet.
“We hoped it wouldn’t get you too, but the fuzz are here, so we knew it struck someone.” Trystan walks over to my grey, lifeless body and presses a finger to my flesh. “That’s fucking gnarly, my dude.”
I’m balancing over the dressing table chair. “Sorry, but what do you mean by ‘it?’”
“The Paragon Phantom,” he answers, now poking through my neck wound as though I’m a dead badger he’s found beside the riverbank.
“Do you mind?” It’s not as though I can feel him prodding me, but it sorta feels like I should give consent for this.
“Sorry.” He straightens up. “Um, is it okay if the rest of the guys come in here before Sergeant Davies arrives?”
“You mean The Youngscares?”
“Yeah. We’re all, like, your biggest fans.”
I swallow down the weird sensation rising in my gullet.
“Um, well . . . I suppose.” I think I already know who the other Youngscares are.
That I have a list in the right?side butt pocket of my ExorSquad overalls with their names on, or at least my corpse does, but I still can’t pinpoint this unusual feeling.
“Guys!” Trystan yells, and my suspicions are immediately confirmed as in walk—through the wall—no fewer than five other ghosts.
A forty-something white guy wearing a metallic orange waistcoat, an orange dickie bow, shiny white gloves, a crushed velvet top hat, and a cape lined with garish orange sequins waves at me.
“That’s Peter,” Trystan says. “Oh, wait, do you already know everyone?”
I’m more overwhelmed than I’ve ever been in my entire life, especially now that a very recognisable face has just sailed through the wall into the room, only she’s a lot younger than she was inside my head. Mid-thirties at most.
“I only know of Imogen,” I say, pointing to the famous actress. The one whose murder I’m here to solve. “But I don’t know anyone, really.”
“Cool beans. Yeah, we call her Jeanie or Auntie Jeanie. Because her real name is Je—”
“Jean Johnson,” I interrupt. Being dead is weird. I feel out of breath, and yet I’m not even breathing.
Imogen, or Jeanie, is five foot two, five-three at most, meaning that if I stood next to her, I’d actually be taller than someone for a change.
She’s wearing silky monochrome polka?dot pyjamas with a matching eye mask perched atop her black bouffant, and immediately my detective brain knows she was probably in bed, or at least getting ready for bed, when she died.
Not, as the papers would have me believe, out for a midnight cliff-top stroll.
“Fucking hell!” Jeanie yells, drawing out the F bomb in her drippingly posh accent. She glances over at my body. “What a bloody mess. That’s the worst one yet!”
“What about Josh?” Peter the magician says. “Josh was pretty gory. Additionally, he was fifteen, so morally it’s worse. This guy’s middle-aged.” He points at me with a flattened palm. “Mid-fifties? And it looks like he’s enjoyed life’s many comforts.” He lowers his hand to my belly.
“Hey,” I pipe up. “I’m thirty-nine.” I ignore the casual fatphobia.
“Were thirty-nine. You were thirty-nine, darling. You’re dead now,” Jeanie says. She lifts her shoulders up to her ears and heaves out a great sigh. “Who will solve all our murders now?”
A woman, early twenties, Black, with closely cropped hair answers.
She’s wearing a tartan mini skirt, boots that look like something a comic book villain would wear, and a see?through black T-shirt with sticky black Xs over her nipples.
In short, she’s a rock star, and if I had to make an educated guess who this is from my pocket list of Paragon deceased, my money would be on Pixie.
“I don’t see why Gary can’t still solve our murders just because he’s dead. What do you always tell me, Jeanie?”
Jeanie sighs again. “You don’t need a body to get shit done.”
“Exactly. You don’t need a body to get shit done.” Pixie triumphantly crosses her hands over her chest. “Gary’s the best of the best. We all know that. He’ll have this solved in no time.”
I decide I like her.
A guy wearing an ill-fitting black hoodie, even iller?fitting stonewashed jhorts, and holding a microphone stuck to a two?metre?long pole rolls his eyes and shakes his head.
I seem to be the only one who notices the gesture.
Or perhaps this guy’s simply the type of person people have learned not to engage with.
From the way the rest of the ghosts give him at least three to four feet of space, I think I know which it might be.
Fine, he doesn’t like me. I’m used to not being liked. If my ExorSquad overalls were made of pockets, I still wouldn’t find a fuck to give.
“That’s Stove,” Trystan says about the boom operator, but he moves on to the next ghost quickly enough to confirm my earlier suspicions. “And that’s Pixie Maynard.”
Contrary to how intimidating she looks, Pixie smiles and waves.
“Hey, sorry they smoked you too, but welcome to the weirdest family you’ve ever been part of.
And I mean ever. I’ve been in bands my entire life.
Drummers and roadies got nothing on these guys.
” She has a soft, soothing US American accent.
A sense of melancholy settles deep in my stomach.
She died so far from home. Is she trapped here now? Can souls travel?
I smile—well, grimace—because I have no idea how to respond to that. As an only child to absentee parents, the only real family I’ve ever known was my grandma.
“That’s Camille,” Trystan says. “They use they-them pronouns.” He looks at Camille. “Did I say that right?”
Camille nods, and Trystan punches the air. I guess most of the ghosts here died before the turn of the century, and the notion of non-binary folk probably seems somewhat exciting and new.
“You are ExorSquad, no?” Camille says, in a French or Francophone accent.
They click their tongue at me as though I’ve made a rookie mistake, and I guess they’re not wrong.
“The world is small. I too am ExorSquad. Ex?ExorSquad.” Camille points to the logo on the chest pocket of their navy?blue dungarees.
It’s what I assume is the same logo on my overalls, but theirs looks like it’s been stitched on by a caffeine addicted squirrel working its thirtieth hour of overtime at the logo?sewing factory to support its twenty-odd squirrel babies.
“You know how the saying goes: fuck around and find out. Well, I fucked around, and now I guess I’m eleven months into finding out.
We are all huge fans of yours. It sucks you died too, but it’s very nice to meet you.
You look nothing like I pictured you would. ”
I nod, can’t even manage a polite smile, and turn to the last ghost in the room.
“And that’s Josh,” Trystan says, pointing to a lanky, pimply kid who’d slunk in almost unnoticed and is now lingering beside the wall furthest away from my festering corpse.
Josh looks up from his phone—difficult to tell what model from this distance but possibly an iPhone 8 (does it even still work in the afterlife?)—and grunts. Typical teenager. Doesn’t want to participate in meeting the new ghost in town and yet won’t miss out on it.
I have nothing to say to Josh, who seems less than impressed with the newest recruit, so I turn my back to him.