9. Man Down #2
“You can be here tomorrow? Oh, bless your souls, thank you so much,” Helga says, running a fist through her hair.
Her shoulders drop in relief. She looks close to tears.
I feel for her, trying to keep this business afloat and rid the place of ghosts, but more folk are up and dying on her, causing her more stress, more work, and less of all the things she needs right now.
This is probably the most emotion I’ve experienced in a long time.
“Really? How much?” Helga says, her face crumpling again. “Yes, yes. I understand the emergency call?out fee. Sadly, this isn’t even my fifth rodeo . . . No, I didn’t forget, I just . . .” She puffs out an exasperated sigh.
“Emergency call?out fee?” I accidentally say it aloud. “Surely a business that deals solely with cleaning up sudden deaths works only on emergency call?outs. Who plans a slaughter sterilisation in advance?”
If Helga’s responsible for the murders, the Helga I met earlier, the one whose office is pristine white with not a speck of dust out of place, the one who’s struggling to keep afloat a financial sponge of a business would have factored in the cleaning call?out fee.
Surely if Helga had killed me, with the motivation of saving a flailing hotel’s reputation, she would have chosen a far less messy option.
One that could be dealt with quickly, without exorbitant cleansing costs, and one where the room could be used again the next night by a paying guest.
Say, for example, by pushing me off a cliff.
But then why would she call me out here, pay Gerald’s extortionate exorcism rates to rid the spirits from the building only to kill me in my sleep with a chandelier? Unless she doesn’t want to save the hotel . . .
Maybe she wants it to fail? I should look into insurance payouts or redundancy clauses in her contract.
The other thing could be that someone is deliberately trying to sabotage her efforts to save the place.
But who would do that? Franny? I haven’t met the woman yet, but I get the sense she’s as entwined with The Paragon as Helga is.
Sergeant Davies? Though he fabricated evidence, the man couldn’t be bothered to follow even the most basic protocols, I can’t imagine where he’d find the energy to haul his ass to the hotel in the dead of night to whack-a-mole me with an antique light fixture.
How about Angel? This mysterious undertaker everyone seems baseline frightened of.
A thought suddenly occurs to me.
“Did anyone witness what happened to me last night?” I ask.
All heads turn in my direction. “No,” they all say.
“But you were all here. You were haunting me.”
“We weren’t haunting you,” Peter shouts, somewhat affronted.
“We were merely trying to communicate with you,” Stove says, standing beside the magician.
“Listen, I’m not attacking or accusing anyone of anything.
I’m just stating a fact,” I say, glancing around at the other ghosts.
“Last night someone was in this room with me. The lights switched themselves off and on, someone kept whispering my name, and someone dropped a fucking chandelier on my face.” I raise my hand and my voice so that they know not to interrupt.
“Now, I’m not saying it was one of you guys, but somebody must have seen something? ”
“Well,” Jeanie begins. “Once we found out you of all people were here, we all came into the suite to hear your show live. Can you imagine? Unalive on Air live! And . . . it was all about me! Goodness, Gary, I can’t tell you how excited we were.
After that, we thought we’d let you get some sleep despite the storm, so we drifted away to our meetup point to discuss the episode. As we always do.”
“Where’s the meeting point?” I ask.
“It changes each week to stop us from getting bored. Last night it was in the orangery because storms are magnificent to watch from there,” Jeanie says.
“But somebody was calling my name. Gaaaarrrryy, it kept saying.”
“That’ll be Stove,” Pixie says, and Stove lifts his hand in confession. “He has a knack for projecting sound.”
Stove points to his boom mic. “Comes with the territory.”
“Stove’s good at sound projection,” I say, fighting the urge to list things off on my fingers.
“Pixie’s got rage, and Peter is the best at possessions.
” Everyone stares at me as though waiting for my point, or waiting for me to accuse someone of something.
“Do you all have special talents? Are you like the X-Men? Who was the tall, dark figure by the windows last night?”
Smiles are instantly wiped from faces.
“What tall, dark figure?” Jeanie says, and something close to genuine worry flashes behind her ghost eyes. She looks at Trystan, the tallest of the group, who shrugs, evidently as confused as she is.
“We can’t make ourselves visible to fleshies,” Pixie offers. “Well, we can, but either you have to be right over the ley line, which is way over on the other end of the hotel, or you have to be a very, very powerful ghost.”
“At least a level three entity,” Camille says. “Maybe even a level four.”
I scramble through my memories of the ExorSquad manual. There was something there about level two entities versus level three, four, and five, but at the time I’d thought it all hocus pocus bollocks and paid it no mind. Now I’m half wishing I’d read that entire thing cover to cover.
“Remind me, what’s the difference between a two, three, and four?” I say.