11. He Ain’t Getting Any Deader
eleven
He Ain’t Getting Any Deader
I’m sure that ghosts in Scotland can hear my scream as Trystan jumps, with me in his arms, over the craggy edge of the cliff. We’re free falling, I imagine the same way a BASE jumper would be, but it seems to go on and on and on and we haven’t reached the ground yet.
Just how high is this drop?
I’m still screaming. My new undead lung capacity is phenomenal.
“Open your eyes,” Trystan says.
I don’t. Though I do stop yelling enough to say, “No, thank you.”
“Open them,” he says again. And that’s all I hear. Well, that and the shore lapping the sand, and a few seagulls chattering overhead. There’s no whooshing of wind against my eardrums. The sound of falling isn’t nearly as loud as I’d expected it to be.
Tentatively, I squeak one eye open. We’re moving downwards, but I wouldn’t really describe the movement as falling. It’s more like we’re travelling down an invisible escalator. I can almost hear the jazzy shopping mall music playing in the background.
“What will happen if you drop me?” I remember I’m dead, and probably can’t die again. Still, I cling to Trystan like a baby koala clinging to its mama.
“Well . . .” Trystan scrunches up his face while he thinks, and I realise I’m only inches away from it. If I tilted my head backwards and he leant his forward, our mouths would brush together. It’s a heart palpitating thought.
Suddenly I’m aware of his fingers digging into the flesh of my upper arm and knee, and the press of his firm chest and stomach along my other arm. I’m certain that if I concentrated, I could count each one of his abdominal muscles tensing against me.
“Because your spirit is so used to having a body, it will behave as though it still has one,” he says.
“I’ll plumet?”
“Yep, like a turd.” He laughs at his analogy. “But because you don’t actually have a body to stop you when you reach the bottom, the likelihood is you’ll keep going.”
“Into the ground?”
Trystan nods. “Many a cave has been discovered this way.”
“Caves?” I say.
“And since you’re so new to being dead, I’d probably have to come into the cave to rescue you.”
Eh, I could think of worse scenarios than to be trapped in a windowless void with this tanned Adonis. “Oh, right.”
He smiles down at me, raises an eyebrow, then purses his lips between his teeth. Pretty sure he’s expecting me to say something else, only when I’m around him, for some unfathomable reason, my mind sort of goes blank.
“Would you like to hop down?” he says, his smile sliding wider across his cheeks.
We’ve reached the beach. Fuck knows when, but Trystan’s feet are firmly planted on the sand, and the only part of the hotel I can still see is the weather vane tickling the distant clouds. I’ve just been clinging to him like Yoda all this time.
“Good god, that’s embarrassing.” I tumble inelegantly to the ground.
“Welcome to my room!” Trystan says, holding out his arms game show host style.
I get to my feet, muscle memory guiding my palms across my overalls to brush away sand that can no longer cling to my clothes. “Your room is the beach?”
“Yes.”
“The whole beach?”
“Yup. And the sea. At least as far out as I can go before I evanesce.”
“Evanesce?” I ask.
“Like . . .” Trystan puffs up his cheeks and blows all the air out. “There are lines—invisible lines—and if you cross them, you just . . . poof.”
“Where do you go?” Camille had explicitly told me there were only three ways for a ghost to “move on,” and none of those involved crossing an unseen boundary line.
“Ahh, nowhere really, you’ll just reappear in the exact place you died.
For me, it’s that little surf hut over there.
” He points to a colourful shack nestled in the rocks at the bottom of the cliff.
“It does Jeanie’s head in when Pixie and I wander off on an adventure and she’ll .
. . poof, suddenly appear in her room again.
” He laughs. “Oh, wait, you too now. We should all go for a walk into the horizon, that’d be hilarious, dude. ”
I get the sense that amongst all the other ghosts, Jeanie is the big sister figure. Respected and revered, but ribbed at every available opportunity.
“Does the tide ever reach the hut?” I ask, as Trystan starts walking towards it.
“Only in really bad storms. Apparently it used to do it all the time, like way back in the day, but since I’ve been dead, I’ve only ever seen it happen twice. There are sand bags inside to stop it from flooding too badly, ironically.”
I know we’re all already under the suspicion that every one of us was murdered, but this definitely cements the notion that Trystan’s death was not an accident.
There’s no way a professional surfer would drown in a hut anywhere from three to five hundred metres from the water on a regular, non-tempestuous day.
So, someone drowned him, or killed him by other means and dragged his body up the nine million steps of Jacob’s Ladder to then leave him in what was Helga’s office.
Trystan has to be six-two, six-three at least, and is made of muscles.
Whoever murdered him and transported his body must have been incredibly strong.
Helga could probably have done it. Albeit with many pit stops, but she definitely has the upper?body and core strength for that endeavour.
Sargent Davies too, perhaps, and even more so in his youth.
I’m not sure yet about Franny or Angel. I’d have to observe both to know for sure, but the news doesn’t really eliminate any of my suspects at the moment.
I want to ask him a million questions about his death, and the moments immediately before and afterwards, but I’m supposed to be taking a mental break from sleuthing.
I’m supposed to be resting and recuperating and adjusting to life after life.
So I file them all away in my head for another time.
There’s a part of my brain that tells me I have oodles of time to figure this all out, and another part that’s acutely aware the killer could strike again at any moment.
Especially if they’ve killed this many people already.
“Here’s where I sort of sleep at night,” Trystan says, passing through the weathered wooden walls of the hut.
It’s dark inside, but only because my eyes are used to the bright early?evening sun.
Lining the far wall are rows of surfboards and racks of wetsuits.
There are a couple of chairs that look as though they’re one repair away from the skip, a coffee table with a stack of intimidatingly cool?looking magazines, and a shop countertop with an old school cash register.
Trystan inhales deeply through his nostrils. “Smell that? That’s the smell of home.”
“Smells like damp, and rotting seaweed, and piss,” I say.
He simply smiles and stretches his arms above his head as though he’s just woken up. “Yeah.”
We pass through a makeshift door into what appears to be some sort of staff area.
There’s a minging sofa and a little kitchenette with a rusty-looking kettle and a dented and dirty fridge.
A young man and woman lean against the far wall, deep in conversation.
They can’t be older than nineteen or twenty.
“And these are my bros. Yeeeww, what’s up, guys?
” Trystan glances at the battered clock and turns to me.
“That’s Kenza and Kai. Their shifts will be over soon.
Usually, we get different ones each summer—they’re always really young—but this is Kai’s second year and Kenza’s third, and I guess I’ve .
. .” He doesn’t finish his sentence, just lets it hang there.
A strange ache blossoms in my chest. A hollowness, like a chasm opening along a rock surface. How terribly sad that his “friends” will never acknowledge him. That he spends most days with these people, and they’ll never say “Yeeeeww” back to him.
Trystan seems to sense my pity. “Anyway, they’re rarely here when I want to sleep. Sometimes they are, though, and sometimes they’re fucking, so I have to come back a bit later. I get it, they’re young, and it’s a sexy place—”
“Is it?” Sand everywhere, the smell of decomposing ocean matter, stagnant heat clinging to the walls making it feel like a black mould hotbox, and a biological hazard of a sofa that countless other people have undoubtedly fucked on.
I couldn’t think of anywhere less sexy. But what would I know?
Trystan was probably alive the last time I had sex.
Well, I mean, he wasn’t. I would only have been eleven or twelve, but that’s how long ago it feels.
“Sure. The sea is very erotic, does all sorts of trippy things to a libido. People fuck here all the time. When I was alive, I myself did a lot of fucking in this very hut.” He waggles his eyebrows.
And great, now I’m trying to scrub that mental image from my mind.
“But you know what’s gross? That he was probably here at the time, watching me, jerking his ghost knob.” Trystan shivers, then fake gags.
By the process of eliminating men who died after Trystan, I already know exactly who he’s referring to. “Peter?”
He curls his lip and nods. “Don’t fall for his little wife devotion ploy.
The man is a grade?A perv. I’ve caught him and Stove hanging around outside the honeymoon suite on wedding nights.
It’s . . . sick. And not in the good way.
Josh is eternally fifteen, and even he understands that people having sex or masturbating in the hotel does not equate to a free porn show.
It’s one of the reasons Jeanie’s so insistent she has that room, to stop those letches. ”
“How do you find living with them?” I already have my instincts about those two blokes, and I want to see if I’m on the money, or if ghost-spying on unsuspecting lovers isn’t a friendship deal breaker.