12. Estimated Time of Departure
twelve
Estimated Time of Departure
The clock on the wall desperately needs replacing.
The Perspex front is fogged with condensation, metallic paint peels from the case, and I just know if I turn the thing over the battery housing unit will be rusted shut.
But it works, and even though there’s barely any moonlight filtering into the poky little hut, my ghost eyes can clearly make out that it’s four a.m.
Twenty-four hours since I died.
Or thereabouts.
I don’t know my exact time of death, only what I estimated based on certain factors like rigor mortis, liver mortis, and the drying patterns of my blood.
But at least one person knows my true TOD. My killer. Though it’s unlikely I’ll ever get the chance to talk to them face to face to ask them why. Unless, of course, at some point they themselves are killed here and become ghosts.
And if that happens, it’s going to be totes awks for everyone involved.
I don’t remember when I fell into a stasis-not-sleep, but Trystan had been telling me about his afterlife as the spectral surfing champion, about the waves, and the huge annual competition, the Wipeout festival, they used to host every year on this very beach.
They apparently stopped after Trystan’s death as a mark of respect.
He went quiet after that, but then perked up when I asked him to explain how it’s possible for a ghost to surf without a ghost surfboard.
“I have a ghost surfboard!” he’d exclaimed. “I must have been killed while giving a demonstration, because it’s the demo board.”
“That’s interesting,” I’d replied.
I have my scrap of paper and pencil, Stove has his boom mic, and Josh his phone. It seems that whatever object a person’s holding or attached to when they die goes with them into the afterlife.
Maybe the ancient Egyptians were onto something.
I wonder if any of the other ghosts had objects on their person. Also, I wonder why the chandelier doesn’t have a spectral counterpart since it was attached to my person when I died. Literally. Embedded in me. I guess the same could be said for Peter’s sword.
But I’d needed to switch off my detective brain—easier said than done—and rest had been screaming my name, so instead, I’d closed my eyes and listened to Trystan’s soft resonance describing the different types of waves, and the “sick moves” he’s pulled off in each one.
Occasionally he’d ask if I was getting bored and did I want him to shut up?
“No, go on,” I’d say, though I hadn’t the foggiest what he was talking about. The next thing I was aware of was that the “plunging” and “barrel” waves had transformed into gentle snores.
The man doesn’t even have functioning lungs, and yet his spirit remembers his unconscious rasping of breaths almost thirty years after his death.
Another question I’d never dreamed I’d ask has been answered: do ghosts snore?
I can’t say that lying half in the coffee table and half out of it was ideal, but I also can’t say it was uncomfortable.
My “body” no longer aches from phantom exhaustion, and apart from Trystan’s gentle rumbling, all I can hear is the tick tick ticking of the minute hand and the distant waves lapping the beach, and I understand, despite the mouldy first impressions, why Trystan had chosen this place as his little corner of The Paragon Hotel.
Eventually, sunlight pierces the cabin through the cracks in the wooden panels. I watch the beams grow and roll across the walls and ceiling. I’ve still not fully acclimatised to the fact that I’m dead.
“Yeeeww, good morning, dude,” Trystan says, sitting his ghost body upright with enviable ease, and pushing a ghost surfboard that definitely hadn’t been there last night aside. “How was your first ever spectral sleep?”
“Okay, I guess.” I attempt to push myself up and instead sink a further two feet into the ground. I’m confronted by the underside of the shack’s flooring and a mass of silvery webs.
Hands close around my triceps and pull me back into the damp space.
And for a moment or two or ten, all I see are the spattering of freckles across Trystan’s nose and cheeks, and his blue eyes.
Piercing blue, like the colour of June skies or cornflowers or, of course, the ocean.
But the kind of ocean one only ever sees in Mediterranean or Caribbean holiday brochures.
I swallow. My mouth is suddenly too dry.
Trystan smiles, looks away, and lets go of me. “What do you want to do today?”
I shrug. “I don’t suppose you fancy boarding the train back to London and getting as far away as we can from this hotel? Not saying I believe the rumours or anything, but somebody once mentioned this place’s haunted.”
“We could see where your boundaries extend to,” he says, between laughing. “But I highly doubt it’s London. We could look for a room for you. Ooh, or I could show you how we haunt people. That’s always fun. Or, if you like . . . we can do some more sleuthing . . .”
“Now you’re talking.”
Trystan’s face splits into the widest grin, and I know that had been his first choice too. “It’s such a shame we’ll never get to hear any new episodes of Unalive on Air.”
I sigh and silently agree. It had been the only light in my life.
“I need to . . . warn you about something,” he says, his expression turning serious for a moment as he glances around the space, presumably to check that we’re alone.
“Jeanie was the one really pushing for you to get involved with the cases, not Camille. She thinks if you solve all the murders, it will . . . finish her unfinished business, and that what’s keeping her from ‘moving on’ is closure. ”
“Do you think it’ll work? If I figure out whodunnit, she’ll just . . .” I make a gesture like vapour rising into the sky.
“There’s always a chance, I guess. I think she’s simply had enough of this afterlife, this existence, and you’re her last hope before she pays the east wing a visit.”
“Ahh,” I say.
A solemness mars Trystan’s smile, and I nod, but an odd, icky sensation blossoms in my stomach.
“Do you think that will happen with you too? If I solve Jeanie’s murder, and if Jeanie’s murderer is also your murderer, am I then finishing your unfinished business?
Will you also disappear into the ether?”
What if I’ve only just met this perfect, handsome, kind, deceptively smart stranger, and he gets whipped away to some other eternity?
And what if that isn’t my unfinished business, so I’m stuck in this fucking hotel for centuries with a pervert magician, an argumentative edgelord, and a tech-necked whiny teenager?
Well, if that’s the case, first thing I’m doing is finding out where the old servants’ quarters are.
“There’s no way to know for sure,” Trystan says, pulling his shoulders up to his ears. “I don’t feel like that’s my unfinished business, and I’m not sure I even believe in the concept of unfinished business . . .” An unsaid “but” hovers over the end of his sentence.
“You don’t?” I mean, I don’t either, but two days ago I didn’t believe in ghosts and that hasn’t exactly paid off.
“Surely the whole point of unfinished business is like a burning need to achieve something that you failed to do in life?” He asks it like a question, and I have to agree with him, but honestly, I have no idea.
“I would expect so.”
“So, surely if I had any unfinished business, I’d already know what it was? Wouldn’t I be like, ‘Oh, I must avenge my father’ or something?” Again, he’s asking me as though I have answers.
I so badly want to be the one to provide them. “Have you tried speaking to Camille? For someone who hasn’t even been dead a year, they seem to know a lot about ghosts,” I suggest instead.
“Camille’s also team ‘unfinished business is bullshit,’ but .
. .” Trystan rocks the tip of his flip-flop over a rogue shell on the hut floor.
It doesn’t move exactly, but it does gently seesaw before coming to a standstill again.
“I’ve been like half wondering for a while if .
. . Jeanie’s onto something. That . . . ‘moving on’ wouldn’t be so bad . . .”
His words slowly sink in. I open my mouth to speak. Close it. “You want me to figure out who killed you in the hopes that you’ll . . . float off to the after-afterlife?”
Trystan can’t look me in the eye. He sucks that perfectly plump bottom lip of his into his mouth and rolls it under his incisors. “Honestly? . . . Maybe. I know I said last night that being dead wasn’t all that bad, but . . .”
“No, I get it,” I say, tamping down the weird new ache throbbing inside my chest. “You were just trying to reassure me.”
I think about him greeting the youngsters at the hut yesterday evening, and about the life he left behind, the surf competitions that stopped happening here out of respect for his death, the family that no longer visits, and I understand.
Fuck, I’d feel the same. Thirty years of being imprisoned in a building you can barely interact with. Thirty years with those other ghosts. Granted Pixie, Jeanie, and Camille seem okay, but I’m not sure I have the wherewithal to pretend I like the others for an eternity.
Trystan looks me directly in the eyes. I want him to say, “Just kidding! Actually, being dead is a total lark. Let’s be ghost besties forever.
” Instead, he bows his head and says, “I’m sorry.
It’s just that I’ve been unalive for so long, and I’m so tired.
It’s not all bad, I promise. You’ll enjoy it—well, some of it . . . for a while, but you understand?”
“I do.” Unfortunately, I’m very well-versed in the sensation of unending hopelessness. That feeling of being trapped by your own thoughts and the knowledge that really, genuinely, there is only one way out.
Is it suicidal ideation if he’s already dead? Or is it simply a common wish of the afterlife to “move on?” Will that make me a—sort of—murderer or just a friend helping another friend?
My head hurts.
“Please don’t tell the others,” he says.
“I won’t.”