14. A Real Dead Ringer
fourteen
A Real Dead Ringer
Before I even have a chance to process Josh’s words, my heart tries to escape my chest by smashing its way through my ribs.
It’s highly likely he doesn’t truly mean what he said, that perhaps he’s taking the piss, or thinking of play pretend.
He is a kid after all, and I’m desperately trying not to let my imagination run away from me, but I’m already picturing myself tucked up inside that tiny Swindon Sounds studio.
The red LIVE light casting a cosy, warm, brothel-like glow over the DJ controller.
Instantly, I feel my cortisol levels dropping.
Annoying that I still produce the stress hormone after death.
“Explain yourself,” Jeanie demands of Josh, echoing my exact thoughts.
“Well . . . I mean, it’s a long shot, but . . .” Josh scratches his shoulder, rubs the side of his Converse against the front of the other, scrunches up his face. “Okay, Stove has a microphone, yeah? And I have a regular phone, and sound waves seem to transcend the living and dead realms . . .”
I think back to the whispered “Garys” and the way the radio cut out when Camille waved their hand through it, and maybe he’s onto something.
“Also, look at this . . .” Josh disappears through a door connected to Franny’s office. When nobody follows him, he pokes his head back into the room. “Guys . . . come on.”
It’s a cupboard. Tinier than both the cleaning supplies cupboard and the stationery closet. Two metres by three at most, with heavy?duty garage?type shelving running parallel against the walls. On the bottommost shelf of the right?hand unit is my duffel bag.
That’s my bag, alright. I can see the iron?on Donatello Turtles patch that I got aged eight from Swindon Market, the scuffed to fuck front pocket where the holdall used to sit flush against my rear bike tyre, and the luggage tag from my last flight to Seville—seven years ago—to visit my parents.
Inside that bag sits all my portable recording equipment. My DJ controller, headphones, mic, speakers, and laptop.
“But . . .” Though my internal organs are practically dancing at the prospect of recording another episode, or more, my brain is working in overdrive, slotting together every piece of intelligence about the undead I’ve gleaned in the past few days.
“We can’t operate that equipment. We can’t even touch it. ”
As though testing my own knowledge, I press my hand against my bag. It slips right through it.
“Yeah, I have thought of that,” Josh continues.
“And I don’t think Gary’s microphone will pick up our ghost voices, but maybe if we can somehow connect Stoves’s mic to the big black square bit you used the other night, and we connect the big black square bit to my phone, we could set up a studio somewhere in the hotel and you can record Unalive from there.
” Josh makes eye contact with me for half a second before looking at the floor again, but I can tell he’s pleased with this idea.
Fucking hell, I’d be pleased if I came up with this.
“Okay, okay,” I say, mostly so that the other ghosts don’t interrupt my thinking time as I begin to pace. Or float-pace.
“Are you fucking kidding me?!” Camille yells, hands on hips. “Does this mean you can connect to the internet on your twenty seventeen ghost phone?”
I stop pacing. This seems like news I should have been told, like, yesterday. “You can communicate with the living world?”
“Yes.” Josh screws up his face again, but this time it looks pained, not shy. “Though before you get too excited, if you manage to contact your family, just know that they will become super pissed off with you, and call you a scammer, and report you to the police.”
“Oh, honey.” Pixie puts her arm over his shoulder and pulls him close to her. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”
Josh says nothing, but his swallow is audible.
And now I feel terrible for bringing it up. I understand what it’s like to crave love from people who are supposed to dish it out unconditionally.
Josh shrugs and smiles, suddenly much more chipper. “The plus side is that my birth year is two thousand and two, so there are no restrictions on the number of porn sites I can visit.”
“Joshua Little, you are fifteen years old.” Pixie releases her grip on him.
“Nuh-uh, according to the internet calculator, I’m twenty-three.”
Jeanie shakes her head, like a mother choosing her battles.
“You are fifteen, and sadly for everyone, you will always be fifteen. Now, I can’t exactly stop you from looking at those websites, since the moment you go to sleep your phone will reappear in your hand, but I want you to know I find it all . . .”
“Icky?” I suggest.
“Very icky,” Pixie agrees.
I place my hand up. “Sorry, just one tiny question. How does a ghost phone connect to the living realm?”
“Through the Wi-Fi, duh,” he says.
“Sure,” I say dryly. “Of course it does. Why wouldn’t it?”
“What’s Wi-Fi?” Peter asks.
“It’s the internet,” Stove says.
“But . . .” Pete scratches the back of his head.
I guess, when he was alive, even dial-up wasn’t a thing.
It’s almost inconceivable for him to have imagined that in thirty, forty years people would carry around pocket-sized computers that can connect to the other end of the world in milliseconds.
“I know what the internet is. Stove taught me. I’m just confused. How are the interwebs so small?”
“Huh? You see guests with these all the time. Helga has one, and you rarely leave her side,” Pixie says pointing at Josh’s phone. She turns to Stove. “What exactly did you tell him the internet was?”
Stove pretends to be offended by her question by placing a hand on his chest. “The usual. Myspace, Napster, and wank fodder.”
I shrug, then nod. The early noughties was a great era to be a teenager.
“It’s so much more now,” Camille says. “You can speak to anyone in the entire world at any time. You can book aeroplane tickets to any destination. You can look up the heights of your favourite actors. You can have almost any food you like sent straight to your house.”
“I miss food so much.” I accidentally say that out loud. Others nod and sigh sadly. “When does that feeling go away?”
“Never, unfortunately,” Trystan says. “You’ll never feel hungry again, but you’ll also never forget how much joy food brought you.”
Damn. Damn, damn, damn. Just really sucks that I’ll never have another biscuit in my mouth.
“If you learn how to possess people, you can always choose a host in the dining room and grab a cheeky munch,” Stove says.
Jeanie blinks slowly, buying herself processing time. “Possessions are generally a no?no around here. However, we all have our weaknesses, and we’ll not think badly of you if, now and then, you have the overwhelming urge to eat . . . a . . .”
“Jammy Dodger?” I can already feel the texture against my tongue, the sweetness, the chewy, jammy centre.
She smiles. “Mine is a cold glass of Pinot Grigio.”
“Pizza,” Pixie adds, pointing to herself.
“Steak tartare,” Peter says.
“A cup of tea.” Stove fake bawls. “Two sugars, splash of milk.”
“Cake. Chocolate cake in particular, but any cake will do. Ooh, carrot cake, though.” Camille.
“Watermelon,” Josh says, surprising me with his choice.
“Crisp sandwiches,” Trystan adds, causing every other ghost to whine . . .
“Ohh, crisp sandwiches.”
Jeanie throws her entire nine years of drama school into pretend sobbing.
While Pixie says, “I died never having tasted a crisp sandwich.”
For a moment, or ten, I drift off remembering the emotions each of these foods conjured, though I don’t think I’ve ever tried steak tartare, because ew, but I’d do anything right now to wrap my lips around some raw egg and raw mashed cow and actually taste it, feel it, swallow it.
Also, crisp sandwiches are fucking banging.
I shake the thought. “We’re getting a little sidetracked here.
Okay, say we can connect Josh’s phone to Stove’s mic and my equipment, and we can connect it all to the Wi-Fi, and let’s just say that we can record our voices and people can actually hear us, how are we going to get this equipment out of the bag if we can’t touch it?
And where are we going to set up this studio?
It can’t be here. Most of us are only half in the room and half in the walls. ”
“We could use the trophy room,” Trystan suggests. “The acoustics are great, it’s big enough to fit us all in, and nobody ever goes there, so we could probably leave the equipment set up for the following week. Assuming there will be a following week?”
“And what about getting the stuff—” I start.
But Jeanie cuts me off. “Peter can take it. He’ll possess Franny just the once, long enough to carry everything over and set it all up. Then he’ll walk Franny back to her office and have her wake up on her sofa as though she’d been napping. You’ll do that for us, won’t you, Petey?”
Peter sucks in a breath and holds it. “Of course.”
“It’s exhausting possessing someone. For both the possessor and the possessee. Really not a pleasant task, but when needs must,” Jeanie says.
Subjecting a nearly seventy-year-old woman to lugging my heavy recording bag halfway across the hotel without the ability to express consent feels like something I should say no to.
Yet she won’t remember a stitch, she probably won’t be under that much physical strain, and the other thing is . . . I really, really want to do this.
“Okay,” I say. “Another small spanner in the works is that I no longer have a radio show, so even if I weren’t dead, I have nowhere to broadcast my investigation findings. The execs from Swindon Sounds sacked me.”
“It’s easy,” Camille says, holding their hands up like they’ve got this all figured out. “You start a podcast.”
Everyone besides Josh and Stove ask, “What’s a podcast?”
Possessions aren’t nearly as traumatic as I’d first imagined they might be.
I guess I was picturing some kind of reverse exorcism.
A bit of screaming, a little writhing, perhaps some foaming at the mouth, or a spot of projectile vomiting, but Peter simply walked right up to Franny, then walked into her, and that was that.
There was half a second tops when the light disappeared from behind the head housekeeper’s eyes before her entire mannerisms changed.
“Was that it?” I say, as Franny-Peter rises from the chair.
“Huh?” Peter says. It’s Franny’s voice, but his accent. Oh, that’s weird. “Somebody say something?” he sweeps Franny’s arms out in front of him as though he’s wearing a blindfold, swiping his hand directly through my sternum.
“What are you doing?” I ask him.
But Jeanie answers. “He can’t really see us right now. Usually, only ghosts can see ghosts. If he concentrates, we’ll appear to him more like vapour clouds than solid, definable people. And he can’t hear us very well either. Stove’s the only one who can be heard.”
Stove winks at me. “’Cause I’m the sound guy.” He points towards himself with a single thumb. Then he cups his mouth and raises his voice, “Alright, fuckface?”
“Stove, hi!” Peter replies, smiling. “I’m just gonna take this bag here into the trophy room? Do I need anything else?”
I shake my head and Stove yells, “No.”
Then with an ease the petite sixty-eight-year-old woman would not possess on her own, she hoicks my holdall bag over her shoulder and marches out of the room.
That bag weighs upwards of twenty-three kilograms. This I know from my last flight to Edinburgh, when they told me to ditch some of its contents or don’t fly. I went via train. The duffle will weigh more now if the room cleanup crew stashed the complete works of the ExorSquad manual inside it.
Peter checks left and right down the corridor before hotfooting towards the trophy room.
We pass through approximately fifty metres of halls, at least half a dozen doors, and the hotel lobby to reach our end destination, and blissfully, it all seems devoid of people.
The concierge on the desk isn’t someone I recognise, and fortunately for us they’re engrossed in something on their monitor.
We’ve almost made it. Not that anybody would happen upon Franny Driscoll out and about in her place of work and immediately assume that the ghost of a forty-year-old man who’s been dead for forty-two years had illegally inhabited her body in order to transport heavy studio equipment halfway across the site and set up a true crime podcast from a trophy room.
Oh, and that she’s one of the prime suspects in the murder mystery that very podcast will hopefully help to solve.
Yeah, chances are pretty slim.
But not non-existent.
Only a few more steps. Peter moves quickly, with the ease of someone who actually has a body. I’ve only been dead for a day and a half, and I’m sure I’ve forgotten all the ways my muscles used to move.
“Do you want some help with that?” a voice calls out from behind us. A familiar voice.
Peter whirls around and freezes. His face drops, his mouth falling into an O.
Helga.
His ex-wife.