Page 36 of Unalive On Air

“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.

Camille rolls their eyes. “It matters not, anyway. Almost everything I’ve learned from my training at ExorSquad has turned out to be . . . c’est des bêtises . . . it is a big fucking load of rubbish. The difference between a level two and a level three is the difference between a regular ghost and a poltergeist. You and I, and all of us here, are average, everyday ghosties. Level twos at most. What lives in the east wing and in the abandoned lighthouse, well that’s your poltergeists right there. Before I died, I thought I—me, a living human being—would be able to feel ghosts . . . Not possible. Only certain ghosts. Only level threes or fours can physically touch people. The exact types of ghosts you don’t want touching you.

“Waste of my time, and for what? Now I’m dead too. I thought okay, maybe it’s not so bad. Maybe I can have a bit of fun being a ghost. Gerald bastard Pickett told me that level twos could manifest in front of people, move things, have a little . . . whimsy. I cannot do anything of the like. It is, how you say, a huge fucking dumpster fire.”

“Cam’s only been dead for . . . less than a year,” Jeanie says, as she consolingly places a hand on Camille’s back. “You’ll get there, darling.” She turns to me. “The longer one’s been a ghost, the more powerful a spirit they become. If you saw a full apparition this far from the ley line, they must have been quite a formidable spectre. What did they look like? Did you see any features?”

“No, no features.” Internally, I’m kicking myself for not taking it more seriously when it happened. For dismissing it all as exhaustion or a trick of the light. “But they were tall. Taller than most regular people.”

My eyes fall upon Trystan. Taller than him? I’m not sure. It could’ve been him, but the shapes were all wrong. The shadowy figure was too angular, too boxy—a long squarish head and sharp square shoulders—and Trystan is all soft flowing hair and soft billowy shirt.

Unless I’m projecting because I don’t want it to be him.

“Do you think this shadow spirit is the one who killed me?” I ask, unable to remove my gaze from the handsome surfer.

Jeanie hums. “It’s difficult to tell, really. There are a few older ghosts who lurk in the old abandoned servants’ quarters, but . . . they rarely step out of the east wing.”

“They’re terrifying, though,” Camille says. “Even Trystan won’t go to the east wing.”

“Nah, no way. Fuck that,” he says. “Some of them don’t even have faces.”

Peter’s shaking his head. “They wouldn’t kill a fleshie, though. Especially a fleshie who’s done nothing wrong. You said you saw vapour?”

“Not quite vapour . . . I don’t kn—” I begin, but Peter cuts me off.

“It has to be a fleshie. There’s no way . . .” He’s still shaking his head. “Look, I’m the oldest ghost in this room, or at least I’ve been dead the longest, and even I wouldn’t be able to bring that chandelier down.” He walks over to the antique and motions to grab the wire cord flopping over from the centre. His hand sails right through it. He tries again and again, getting redder in the face and visibly more frustrated each time, but nothing happens. “If one of them was out of the east wing, yeah, maybe they could’ve killed Gary, but they . . . just wouldn’t do it. They’re not like that. They keep themselves to themselves. They almost never bother us unless we’re doing something we shouldn’t be, but even I’m not convinced they could float all the way over here and murder you without being spotted by one of us.”

It’s a relief, to be honest. It confirms that I was right yesterday. Only a living, breathing person can take another’s life.

Still, it wouldn’t hurt to find out a bit more about the older ghosts. Even if just to cross them off my list of suspects.

“How would I go about meeting these east wing entities?” I ask.