I looked around me. The lights in my peripheral vision, like glowing balloons in a range of colours, were always with me. For years I had denied what they were, but recently I had begun to understand that here was a skill that I could no longer deny, and perhaps shouldn’t.
I had been prompted to acknowledge several ghosts in the run-up to the Battle of Speckled Wood, and some of those had remained with me at the inn. Others had drifted away. New flecks of light took their place, and periodically when I was out and about I would see new colours, new flashes of bright light. I wanted to work with the ghosts more, understand what their needs and motivations were.
I watched her tap a few buttons on her lap top and the machine whirred into life. Numbers flitted quickly across the screen.
“Tell me, Perdita,” I asked, my eyes on the screen, watching green dots move around aimlessly. “What would I gain from knowing how many ghosts there are and what they’re doing?”
Perdita looked amused. “That’s a good question, Alfhild. Probably nothing, if that’s not something you worry about. I mainly use this tracking technique for buildings riddled with spirits that the owner wants to eliminate.” She raised her eyebrows. “Do you want to get rid of all the spirit inhabitants here at Whittle Inn?” Perdita bent over her lap top and typed a few commands in before whacking the space bar. “Look, initial readings from the electro-endoquaero suggest there are thirty-six ghosts currently housed inside the inn. That would be a rough estimate based on this first reading. Some of those may be false.” She beckoned me over.
Sure enough, I could see the figures she was pointing at, along with an approximate outline of the inn and all the rooms mapped out on it. “Thirty-six?” I repeated in disbelief. “I had no idea there were that many.”
“That’s a minimum. It’s a lot for a building of this size that you intend to populate with human guests. I would assume you might like to eradicate a few of these spirits.”
“Eradicate them?” Her choice of language unnerved me.
“Yes. Obviously you know that if you want to get a ghost to move on, you can simply ask it to leave.”
“Yes.” That was your basic Witch 101 after all.
“And of course, many ghosts choose to do as they’re told. Some have been left behind, not realising they should pass over to the other side. Once you make a polite request they often see the error of their ways and skedaddle.” Perdita opened her notebook. I spotted lots of notes written in tiny, tidy purple ink, and numerous doodles of flowers and butterflies. “Then there are those who need a little more coercion, and you can use magick to do that.”
Again, this was something I knew of in practice, but had never tried to do.
“At the end of the scale you have exorcism. This tends to be carried out by extreme religious types and can be excessively violent when not conducted by a specialist. There is no coming back from an exorcism. Once the spirit is sent to the afterlife, they have to remain there forever.”
“That’s very final.”
“And it isn’t what all ghosts want. So it is our job,” she waggled a finger at me, “to ensure that all ghosts have the freedom to go where they wish if we’re intent on sending them away.”
“Fair enough.” This did indeed sound the most respectful way to behave.
Perdita checked her screen once more and recorded what she saw there.
“Luppitt wouldn’t come down?” she asked when she had finished.
“No—”
“He’s extremely scared.”
“Yes—”
“Tell me about him.” Perdita threw herself down on a bench and put her feet up. I noticed she had changed into bright pink slipper mules, with furry uppers.
I repeated all I knew about Luppitt, and for once Perdita listened without comment. Occasionally she made a note in her book, and at other times she doodled, but I sensed she was listening to what I had to say.
When I had finished she nodded and lay her notebook down.
“You’re doing all the right things,” she said. “The crux of this one is finding out how Luppitt died in the first place. That will lead you to who is responsible.”
“Do you believe what Luppitt says about being killed over and over?” I asked. The idea pained me on his behalf, but so far nobody else believed it was a possibility.
But Perdita wasn’t everyone else. “Oh of course I do.”
“But how is that possible? You can’t kill something that is already dead. I get that you can banish a ghost, by asking it or telling it to move or … or by exorcism. But you can’t physically kill a ghost, can you?”
“Well that’s where you’re muddling your physical with your metaphysical, clearly.” Perdita leaned over to stroke Chi absent-mindedly. “The key here is that you said—and I repeat— ‘you can’t physically kill a ghost’ and no you can’t. And I can’t. And Mr Kephisto can’t. And Wizard Shadowmender can’t. Why?” When I shook my head in confusion, she pointed at the dots on the screen, all thirty-six of them, some moving around the inn, some staying in one place.
She reached over and with a few taps of the keys changed the screen to show two red dots along with all the green ones. “Those two red dots are us in this room. If the ghosts in this inn were conducting this experiment, what would they see?” Perdita clicked the space bar. All the green dots disappeared leaving just the two red dots. She hit it again and the green dots came back. The third time she hit it, she and I disappeared, and all of a sudden, I understood what she was trying to tell me.
The ghosts existed on a separate plane to ours. They were able to have a presence in this world only because Perdita and I could see them. The clear majority of physical beings on the planet would not see the ghosts, because they refused to, did not believe, or were simply not attuned to the correct energy frequency. Similarly, the ghosts interacted with us because they could see us, and they believed we existed. Others would perhaps deny our existence and would never see us.
The ghosts were on their own plane, as physical to each other as Perdita and I were.
“You’re suggesting Luppitt can be killed by another ghost.”
“Of course. And the thing is, Luppitt is dead. Every time he dies, he becomes the ghost of a ghost. There’s a chance that his memory is hazy, mostly because some of those ghosts have crossed right over. But enough of the original him remains and remembers.”
A light went on in the recesses of my brain. She was right of course. Why had I not seen that?
“And do they feel pain?” I asked.
“Oh yes, I’m sure they do,” Perdita replied matter-of-factly and turned her attention back to her notebook.
“Now tell me,” she said. “Were you wanting to weed out the ghosts you have here at Whittle Inn? If so how many? Because I’ll have to construct a timetable of just how we’re going to do that. You can tag along with me when I do it, if you wish. Then next time, you won’t need me to come and help you.”
I watched the little green dots on the screen as the ghosts went about their business. I thought I knew which dots belonged to Florence, and made a guess that the two outside the inn were my father and Zephaniah. How would I feel if someone politely asked my father to move on? Or Gwyn?
It made me uneasy.
“I’ll give that some thought,” I said, and left Perdita to her research and tracking while I sought out Florence for a restorative cuppa and a bit of a girl chat.
“Do you mind being a ghost?” I asked Florence as I sat at the kitchen table and helped myself to one of her delicious currant buns. They weren’t quite cool enough. My mother would have told me I shouldn’t eat them because they would give me the belly ache.
“Why gracious, Miss, what a strange question,” Florence said, up to her smouldering elbows in a bread dough mix.
“I know,” I said, feeling oddly despondent. “I think it’s important for me to know that you are happy…being where you are. Happy with being a ghost.”
Florence glanced at m
y face, and stopped what she was doing. “Oh bless you, Miss.” She blew her hair out of her eyes, and then dabbed at an itch on the end of her nose with the back of her wrist.
“May I be honest?” she asked gravely.
“Of course. Always.”
She took a seat at the other side of the table and we studied each other before she piped up, “Of course I would rather not have died. I had a beau, you know? His name was Thomas Gilles. He worked in a butcher’s in Honiton, but he was born and brought up in Whittlecombe, and we had promised ourselves to each other when we were little more than children.” She gazed fondly into the distance, no doubt remembering the good times. I was glad she had those to hang onto.
“We wanted to do it properly. Save up enough money so we could find a little cottage, only to rent mind, but something nice, you know?” She rubbed her hands together so that flakes of bread dough fell onto the table top. “I was 15 when your great, great grandfather hired me here. I started off in the kitchen, helping the cook. Lovely she was, Sally Crowley. Then the lady’s maid got in the family way and was given her marching orders, so they needed someone extra upstairs, and I started helping there. I became head housemaid when I was twenty. I was so proud. The money wasn’t bad really. I was saving up. And Thomas was saving up too. We had a good nest egg.”
Heart-breaking. To think Florence had the love of her life, and one simple accident laying a fire in the main bar had caused her untimely demise before she could fulfil her dream.
“Then he met someone else.”
“Eh?” I was jarred back to reality by the sudden vitriol in her voice.
“The dirty, two-timing rotten scoundrel was playing around behind my back with a floozy he met over the butcher’s counter.”
I stared at her, stunned. I suppose I had imagined life was simpler back then. More idyllic somehow. Love was love and it lasted forever.
“What did you do?” I asked, while imagining I’d have skinned him alive, no mistake.
“Well I suppose it’s more what I would have done, really, because events overtook me rather quickly. It was precisely because I was distracted that morning—having not slept well—that I wasn’t paying attention to what I needed to be doing. I didn’t take enough care, and unfortunately the pay-off for that was that I somehow…caught fire.”
I sat in stunned silence for a second. Then shook my head. “Florence! I’m so sorry that happened to you! That’s terrible.”
“Yes.” She nodded, scraping her hands together some more as the dough dried on them. “Yes, it is terrible. No mistake. But to answer your question, I suppose the thing is, that once life is over, it’s over. I don’t really remember my death or the pain of it. I knew I was dead because I’d be meandering around the hall, attending to my business and lighting fires in the grates, straightening up the bedrooms, and all that and yet nobody really reacted to me. Nobody spoke to me. Or even looked at me. And then somebody else started doing all my jobs. She’d get very unnerved when I beat her to it.”
Florence stifled a giggle. “She overreacted I think. Had a bit of a breakdown. But that’s when I finally got the message loud and clear that I wasn’t alive any more. For years I gave up doing my duties, and just hung around the hallways. It wasn’t until your great grandmother came to the house that everything changed. When she married Mr James, you know? The very first day she walked into the inn, she was just this sweet young bride, but she acknowledged me straight away.”
“She did?” That might explain where my skills with ghosts originated.
“Oh yes, and she was very kind. She suggested I carry on with my housemaid duties.”
“Did she indeed?” So it appeared Gwyn had her own version of the Wonky Inn Clean-up Crew back in the day. She and I were very alike in many ways.
“Yes.”
“I wonder what happened to Thomas?” I asked, curious as to whether he had grieved for Florence after she had gone.
“Oh I know exactly what happened to him.” Florence stood up and went back to her dough, pounding at it with a new ferocity.
I waited, watching with amusement. Florence obviously still harboured feelings of bitterness.
When she didn’t continue, I slumped dramatically over the kitchen table. “What? What happened to him? You have to tell me!”
Florence tsk’d, her mouth a thin line of disapproval. “His little liaison with the tart in the butcher’s shop didn’t lead anywhere. He married Marjorie Denby, a shrewish Baptist from Plymouth, and lived a miserable life with her at Sparrow Cottage in the village.”
“My Sparrow Cottage?” I asked. I owned a number of tied cottages in Whittlecombe.
“Yes.”
“That’s a tiny one.” Even now, when most of the little cottages in Whittlecombe had been renovated and extended, it was a miniscule two-up and two-down terraced house, with a poky bathroom which had been tacked on downstairs in the 1950s as an afterthought.
“They never had any children, and he was killed crossing the road in Honiton one day.” Florence sniffed. “I don’t care. He showed his true colours.”
I nodded, thinking of Jed, sloshing tea around in my mug and niggling at my own emotional pain, the way you might scratch at a wound, just to check it was still there.
“I’ve heard about your young man,” Florence said, and her voice was full of sympathy. Tears sprang unbidden into my eyes. Angrily I blinked them back.
“It’s just one of those things, isn’t it?” I said, trying to pull myself together. “And I suppose he never really was my young man.”
“Dastardly, the lot of them.” Florence punched the final life out of the bread and threw it back into the mixing bowl, covering it over with a damp tea towel and then picking the whole thing up. I knew she liked to leave the bread to prove in the boiler room where it was warm. The enormous—and ancient old boiler—had to be left running all the time but was the most efficient means of providing heating and hot water to all the guest bedrooms and bathrooms on demand.
“You’re not wrong,” I said and smiled. It felt good to have a sister-in-arms, albeit a ghostly one.
I returned to my office to send out email invitations to half a dozen chefs who had answered my advert, and whom I judged had the most going for them. I sent them all a map with directions on how to get to the inn and suggested they could stay over at the inn with me if they wished. Then I set about creating a list of questions I would ask, before creating a couple of taste tests for them to try in the kitchen. I hoped they would wow me with their culinary prowess.
Once I had typed up my questions and plan for the interview day, I phoned Rhona down at the Whittle Inn convenience store and provided her with a long list of all the fresh ingredients I would need. She agreed to get Stan to deliver them for me on the morning of the interviews.
I resurfaced mid-afternoon, boggle-eyed from cross referencing everything and making sure everyone had what they needed from me, in order to either attend the interview, or to ensure its smooth running.
I clumped down the back stairs, those closest to the kitchen, stretching my shoulders, stiff and aching from where I had hunched over my computer for hours, and spotted Zephaniah with his head in the cupboard under the stairs. Curious, I went to see what he was up to.
“I’m just fetching the ladders, Miss Alf,” he said. “Your father introduced us to the game of softball, and unfortunately in my enthusiasm, I seem to have lost the ball up a tree.”
“I see.” I rolled my eyes. My father had an appetite for playing games outdoors. I remembered the endless games of softball, badminton and pétanque as a kid. Whenever we had a picnic or a summer outing somewhere, he would rope in as many people as he could and set up two teams. He was highly competitive too. He loved to win.
“I hope you find the ball,” I said, walking away.
“Oh well, no problem if we don’t. You father wants to play cricket tomorrow.”
I turned back. “He’s a bad influence.” I was joking, but p
art of me was thinking about my idea for a Wonky Inn Clean-up Crew. I ought to put that into practice and soon. We needed to get Whittle Inn open.
Zephaniah looked worried and I quickly changed my expression. “Oh, ignore me.” I waved him back to what he was doing. “I have a few ideas I need to run by you at some stage. Maybe tomorrow. After your game of cricket.”
“Yes, Miss Alf.” Zephaniah pulled the ladders out from the cupboard.
I stopped him before he could escape back into the garden. “Sorry Zephaniah. May I ask you a question?” I might as well take a poll of the ghosts around the inn. He looked at me expectantly. “Do you mind being a ghost? Are you happy?”
Zephaniah looked as taken aback as Florence had been. “Well,” he started, “I think initially it was a shock to the system. Especially given the location. I really hadn’t planned on spending my days haunting a muddy battle field.”
“Did you ever think about crossing over?” I asked.
“Of course, but to be honest, Miss Alf, I never had the opportunity. No ceremony. Nobody found or claimed my body. It was simply churned into the soil, and as far as I know it’s there still.”
“That’s terribly sad,” I said, moved to think of his body languishing in the Belgian earth, on a forgotten battlefield. “Would you like the opportunity to move on?”
Zephaniah steadied the ladders with his one good hand, and looked at me, his soft eyes clear and intelligent, totally without guile. “For many, many decades I would have said yes, certainly. But since I arrived back here in Whittlecombe, since your great grandmother put me to work, no. I’m as happy now as I was when I was alive.”
“Aww, that’s so good to hear, Zephaniah.” I put my hand on my chest. “Such a relief.”
“You’re not planning on getting rid of us, are you, Miss Alf?” Zephaniah asked, his face creased with concern.
I looked at him, guiltily glancing towards The Nook where Perdita was holed up with her electro-endoquaero. Zephaniah nodded. “We have all been wondering about that lady.”
“She’s not here to evict any of you.” That much was true. Not that I could put my finger on why she was here anymore. I had hoped she would help me with my Luppitt problem, but now I no longer believed she would be of much use in that regard. All her excitement was targeted at the sheer volume of ghosts inhabiting the inn.
The Ghosts of Wonky Inn: Wonky Inn Book 2 Page 6