by Robert Wilde
“She can’t see, she can’t see!”
“Okay, okay, when…”
“I can’t see…” the second girl hissed desperately.
“Okay, well come with me and we’ll examine you,” and soon the blonde had been led into a cubicle created of a curtain being folded round. “Now, how did this start?”
“I, I, fell asleep, I don’t remember, I woke up in the park.”
“She didn’t know it was the park, she rang me, she couldn’t see.”
“How did you find her?”
“Her phone has this game with our locations.”
“Okay, just tilt your head up and let me look at your eyes.” He shined a light from his pen torch into the left eye, and there really was something up, here. At this point the blonde girl coughed very badly, and the eye fell out and landed in her lap. To the credit of the brunette, and to Bhavsar, neither screamed or flinched, they just looked at it in disbelief.
Then something occurred to Bhavsar. “Excuse me, but what colour are your eyes?”
“Brown.”
The one staring up at Bhavsar was blue.
A wooden box sat in the middle of a table. It wasn’t alone, because the table was also suffering under the weight of multiple empty bottles of wine, empty snack packets, and an actual inflated balloon, the skin of which someone had found and hurriedly filled to create the relevant atmosphere. Neither was the room empty, because Dee was laying on her sofa asleep. Her bed had been filled by Nazir, and neither would remember how that swap had occurred, whereas Pohl was in her own bed in her own room, if you accepted that she was basically a free houseguest anyway.
Dee twitched, moaned, and heard a voice say “hey, are you awake?”
“Yes Joe, I’m awake,” she moaned, then her eyes popped open. “Joe!” Her body shot up, and she was soon standing over the table grinning. “You’re alive, you’re alive!”
“I’m patently not alive.”
“Oh. Yeah, you did say something like that last night.”
“Nineteen times.”
“We may have celebrated a little too hard to remember exact details.”
“It was very nice of you to throw a party, even if I couldn’t drink or dance.”
“You always danced like shit anyway.”
“It was a good thing you had a party or I’d be offended at that.”
“So, right, I better have a shower and, ah.”
“Ah?”
“Okay, you’re secure in your box, you can see your surroundings. We’re going to have some ground rules.”
“Oh?”
“You never go upstairs. The bathroom is upstairs, the bedroom is upstairs, the box stays down here.”
“I’m not going to perv on you weeing.”
“And in the unlikely event I have to take my knickers off down here you’re going in the shed.”
“Oh charming.”
“I know you’re a ghost and you can’t masturbate, but I have restrictions.”
“Is this what you thought of the living me?”
“And you’re telling me the Amy Pond fetish didn’t carry over?”
Let’s just cover that up and move on. “Anyway, I can’t wank now, I’m a ghost.” Okay, that didn’t work.
“Did someone say wanking,” said a male voice from the top of the stairs.
“Hush, you’ll wake the professor,” Dee hissed back so loud she woke the professor.
“Hello Joe,” Nazir said entering.
“That’s my dressing gown.”
“Yes Dee, it is. Do ghosts sleep Joe?”
“No.”
“Oh, what did you do all night?”
Do not say look at Dee, do not say look at Dee, “tasted the surroundings in a new way.”
“You perved on Dee.”
“Nazir!” the other two complained together.
“Is he in trouble again,” Pohl said, having trotted downstairs and wandered in bleary eyed.
“That’s his default position,” Dee complained.
Pohl laughed, and added “so we are all back together again, give or take one body.”
“Indeed.”
“And the first thing we did was get drunk!”
“Yes Nazir, yes,” Pohl conceded, “Why don’t we all go out for breakfast somewhere? Want to pick Joe?”
“Do you want to go to breakfast?”
Jeff looked up from his desk, saw the smiling Detective waving an empty cup of coffee, and realised that yes, it was incredibly early, and that yes, he was incredibly hungry, seeing as his stomach had so far been placated with a packet of leftover miniature sausages that didn’t fill anything except the arsehole of a tiny mouse.
“I’m buying?” came the offer from a man who was clearly desperate to go and willing to put his hand in his pocket.
“Are you thinking of an actual breakfast, or that van at the end of the road?”
“Actual breakfast. Sausage, bacon, eggs, beans, lovely bread hmmmm.”
“Flesh eaters!” came a cry from the office.
“You can have pancakes.”
“Let’s go flesh eaters!”
“All right, all right, I conceded,” and Jeff stood to retrieve his coat, “let’s go.”
“You’re not wearing the hat?”
Jeff looked from where his hand was, and back to the detective. “If my mother is in the vicinity, I wear the hat. The hat is here, as I promised. But if you think I’m wearing the hat to go for breakfast, not a chance.”
“Ms. Maquire will not be happy.”
“Ms. Maquire has enough worries wondering what I’m doing.”
They processed through the building and exited to smell ozone in the air. “Guess one of us should drive,” Jeff said, keys already in hand.
“Maybe we should recruit someone who hasn’t been awake all night.”
“No one’s going to arrest us.” The emphasis was on the final word. As they drove off, the man in the van at the end of the road looked sadly.
“I feel fucking guilty now,” a detective complained.
“We’ll have lunch there.”
“Where are we actually are we going?”
They were soon at a café which opened for the commuting trade and filing inside. Jeff’s phone rang, he saw it was an unknown number, so he answered it and said “if you’re selling me Windows repair software I will arrest you.”
“Hello Detective, I’m Detective Inspector Willis from Liverpool.”
“Oh, right, wow, sorry.”
“Not to worry,” the woman laughed, “although laughing is a little inappropriate.”
“Ah, not a pleasure call.” It was, never was, going to be a pleasure call.
“I’m hoping to pick your brain on something. I’ve read about you and a case that echoes something I’m working on.”
With a sense of unease, he asked “which one?”
“You dealt with someone who stole eyes from their victims.”
“Yes, yes we did, but they’re definitely stopped now.”
“Ours isn’t quite the same. Someone is stealing eyes, yes, from living victims, yes, but the victims are then having other eyes inserted into the sockets and freed.”
“I see. Yunno, about a year ago I wouldn’t have believed that.”
“Been quite a year?”
“Yes.”
“So, can you offer me any advice?”
He couldn’t really say ‘yes, you need a box that allow the dead to speak’, but he was sure he could offer some assistance. After all, there had been lessons learned…
“Are we really watching a tv show about buying houses?” Joe wasn’t sure he’d been bought back to life for this.
“Yes we are. Only chance I’ll have to see a million quid house.”
“We’ll probably break into some soon.”
“Okay, only chance I’ll have while not risking arrest or murder. Err, no offence intended.”
“It’s alright, I’m dead, I’ve adapted.”
“We don’t have to joke about that,” Joe said tenderly.
“I’ve adapted,” and she winked at thin air “now I know what was hidden.”
“Yeah, you probably had to adapt more than most of us.”
“We all had a shock. I’m not going to pretend mine was worse than yours. I didn’t die.”
“I at least thought the world would recognise me as a hero, name something after me. Instead I’m filed secretly away.”
The doorbell rang, so Dee stood, started walking out of the room but saw a car through the window. “Right, silence Joe,” she ordered, and then went and opened the door.
“Hi Dee,” Jeff said sheepishly.
“Hello. Well?”
“Yes, can I come in?”
“I’ll make you a coffee,” and she closed the living room door as she ushered him into the kitchen.
“I’m sorry to ask this Dee,” Jeff said as she filled the kettle, “but, well, do you know how to make a new machine?”
“What?” she said spinning round, water going on the floor.
“I know you lost the machine, and Joe’s gone, but did he leave anything behind, any clues, any plans anything at all?”
“You want to make a new machine?”
“Yes, I need something, police work doesn’t stop and there’s this really grisly case where…”
“Well maybe you shouldn’t have dumped me.”
“I didn’t dump you! Alright, alright,” and he was holding his hands in defence, “maybe I did issue you with an ultimatum, but you choose to…hang on,” and he’d had a thought. “I shouldn’t have dumped you? That’s got nothing to do with Joe or MI5. So… so there is something.”
“Oh. Fuck.”
“Yes, yes, you know something. You do.”
“Jeff…don’t…”
“We need to keep going and get these people. There’s someone stealing eyes and…”
“Alright, alright, come with me,” and Dee stormed through the house, flung the lounge door open and stood by the box, inside which you could see a model head.
“Is that… is that a new box?”
“Bloody is,” Joe said proudly.
“Well thank the baby Jesus. Is there a Jesus?”
“I’m dead, not a phone directory.”
“Sorry, of course. Well, you have a box…”
“We do,” Dee said flatly.
“Are you, err, going to use it for any, err, investigations?”
“We might,” she said even flatter.
“Good, good, so how about I buy the four of you some lunch and we can go have a chat about something.”
“I imagine Dee wants a really, really good lunch.”
“I want silver fucking service.”
“Breakfast and lunch, today is turning out expensively fun.”
“We need to do more road trips,” Nazir suggested from his back seat in Dee’s car.
She was driving up to the scene of the crimes, and she turned slightly and said “driving north for a few hours does not constitute a road trip. Driving from New York to San Francisco is a road trip.”
“Alright, then we need to go and do that. Ghost hunting American style.”
Pohl smiled, “I think we’d all enjoy an American holiday.”
“Exactly, party in the USA!”
Dee shook her head, “let’s just focus on the task in hand and we can be Californian Dreaming another day.”
“I see what you did there.”
“Thanks, I was pleased.”
“Does it feel unusual Nazir,” Pohl began, “being alone in the back seat?”
“I’m here!” Joe protested.
“Yeah,” Nazir confirmed, “having this space in the back is weird.”
“I’m here!”
Joe’s box had been strapped into a passenger berth on the back seat.
“I think we’re nearly there,” Dee said.
“Good, I need a nice bath and some food.”
“Not the hotel Naz, the first target zone.”
“You make it sound like we’re jumping out of a plane.”
“And what would you prefer?”
“The name is Crime scene.”
“Fuck, that is better. Have you been binge watching CSI again?”
“No, I’ve been tearing through a show with that bloke from Firefly.”
“Ooh!” Joe said, to the surprise of exactly no one. “Bring the box set round.”
“He gets bored,” Dee explained.
Soon the car was parked up, and Dee retrieved the box from the back seat as the trio / quartet walked into a park. There were bushes and trees artfully arranged, well mown lawns, and a park bench where bunches of flowers had been attached.
“This must be it,” Dee said. “Strange that people would place their flowers here.”
“I think,” Pohl began to explain, “that the flowers are for whom the bench is dedicated to, and that our crime is much later.”
“Oh, yeah,” let’s move quickly on, “Right, Joe, are you ready.”
“Yes!”
“Right, round up some spirits and let’s get talking to the eyewitnesses.”
There was a pause before Joe replied to Dee. “There’s a problem with that.”
“What sort of problem?”
“Well, there aren’t any ghosts in this park.”
“None?”
“No one.”
“Zero?”
Joe sighed, “Yes Dee, no ghosts.”
“Well how the fuck has that happened.”
“I suppose,” Pohl said, “that no one has died unfortunately in this park. Something we should, on balance, we thankful for.”
“So no eyewitnesses.” Dee pursed her lips and looked around. No eyewitnesses, that left them at square one. Or zero.
“Shall we drive on to the next crime scene?” Pohl asked.
“Actually,” Nazir interjected, “I’m serious about wanting that shower and a meal.”
“If I remember the map right, there’s another one between us and the hotel, and one only a little beyond. Let’s visit those two and see what we can find.”
“Slave driver.”
“Just google the nearest coffee shop and we’ll load up with some sausage rolls.”
“Nice slave driver.”
Thomas wasn’t sure where he was, he just knew he wasn’t comfortable. His mind felt like it was coming out of a sleep, all hazy and thick with smoke, not wanting to return to consciousness, but dimly aware of something it couldn’t grasp hold of and read. Maybe, if he’d been a ghost, he’d have stayed where he was, lying down, he was sure he was lying down, but his body was arguing. It felt bruised, damaged somehow, but Thomas couldn’t work out how as his mind wasn’t capable of conversation with it, so he laid there, in the still and the dark, wondering what was wrong.
The wonder slowly began to subside, the mind began to clear, and a panic replaced it. Where was he? He couldn’t remember going to bed, so he must be horizontal somewhere else, but he couldn’t remember drinking. Was he just very hungover? Was what he was increasingly identifying as a pain in his head just the booze? He felt like he’d been battered, so had he managed to get drunk, have a fight and end up here? Was he in a street somewhere, in a gutter?
He decided it was time to move, and ordered his brain to order his body to sit up. Slowly the message crept through him, and he groaned at the pain across his body as he sat up. Someone really had worked him over; he hoped he’d given as good as he got to them. Funny thing was, everywhere was still black, and he couldn’t see anything. He was sure he’d told his eyes to open, and he ordered his brain to do this, but nothing happened, and the darkness remained.
So, Thomas, either you’re stuck in a cellar or a dark room or something, or your eyes have stopped working. He put a hand to his face, and it was pulled quickly away as he felt an eyeball. His eyelid had o
pened all right, so he was in darkness.
The sudden movement of his hand had made him wince, because his head really did hurt, in fact there was a stinging pain right behind his eyes. What he needed, really needed was a torch, and he realised he’d installed an app on his phone which turned the device into a torch via the flash. A hand went to a pocket, a phone was produced, and he switched the device on.
Shouldn’t a light have come on? Shouldn’t the screen have lit up? He heard noises, the phone talking back, so knew it wasn’t flat. But here he was, still in darkness. This made him ponder, so he put his hand back up to his eyes and gently touched one.
His hand felt the eye, but the eye didn’t feel the hand. Was he blind? Had he hurt his eyes somehow? He twitched, the fingers jarred the eye, and he felt something small and round fall right out of his eye socket and onto the ground. Then he began to scream.
The mood in the vehicle was low. While the plan had been to check out two more of the city’s crime scenes and go to the hotel, the plan had been changed. Having failed to get spiritual eyewitnesses at the first scene, they failed to find any at the next two, and with three failures against them all had stood round the car bonnet, looking at their map and list, and decided fuck it, let’s go on until we find something.
They got out of the car, looked around, and saw only dark, empty streets barely lit by a clouded moon. “Is there anything here?” Dee asked, her voice with a tremor of desperation.
“Do you want the good news or the bad news?” Joe asked.
“Let’s start with the bad news,” Pohl suggested.
“There are no spirits here.”
“Grrnn,” Dee said in frustration, although it was more like a growl.
“What’s the good news?” Pohl asked.
“There’s a family of ghost kitties who just love this place.”
“Right, Joe, that is wrong on several levels, several very fundamental levels,” and Dee stalked back to the car.
“But kitties!”
“Shoosh.”
“Harrumph. What now?” Joe asked.
Dee looked up. “We’re all out of leads, we have nothing, we might as well go to the hotel and drink ourselves into a stupor.”
“I can tell Jeff if you’d like,” Pohl offered.
“No, no, I’ll do it.”
Soon they were meandering through the streets of the city, and they passed a man selling newspapers. “Stop!” Pohl said, and as they jerked to a halt see jumped out and purchased one, soon sitting back inside.