Page 25 of Unalive On Air

Don’t get me wrong, a very handsome ghost, but a ghost nonetheless.

Am I a believer yet?

I wonder if I can touch him. If I poked him with my finger, would it pass right through his body, or would we make contact? Would he feel human? Or . . .

Gary Runcorn! Get that thought out of your head immediately.

“Gutted you’re dead,” Trystan Retallack says. A dead man says that to me.

His accent is an intriguing blend of dialects. Americanised Cornish. A local lad who’s either watched too many episodes of Saved by the Bell or spent a great deal of time hanging out on the Pacific coast of California. Going by the golden‑brown hues of his skin, I’m willing to bet it’s the latter.

“Gutted, but like, also super stoked. I mean . . . I didn’t actually mean to say that. Uh . . .”

“Trystan, yeah?” I say. There’s a strange mix of emotions swirling around inside me. On the one hand, I’m thrilled that somebody can finally see me and talk to me and I’m not alone in this blood-soaked mess.

On the other, it confirms that I am definitely dead, and not in some kind of fever‑induced nightmare.

I mean, I still could be. Trystan may, in fact, be a hallucination.

I decide that either way, I don’t care. My subconscious brain clearly knows what it wants.

“Yew! You actually know me?” he says.

“Your picture’s downstairs in the trophy room,” I reply, but Trystan doesn’t acknowledge my response. He’s too busy looking at my gory corpse, and then the spattered ceiling, and back at my corpse. “What’s going on?”

Trystan cocks his head to the side like a spaniel. He literally looks like a puppy, confused by my question. Or maybe it’s that the answer is so obvious he’s wondering why I asked it. “You’re Gary Runcorn,” he says instead.

I’m robbed of speech. How does he know little old me?

“We’re your biggest fans.”

“We?” I ask.

“The Youngscares.”

“Oh,” I reply. “Ohhh.” I feel like I need to sit down, but I still haven’t mastered that yet.

“We hoped it wouldn’t get you too, but the fuzz are here, so we knew it struck someone.” Trystan walks over to my grey, lifeless body and presses a finger to my flesh. “That’s fucking gnarly, my dude.”

I’m balancing over the dressing table chair. “Sorry, but what do you mean by ‘it?’”

“The Paragon Phantom,” he answers, now poking through my neck wound as though I’m a dead badger he’s found beside the riverbank.

“Do you mind?” It’s not as though I can feel him prodding me, but it sorta feels like I should give consent for this.

“Sorry.” He straightens up. “Um, is it okay if the rest of the guys come in here before Sergeant Davies arrives?”

“You mean The Youngscares?”

“Yeah. We’re all, like, your biggest fans.”

I swallow down the weird sensation rising in my gullet. “Um, well . . . I suppose.” I think I already know who the other Youngscares are. That I have a list in the right‑side butt pocket of my ExorSquad overalls with their names on, or at least my corpse does, but I still can’t pinpoint this unusual feeling.

“Guys!” Trystan yells, and my suspicions are immediately confirmed as in walk—through the wall—no fewer than five other ghosts.

A forty-something white guy wearing a metallic orange waistcoat, an orange dickie bow, shiny white gloves, a crushed velvet top hat, and a cape lined with garish orange sequins waves at me.

“That’s Peter,” Trystan says. “Oh, wait, do you already know everyone?”