Page 1 of How I Met Your Murderer

one

Before the Fall

Raff

Until last summer, the most haunting thing I’d ever seen was a surprise flash of blue sky as my world turned upside down. And worse, the wince in the eyes of the ref that told me, well before the paramedics rushed onto the pitch, that I’d never play hurling again. At least, not professionally. Not in the Kerry green and gold.

We were in the midst of fighting to keep the MacCarthy Cup, Ireland’s highest honor in the sport, for a third year running. I had leapt to catch the sliotar, the white leather ball just grazing past my desperate fingers. I was so focused on grabbing it that I didn’t consider my landing, and I landed slightly off-balance with one foot planted firmly on the turf. I tried to pivot and burst forward, to put some distance between me and my Limerick opponent, but instead my knee did something weird.

And by weird, it felt like someone had just stabbed me in the leg. Instead of chasing after the sliotar, I found myself on the ground, staring up at the sky and the open-mouthed ref who apparently had never heard of putting on a brave face.

The long and short of it was a torn ACL and the end of a high-flying—or at least steady—career as a midfielder at twenty-nine years old. What should have been the best years in a sport like hurling, when my body was at its peak.

I hung my number 9 jersey in the back of my closet. Maybe one day, when the wound wasn’t so fresh, I’d wear it to a party or something. The girls always went mad about how the color of my eyes matched the green of the jersey when I wore it to the pub after a match, running their fingers through my red-brown hair until it was in more of a state than usual. The attention was nice, even if it wasn’t actually theirs I wanted, and I tossed all the slips of paper with their numbers in the bin the moment I got home.

There were plenty of jobs going for me. Hurling was in my veins, as it had been in my granda’s, which meant I had the chance to become a ref, a coach, a pundit. But hanging around folks from the GAA—the Gaelic Athletic Association—was wrecking my head. My insides writhed white-hot whenever anyone stared too long at my slight limp. Or when their pitying whispers followed me, which they always did. Anger wasn’t new to me, far from it. It was easier to reach for than everything underneath. Only now, I had no way to unleash it on the pitch.

So I turned down all the soft-hearted offers, even though that left me with feck-all. The job scene wasn’t exactly hopping at home in Killorglin. For a few months after the surgery, I stayed busy by dragging my still-healing leg on hikes just to prove that I could, pretending to admire the views of MacGillycuddy’s Reeks like a tourist who hadn’t seen those mist-cloaked rugged peaks and staggering red-brown cliffs so often as to make them almost ordinary.

And then one rainy morning, after making awkward eye contact with my da while he was rushing around the house before work at the bank and I was on the couch doomscrolling with a giant bowl of cereal in my lap . . . I saw it. An ad that, for once, wasn’t selling something but searching. Inviting brave souls to apply to join the ExorSquad.

The “UK’s Leading Ghost Removal Service—Become a Spirit Extraction Expert Today!” had recently extended its coverage across all of Ireland, too, which made sense. I couldn’t name a place more haunted in all the world, even if I’d never seen a spirit myself despite briefly dating a demonologist.

The pay at ExorSquad was shit, though: work for the desperate. Removing spirits from people’s homes and pubs with what looked like a vacuum fit for the scrap heap seemed a bit daft, but I clicked on the application anyway after brushing cereal crumbs off my joggers.

I was a bigger guy. Built tall and tough enough to take a hit from this world or the great beyond. Steady, even if my knee got weak and forced me to take a seat more often than I was willing to admit. I could still haul a weird vacuum around and zap a few ghosts, no problem. I also didn’t scare easily. Hell, after being with a demonologist, the idea of creeping around in the dark and provoking the unseen wasn’t entirely new to me. And I could make any uniform look good, even a pair of black overalls with a cheesy ghost logo on the front.

Even if the little cartoon ghost representing their Irish division held a fecking shamrock.

I had already typed in “Rafferty Finnegan O’Meara” and my birthday, April 2nd, on the form when it fully sank in that I’d make more money selling balloon animals to kids at the Puck Fair. If I knew how to make a balloon animal, anyway. It couldn’t be that hard.

In the end, it wasn’t desperation that led me to reopen and finish the ExorSquad application, and to eventually sign a contract longer than my gran’s favorite Bible. It was a phone call from Coach Flanagan, asking me yet again to come ref a match like he could somehow sense that I was just sat at home playing video games, no job prospects and certainly no romantic ones on the misty horizon after my last messy breakup.

It was pride.

But after how far I had already fallen, I figured I could only limp uphill from here.

Here being a gently used van, which was home for now as I hopped around the countryside on assignment. My sleek blue motorbike was my favorite way to travel, but as much as it pained me to admit, it wasn’t practical for hauling around a bunch of ghost-trapping gear.

The X5000 Turbo Pro Plasma Accelerator ™, as it said on the label, was fecking heavy. Even to me.

Before setting out, I strung some twinkly lights in my new ride and shoved a mattress in the back beside a pile of pricey-looking equipment with names I could barely remember and the company handbook I always fell asleep reading after only a page or two. Luckily, my friend Anna was visiting and handy with a paintbrush, so she carefully recreated the ExorSquad logo on each side of the van’s shiny black exterior to help me look official.

The van and the paint had all been bought with my dwindling savings, of course. It had been made clear in my brief (and admittedly confusing) training in London that aside from two pairs of overalls and the standard-issue gear, anything I needed—like transportation or housing, or enough money for the occasional nice meal—would be at my expense.

This was no glamorous position. There would be no crowds standing shoulder-to-shoulder vying to get the best view, no cheering and singing, no victory pints with the lads after. (There were no pints of any kind with my old friends from the team anymore, but that was because I had gradually ghosted them all after the surgery.)

Still, my parents could’ve looked a little proud when I pulled out of their driveway on a brisk March afternoon for my first assignment, off to save an elderly woman from something sinister that moaned and hissed at all hours of the day and night. The homeowner made it sound like the whole property was cursed in the report I’d been sent by Ted, who seemed to be ExorSquad’s only secretary, with chains rattling and something rustling in the farm’s various outbuildings as well. The Turbo Pro Plasma Accelerator Thing was going to get a workout, and so was I.

As I drove with the radio turned up for its mindless chatter, coasting over potholes and navigating familiar tight curves and switchbacks—the job was still in County Kerry, if a little farther afield than I was used to driving in a day—my thoughts kept drifting back to my old life. To the weight of a gold medal around my neck. To tripping and rolling through fresh-mown grass on the pitch, laughing and feeling like that pitch was the top of the world. To the clamor in the locker room after a match when I licked the salty skin of Declan’s abs on a dare, cursing and spitting to hide the fact that I really wanted to keep going.

But suddenly, another thought intruded, one that had nothing to do with hurling or the delicious abs of straight players. Like the flash of a memory but not, because it had never happened. I stood in a cramped, cluttered kitchen I didn’t recognize, hands bound in metal cuffs behind my back, a man in uniform glowering at me suspiciously.

I had never been in trouble with the law. Kicked out of a pub once or twice with the lads, sure, but I’d never had a Garda look at me like that. Like I was dangerous.

And then, as quickly as it had come, the not-memory released its grip on me, leaving behind a fading sense of panic and the shadowy outline of a dirty kitchen.

When I was a boy, my gran told me that I had something called the Second Sight, and that everyone in her family line had it. I received little glimpses of the future, which she seemed to think were special, or even sort of magical, but which I always found too vague and brief to be remotely useful. Annoying, more than anything. If the Second Sight were a gift, it would have warned me to mind my landing the day of my last match against Limerick. And since it hadn’t, I had decided that from now on, I was just going to ignore it.