Page 14 of How I Met Your Murderer

“You’re not afraid, then?” I certainly hadn’t gotten that impression from him.

“Nah, it’s just a bit of living history. Good for everyone to be reminded of the past on occasion, lest we repeat it.” He grinned. “That’s my unofficial stance, mind. My official stance is that ghosts are very bad for business, and asking people to sign a waiver for a medieval buffet would be daft beyond belief.”

Licking my fingers clean in lieu of a napkin, I then said, “You’ve probably been asked this before—and maybe it was in Caoimhe’s email—but do you have some kind of record of everyone who’s died in there?”

With the van doors thrown wide open, we were afforded a full view of the castle and little else. From this angle, the looming stone behemoth blotted out the fair September day and cast a long shadow over us and the parking lot at large. I felt watched by every single window.

“Until we lost our last expert from ExorSquad, the most recent death at Ardruin was Eric James Crawford, age twenty-seven, back in 2009,” Jordy answered after thinking a moment. “He was here on holiday, an American, so you know that made the headlines. The news said he either fell or leapt off the top floor, his injuries were that bad. His sisters found him later that day.”

Jordy paused like he expected me to make some kind of sympathetic noise, or say what a shame it was. But I felt too stunned. Of all the things I had sensed about Eric last night, the kind of deep sadness that would compel someone to leap off a balcony hadn’t been one of them. Not that that meant anything at the end of the day, of course. People hid their pain well all the time.

In the distance, hammers rapped and saws hummed as work on various parts of the castle continued. The car park was full of vans like mine. Two older women struggled to fit what looked like an oil painting through the front door. Birds chirped and chattered overhead as they rode the gentle breeze, backdropped by billowing spun-sugar clouds. The noontime sun kissed warmth into my cheeks.

Eventually, Jordy shrugged and went on: “Apparently Eric’s family was a big deal. Money, like. They tried to sue the castle’s estate, but it was already held by the bank at that point and I don’t think the case went anywhere. I actually played one of the games Eric designed back when I was at uni—it was deadly. The Shattered Crown. You can still find some of the playthroughs he did on YouTube. His family left the channel up in his memory.”

Once again, I didn’t say anything. I was out of the excuse of having a mouthful of bagel sandwich, but really, I just couldn’t find words. Because I now knew why Eric had looked so familiar.

I’d seen some of those videos on YouTube while sat at home in my sweats, wondering if I should fill out the ExorSquad application and avoiding Coach Flanagan’s well-meaning texts. I’d been looking a tutorial on another game I was trying out to kill a bit of time, and I’d stumbled onto Eric’s channel. I didn’t know him. Didn’t know he was dead. It’s not as if I had read the comments section. I had more sense than that.

But he was so distractingly gorgeous that I hadn’t heard a word he said about the game, even though I couldn’t tear my eyes from the shape of his lips and the way the light scattered through his dark hair.

I’d had a good wank right there on the spot. And bookmarked the channel so I could do it again later. Before I hit the road, I’d knocked one out to those videos a fair few times. Hell, even thinking about it now was enough to get my heart going ninety.

“Tea too hot?” Jordy asked me with a look of mild concern. “You’re beetroot.”

“Yeah, um, I think I burned my mouth,” I quickly agreed, though I hadn’t had a sip of tea since we finished the sandwiches. “So, about that record of deaths . . .?” Hopefully focusing on death and suffering would be enough to distract me from remembering those videos before my neglected cock decided to remember them, too.

“Well, we’ve nothing as official as that,” Jordy said, mercifully not questioning me further. “And even if we wanted to put something together—that was one of my ideas for the tours, actually—it would still be incomplete. This land has been occupied for a long time in one form or another, even before the first castle was built.”

He launched into a detailed explanation of battles during the Norman Conquest that were so brutal the very ground beneath us was soaked in scarlet for months on end. Now, sunlight wove through the neatly mowed fescue and ryegrass, still green from summer’s touch, making it near impossible to picture what Jordy had found in his books.

Rival clans competed over this land and its resources well before the Normans even came. Druids worshipped here, too, in a grove of ash trees behind the stables currently being rebuilt (the source of today’s hammering, apparently). After the druids, Christian monks had lived here briefly, before up and leaving in the middle of the night for reasons now lost to time. There was the famous poisoning death of Lady Síofra, a beautiful and beloved countess. There were rumours of cult activity on and off over the centuries, as well as the occasional murder. Disappearances and suspected deaths never confirmed, bodies never found. Even a load of blarney about treasure hidden by Síofra and her husband’s successors, treasure which teens from Ballycorven had loved to search for back when there weren’t security cameras covering the extensive property.

None of it was the helpful record I was hoping for, but it did at least explain the stain that seemed to have settled into the very bones of this place. So much fighting and betrayal and death had happened here, so all that dark energy must have seeped into the scarlet ground, and, later, into the foundation stones of the castle itself.

Jordy talked for so long that we eventually got up and walked into the castle with a restless Pepper. There was at least one working shower, which would give me a chance to freshen up and change. They hadn’t included that on the tour yesterday, so Jordy led the way down a winding corridor on the main level and through one of those narrow halls where the modern electric lighting should have illuminated every crack and imperfection in the stone. Instead, everything was somehow muted.

I tried not to think too hard about the crimson-stained ground beneath us, and instead glanced curiously at the well-dressed man in the next room who appeared to be fighting with a life-sized plastic skeleton wearing a leprechaun’s glittering green top hat and bow tie.

My first thought was that the ghosts were going to tear that thing apart soonest chance they got and scatter the bones everywhere. Maybe the man was thinking the same, because he frowned as he adjusted the skeleton’s hat and stepped back, bumping right into Jordy.

“Ah, sorry there,” the man said as Jordy put a hand on his waist to steady him. He was just a few inches taller than Jordy, with dark brown hair and almost as many tattoos and piercings. It didn’t take much guesswork to know that this was one of the living decorators I’d mistaken Eric for last night, someone who treated his body as art, too.

“Raff, this is Basil. He’s a Brit, but we like him anyway,” Jordy said, a faint pink tinge appearing on his cheeks. Now who was red as a beetroot? Jordy also still hadn’t moved his hand from Basil’s waist even though the decorator clearly wasn’t in danger of falling over. “And let me guess,” Jordy continued, turning his attention to the large skeleton currently sat on the bottom step of a staircase, “this was Caoimhe’s idea?”

“Halloween chic for the trial banquet, and you might as well start today.” Basil seemed to be quoting, likely from Caoimhe. “Make it sparkly and fun and not too spooky.” His eyes darted briefly down to Jordy’s hand, then back up. “So . . . what do you think? Does this scream ‘haunted fun’ to you? I hope so, because we’ve got about ten more stashed in the closet to put out after this.”

Finally, Jordy did drop his hand, flushing scarlet. Pepper pawed at his leg, little paws only able to reach up to his knee, and he pretended to be distracted by the dog when in reality, I suspected he was tongue-tied.

I was catching a bit of a buzz between those two.

“Shower’s just down there, right?” I pointed to a door on the opposite side of the parlor we stood in, and held up my towel. “I can take Pepper for a bit, if you don’t mind,” I added to Jordy. “I’d like the company while I work on a plan to make sure you don’t have to buy any more mirrors.”

I really liked the idea of having a dog, one small enough to hang in the van. Someone living and loyal and warm to crash with at the end of the night. If I was going to keep on with the spirit extraction business, it might be good for me.

“Good luck with your closet full of skeletons!” I called to Basil and Jordy as Pepper and I set off, leaving them to it. I had a few of my own to work out once I coaxed a trickle of hot water out of the showerhead. Seemed like this place had plumbing issues on top of everything else.

Under the steam, I didn’t try to fight those visions of Eric from his videos. I let them come flooding back, stroking myself long and hard until I was sure I’d worked every last drop of him out of my system. No different from fixing a stubborn knot in a muscle after a match. Then I washed all the evidence of the weirdest wank ever right down the drain.