Deadhead Read online

  “This is a, uh, special case,” said the ghost. “They said you’re to get started right away.”

  “They always say that,” said Henry. He turned to me. “They’ve done a pretty good job here. I mean, this is going to involve a whole lot of talking to ghosts. You should have your licence in no time. What’s your name, ghosty?”

  “Ed,” Ed said. “I, uh, I’m dead.”

  Chapter 2

  In addition to being incredibly rude, Ed’s other features included an age of late teens to mid 20s, though it was hard to tell because I’m not good with ages between about 12 and 40. Or 40 onwards. Or under 12. I’m kind of bad with ages. He was, of course, glowing and perfect – ghosts almost always came back as a totally intact version of their living body, with all scars, cuts and bruises gone.

  It was nice, really, because having to deal with autopsied ghosts falling apart in front of me sounded really unpleasant. Unless they’d died in a really violent way and had their spirit ripped apart (like Nearly-Headless Nick from Harry Potter), ghosts came back in peak physical condition, albeit the same age as they’d died. Well, peak physical condition apart from, you know, not actually existing as physical beings. This one had been a pretty boy in life. He’d even styled his ghost hair. Who was he trying to impress? Everyone here knew his corpse was rotting away in the ground somewhere.

  “Thanks for that, Dead Ed,” I said. “You need to learn some manners about just popping up out of nowhere and demanding favours. I’m not used to doing this shit for free.”

  “Oh, good, you’re nice and heartless.”

  I ignored him. “Are you buried around here?”

  “Why, are you going to deface my tombstone?”

  “Actually I was planning to check for clues, but now that you’ve put the idea in my head –”

  “So you are going to help?”

  I sighed. “Well, I don’t really have a choice, and believe it or not, I’ve already started to dislike you immensely so I’d quite like to get rid of you.”

  He was silent for a moment, then, “What sort of clues?”

  “Flowers, I guess. When did you die?”

  “About a week ago. What are flowers going to tell you?”

  “You were murdered, yet you were buried within a week?”

  “It was ruled a suicide and I was buried as quickly as possible.”

  I glared at him. “Well, that person who shot you is probably a safe bet for suspect number one.”

  He glared right back. “I was poisoned, but thanks for the tip. What do the flowers matter?”

  “I won’t know what they tell us until I see them.” Of course, what I really meant by ‘see them’ was ‘check out their aura’. But whatever. That was just detail. And not really one I wanted to give away in front of the Audit Gorilla.

  “Oh, right, that sounds really useful.”

  “And how many murders have you solved?”

  “Well, you aren’t exactly doing a great job of this. Aren’t you even going to ask me any questions about it? How it actually happened? Who I think did it?”

  “With a personality like yours, I think it’s going to be hard to narrow the list down.”

  I made Henry help me clean up the dishes from dinner (with Ed whining constantly in the background about how we were rubbing it in his face that he couldn’t eat anymore) and then we headed on down to the grave plot where the charming Ed’s body lay.

  It was still light – barely – so we didn’t bother with a torch. Sure, some might think it’s creepy spending your evening in a graveyard, but when you’ve got a ghost and a shape-shifter by your side it’s not like things are going to get weirder.

  The ground was fairly rocky and uneven. It was a relatively small cemetery built on the side of a hill leading down to a beach. If ever you want a good place to sunbathe on this beach, I recommend the grave of William Potts III (1865-1901): perfect size to properly stretch out, excellent view and you won’t get sandy. Mind you, you can always find a good spot on Watergrove Beach – it doesn’t get too many visitors. Go figure.

  There was a slight sea breeze but it was late November so the temperature was still about 30C. People always expect graveyards to be cold, but in reality the temperature inside a cemetery works much the same as the temperature outside the cemetery – it’s based on the weather, not, you know, the number of corpses on a plot of land. Rather than getting chills, I was getting sweaty from all the walking (and from the smell I guessed Henry was too) so when I spotted the soft dirt of the grave Ed was leading us towards, I let out a sigh of relief.

  “Finally. Jeez, I practically died just walking here.”

  In hindsight, that might have seemed a little insensitive. Henry gave me a disapproving little frown and Ed tried to hide his pout. We came to a stop at the grave and all at once realised the same thing.

  We stood silent for a moment, but I couldn’t contain myself.

  “No flowers,” I commented.

  “Shut up,” said Ed. Not his best comeback.

  “Just bare dirt.” No response from Ed, but I could feel Henry’s disapproving gaze boring into the side of my head. I ignored it. “Not that I’m surprised, given that someone went to the trouble of murdering you and everyone else just believed your life was so miserable that you’d done it yourself.”

  Again, no answer. It was boring insulting someone who didn’t even have the self-respect to argue, so I turned my attention to the case. Yes, “the case”. Sure, it sounded a bit lame, like I was trying to play detective, but it was better than calling it “my quest”.

  I knelt down on the ground and ran my hand over the loose dirt of the newly filled-in grave. I hadn’t been entirely honest with Henry. Or, for that matter, the coven. I did have some other magic powers aside from ghost-com that I generally kept to myself. It’s one thing to be a medium who everyone thinks is a charlatan, but it’s another for people to know that I could – well, do things.

  With my hand hovering over the dirt, I could feel a sort of warmth, a pull, underneath. There was something on the body that would help. Something that Ed’s ghost couldn’t tell us.

  “I need to see his body,” I said.

  “Pervert.”

  I shot Ed a glare that may well have killed him if he were still alive. OK, so maybe it wouldn’t have killed him. But it would have done something. Caused a twinge in his left pinky at least.

  “There’s something in the coffin, maybe in the pockets, something that could help. We’re going to have to do a spot of illegal exhumation.” I looked at Henry, about to ask if he had any ideas. He had his arms crossed and brow furrowed, watching exactly what I was doing.

  “Right, so you can’t do magic.”

  He didn’t know the half of it, but I wasn’t about to tell him that.

  I rolled my eyes and tried to be casual. “Fine, I can do some. Just basic things; I’m hardly a master sorceress.”

  It wasn’t that I didn’t like Henry – I did. He was a cool guy as familiars go. A little over-sensitive when it came to my insulting Ed (like he hadn’t started it), but a cool guy nonetheless. It was just that I didn’t entirely trust him. I wasn’t sure exactly what he was here to do and I didn’t know why his employer was making me jump through hoops. The thing was, I suspected some of my more… unusual abilities might be of interest to them.

  “Hmm,” said Henry, not sounding like he was buying it at all.

  A question had suddenly occurred to me – one that I suspected I should have asked a little earlier on in the evening.

  “Henry?”

  “Yes?”

  “Who exactly is it you work for?”

  Henry looked at me over his glasses, frowning. “You don’t already know?”

  “I didn’t even know licensing was a thing until today. How am I meant to know who you work for?”

  Both Henry and Ed were staring at me with looks of utter disbelief.

  “Who sets out on a quest to get a licence they didn’t know t
hey needed from an unknown organization?” Ed asked.

  “What?” I snapped indignantly. “They sent an axolotl. It seemed legit.”

  Not my best retort, to be fair.

  “Right,” said Ed.

  “Well, I work for the Australian Department of Magic and Death.”

  The term that would best describe my facial expression at this point is, I believe, ‘WTF’. I repeated it back to him just in case he didn’t realise what he’d said and how ridiculous he’d sounded. “Magic?”

  “Yes.”

  “… And death.”

  “Yes.”

  “In what insane world are they two things that you’d lump together? That’s like saying you’re from the Department of Squirrels and Artichokes!”

  “What?”

  “Exactly!”

  “Actually, it kind of makes sense to put death and magic together,” said Ed.

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Well,” said Henry, “think about it. Where exactly do ghosts fit? Or zombies?”

  “Well,” I said, then stopped, because I realised he was right. Damn it. “Fine.” The fire had sort of gone out of my argument when I realised I was wrong. “I guess you think I come under the category of both death and magic, don’t you?”

  “Actually, at the moment you come under the category of Other.”

  Oh, well that just did it. “OTHER? Like I’m some sort of weird specimen that defies classification? That’s the kind of insult I would have expected from Ed, Henry, not from you! What have I done to deserve that exactly?”

  “No, it’s not an insult,” said Henry quickly, clearly just trying to shut me up. “It’s just – well, I’m here to, you know, figure out what you are.”

  This was just unbelievable. “Well, I’ll make it very easy for you. I’m a human. I’m entirely normal, except that I can talk to ghosts. That’s it.”

  “You can also sense energy coming from the grave there.”

  Argh, why did he have to be so damn perceptive? I decided that in this case offence was the best defense. I threw my hand in the air. “Oh, so I can sense some energy. You’re right, you’ve got me, I’m just an alien wearing a human costume.”

  “What can you sense?” he asked, ignoring me.

  I didn’t really want to stop the argument about my status as ‘other’ there, but I also didn’t want to spend all night in the graveyard. The sun had disappeared completely now and while the temperature was still pleasant, the mosquito attacks were not. There was also the risk that the mosquitoes were not the only blood suckers out tonight. “We’ll continue the conversation about my classification later.”

  “I have no doubt.”

  I decided to ignore that. “I don’t know what’s in the grave, something small. I’m not getting much energy off it.”

  “What type of energy?”

  “It’s all muddled. Like, I don’t know, like there’s something interfering with it.”

  “You can’t even tell the type of energy?” Henry said, looking like he didn’t really believe me. “That’s not exactly impressive.”

  “As I’ve said before – many times – I’m hardly a master warlock.”

  While I was keeping a relatively calm exterior, inwardly I was rather alarmed. There was a body six feet away and I couldn’t tell the kind of energy that it was giving off. As Henry had hinted, that was pretty pathetic. Normally I could give a grave a magical CAT scan with no worries (I’d had my reasons for doing it before, don’t judge me), but today I was getting nothing.

  “Hmm,” said Henry. “I guess we’ll have to dig it up and see.”

  “Dig – dig it up?” Ed stammered.

  “Yes.”

  “B-but… I had an autopsy. It’ll be all…”

  “Hardly the first time I’ve seen a dead guy,” I said. And I was rather curious to see this one. Why couldn’t I sense the energy properly? The only explanation that made sense was that someone had used a clouding spell, but why? What could there possibly be in the coffin that warranted that much secrecy?

  “You don’t have to watch, Ed,” said Henry.

  “It just seems wrong to dig it up. I just feel like – ”

  “No one cares about your feelings, Ed. We’ve got a job to do.” I wanted to see what was in there that was so important someone had gone to the trouble of clouding it.

  Ed let out a noise of disgust before turning and beginning to walk away, hands thrust in his pockets like a moody teenager. I wondered how old he was. Maybe he was a moody teenager. Of course, technically I’d been a moody teenager less than a year ago, but I was always a cranky grandmother at heart.

  I rolled my eyes at Ed’s back and turned to Henry. I was about to ask him to transform into some sort of large animal that was very good at digging, but I was interrupted by a sudden surge of energy in the graveyard. The ground began to hum. It wasn’t something you could see or hear – yet – but there was power moving around the grave. In fact, there was so much power that it was moving over the whole cemetery. My stomach dropped. This could not be good.

  “Henry, do you feel that?”

  “Yes,” he said. We stared at each other in horror for a second, realizing what was about to happen all around us.

  Simultaneously, we yelled “Run!”

  And that we did.

  Chapter 3

  The ground was pulsing with magic, the green tendrils snaking around our feet and plunging down into graves both old and new. The graves’ occupants were being woken and some unknown force was telling them to come out and play. Hands were beginning to pop up from the ground on all sides, some with decaying flesh slopping off them as they moved, some already bare bones. The stench was awful. It was the kind of stink that someone with synaesthesia would describe as deafening. I knew my nose would be ringing for days afterwards.

  If, you know, I didn’t get bitten.

  Which seemed unlikely now that one of them had grabbed my foot. I hadn’t been paying attention to where I was treading and in my panic I had stepped right on top of an emerging hand.

  Henry, who had transformed into a cheetah (which in my book also made him a cheater in the race to get away from the zombies), had already cleared the cemetery. No one was going for Ed, who was nonetheless running for my house screaming in blind terror. Basically, no one was coming to my aid. I had been left for dead. And I was rather unimpressed.

  “What kind of wimps are you?!” I screamed at them, kicking at (and missing) the head of the zombie who’d grabbed me with my free foot. Luckily for me, only one arm and half its torso had emerged, but some others who had fully escaped their graves were heading my way.

  “Fast wimps!” Ed screamed back. Touché.

  The zombie who’d grabbed me was pretty ancient and brittle-looking. Not a scrap of flesh anywhere. I lined up my kick better this time and put all my force behind it. WHOMP. The head came clean off and knocked over another zombie headed my way. The hand around my foot went limp and I pulled myself free and ran, this time being a little more careful where I trod.

  Sticking to the path, while ensuring I was safe from attacks from below, meant I had to take a slightly circuitous route back to my house. More and more zombies were emerging all around me and heading my way, but I couldn’t cut through and head directly for my house because that involved walking over an older section of the cemetery where I knew for a fact there were a number of unmarked graves. Instead, I had to follow the path away from the cottage and towards the main entrance of the cemetery.

  A zombie managed to pull itself free of a grave directly to my right, but seemed to have trouble holding up its own weight once it was standing. It teetered for a moment before it fell and plopped onto the path in front of me. I screamed, leaped over it and kept running.

  I could hear groans all around me and to my horror (not an intentional pun) they seemed to be getting closer. To be honest, I was starting to slow down a little. Running from zombies was not something I did often and I was
getting puffed, what with all the screaming and evasive manoeuvres. I reached the turn in the path, circled around a huge gravestone with a statue of an angel on top, and stopped dead. (Not actually dead, I just stopped very quickly.)

  I was face-to-face with a particularly ripe zombie. The corpse was right at the age where they smell the worst. He was covered in holes where his skin had decomposed and on his left cheek – wait, were those maggots? I started to gag, trying to keep my dinner down. The zombie just stood there and blinked at me. I could see other zombies closing in on me from all directions and I knew I needed to run, but I was too terrified and exhausted. I took a deep breath, trying to compose myself, but the smell of zombie flesh didn’t exactly help. Then the zombie appeared to have a sort of face avalanche and part of his cheek fell off his face and onto my foot. That is not the sort of thing that many people can cope with. I screamed and kicked my foot, sending the piece of face flying off into the darkness. Then I vomited.

  The zombie made a weird squeal and stepped away from me, looking about as disgusted as you can when you’re missing half your face. Apparently I’d vomited onto his shoes, and he was not impressed.

  “Now you know how it feels,” I screeched at him. Suddenly I realised that he wasn’t the only zombie backing away in disgust. Really? I thought. You’re composed of rotting flesh and you think I’m disgusting?

  Then it clicked. The coriander. I’d eaten Mexican for dinner, and if ever there’s a type of vomit that will keep away the undead, it’s coriander flavour.

  Luckily, I’d managed to get a bit on my shirt (yes, luckily), so I was able to ward off any other zombies as I stumbled my way down the path and out of the cemetery. I made it to my front door, kicking my cheek-shoe off outside before entering. I closed the door quietly and tried to contain my anger. Then I turned to the other two, who were cowering in my kitchen. Henry had turned into a tiny kitten, probably trying to look cute so that I wouldn’t yell at him.

  “What the FU–”

  “OK, I sense that you’ve got a lot of anger happening right now,” said Ed.