Stolen Ghouls

by Alex A King

  Panos Grekos, the island’s coroner, appeared, hunched over a stretcher. He’s paler than the average Greek because he spends his time in the hospital’s basement, hanging with the dead. Although he doesn’t know it, his mother judges him from beyond the grave. When Panos heads to the periptero—newsstand—she goes full banshee, howling at his retreating back as he’s carrying home the current month’s editions of German Jugs and Tattooed Tail. Why he doesn’t get his porn online like a regular person is beyond me.

  “What have you got for me?” Panos barked.

  Leo stepped aside. “See for yourself.”

  The coroner peered down at Roger Wilson’s remains, finger perilously close to exploring his nostril. He’s one of those men who never hesitates to blow a nose oyster on to the ground, leaving it to bake under the Greek sun. “This the English one?”

  “Roger Wilson,” I said.

  He looked up, noticing my existence for the first time today. “You again,” he said.

  Guilty--although not of a crime. My job often depended on me being at the right place at the right time, and lately I’d managed to be the first warm, breathing body at the scene of two too many deaths. And now, a third one.

  “Any idea about cause of death?” Leo asked the coroner.

  “Spontaneous combustion of the kolos,” Panos said. He crouched beside Roger Wilson’s husk. “How would I know? I just got here.”

  “Natural causes,” I said, though no one had asked for my opinion. “It had to be.”

  Both men glanced at me, then they went right back to police business.

  I was right—at least I thought so. Nothing brings a ghost back faster than a bit of murder. An absence of spectral Roger Wilson meant an absence of foul play.

  Constable Gus Pappas was next through the door. From his disheveled appearance I could tell he’d thrown his uniform on in a hurry. Built like a pipe cleaner with a buzz cut, he’s the youngest cop on the island. Pappas is a good kid and a decent cop, but his stomach can’t handle death.

  “Is he dead?” he asked me.

  “Regular dead, probably not murdered dead,” I said.

  The coroner’s head shot up. “Thank the Virgin Mary I have an expert here. Tell me, expert, what is the cause of death?”

  “He overdosed on German Jugs,” I said.

  Panos Grekos stared at me. Hard.

  “I’m going over here,” I said, shuffling backwards until my back touched the door.

  “Good idea,” he said.

  My hasty retreat meant I was sharing space with Constable Pappas. Color had bled out of the young cop’s face. “Want to come vomit with me?” he asked. His hand slapped his mouth. He bolted into the street.

  There wasn’t time to tell him about the Cake Emporium’s garbage can sitting just inside the entrance, in case customers needed to dump napkins on the way out. Would a garbage can work if you couldn’t see it? That was one of those philosophical questions that was bound to keep me up at night now that I knew about the cake shop’s quirk.

  I went out into the street to check on him.

  “Relax.” I handed him a packet of tissues from my bag. “It’s just a regular corpse, not gross or weird one.”

  He took a tissue, wiped his mouth. “My stomach doesn’t know the difference.”

  Lucky for him the island didn’t see much out-of-the-ordinary death; although, Leo was right, lately we’d had more than our fair share. Something about Merope was changing.

  “Who was he?” the young cop asked.

  “Roger Wilson, the Englishman.”

  To my surprise, he rubbed his hands together. With the puking out of his system his skin had lost its pallor. “Great. Now I get to see what he’s collecting in that old place of his.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He was a collector or something--at least that’s my cousin’s theory.” Pappas’ cousin was the local mailman. He delivered Merope’s mail on his motorcycle. “He was always taking packages out there. Kyrios Wilson used to snatch the boxes from him and scurry back into the house like a little rat.”

  Kyrios is the Greek word for Mister. Kyria is the feminine form for a married woman. If you’re a single woman you get stuck with the considerably longer and harder to pronounce despinida. In Greek society if you don’t want to be gossiped about it’s safer to tack the correct one onto a person’s name if they’re five or more years your senior—unless you’re friends. I’d never call my client and almost-friend Angela anything except Angela, and she had at least twenty years on me, although she’d only admit to ten.

  “Probably care packages from home,” I said. “Cans of mushy peas, rain, and sadness.”

  When I’m not discovering dead bodies, I’m busy running my own company, Finders Keepers. Looking for something? I can find it. That heirloom plate that belonged to your great-grandmother, the one you dropped, the one you need to replace before your mother murders you? If a match exists, I can save you from filicide. Missing your beloved pet chicken? I can find Clucky before she or he winds up in someone’s cooking pot, backstroking amongst the chickpeas. Looking for proof your spouse is rubbing their smooshy bits on someone else’s smooshy bits? If smooshy bits are smooshing, I can get photos. I’ve always had a knack for finding things. People on Merope make things easier. Sooner or later--usually sooner--the local gossip finds its way to me. People love being the ones to tell me things. What I didn’t know until right now was that Roger Wilson was a potential collector—of what, I didn’t know—or that he received a higher volume of packages than most people. I filed the information away and promptly forgot about it because Leo and the coroner were lifting the dead man, and they needed a little help tucking him into the body bag. Pappas rushed over to help, refusing to make eye contact with Roger Wilson’s remains.

  “Find anything yet?” I asked.

  Leo tilted his chin up-down. Greek for no. My childhood happened in the USA. Then my Greek parents dragged our family to Greece at a low point, when my grandmother claimed she was dying of a--as she called it--”mouni disease”. The so-called vaginal disease turned out to be something easily cured with antibiotics. Thanks to our parents, my sister Toula and I could read, write, and speak Greek long before we landed on Greek soil. The nuances took longer to adopt, so sometimes I shook my head when I meant no.

  “Just this corpse,” Panos Grekos said dryly.

  “So Roger Wilson just wandered in here off the street and died of natural causes?” I said. “Like a stray?”

  Then I froze.

  Something in the shop stirred. My peripheral vision caught a flash of color and movement. I didn’t look at it. Not yet.

  “Won’t know for sure until Panos checks him out,” Leo told me. Panos grunted in his direction. “But at this point it looks like that’s how it happened. There don’t appear to be external signs of foul play. None of the usual suspects, anyway.” He blew out a sigh. “I have to go write up a report, but how about dinner tonight?”

  I eyed him warily. “Just us?”

  “I hope so.”

  I did, too. Somehow, Leo had picked up a pair of passengers he couldn’t see or hear. Lucky me, I saw his demon companions in full Technicolor when they were sniffing around him. Right now the succubi were hiding out elsewhere in their pocket dimension, or possibly bothering some other guy in their man candy collection of action figures.

  “You don’t care that I can see a shop you can’t?”

  He grinned. “I care that you show up to our date and don’t escape out of a window part way through.”

  Good enough--for now. I shot my own grin at him and made a big show of shutting the Cake Emporium’s door.

  As he angled into his car and rolled away, I waved.

  It was all a big production, starring me.

  As soon as Leo was out of sight, I ducked back into the bakery and closed the door. The air was still, quiet, sugar-scented. Whatever my peripheral vision snagged on moments ago had vanished. I did a circuit of th
e shop to make sure nothing was damaged besides the front window. Everything appeared to be normal and unbroken. My mouth watered the way it always did when I was enveloped between the bakery’s sweet walls.

  Done with the shop, I wandered into the kitchen. Jack Honeychurch worked in a cleanroom worthy of the Umbrella Corporation before the breech and subsequent zombie outbreak. Appliances gleamed. Floors and counters shone. Dirt had no place here—a major miracle on an island where chickens and other domesticated birds routinely wandered in and out of shops.

  Aha.

  Standing in front of the bakery’s large pantry was a gaunt sixty-something man I recognized from when he was lying dead on the floor as recently as five minutes earlier.

  “Looking for something?” I asked in perfectly serviceable American English.

  “Jesus fooking Christ!” Roger Wilson yelped, then winked out of existence with a small audible pop.

  I was wrong; this was murder.

  Chapter Two

  I yanked open the pantry door and peered into the cavernous space, in case Roger Wilson had selected a new hiding place.

  Nope. Empty. Unless ingredients counted. Who knew there were so many varieties of sugar and flour? Potato flour, corn flour, almond, brown sugar, browner sugar, sugar that sparkled like a disco ball in a bag.

  “Mr. Wilson?”

  Silence.

  With a snick the pantry door closed. At the speed of tortoise, I turned in a tight circle. “Mr. Wilson?”

  There was a small pop. He was back. Somewhere.

  “I know you’re there,” I said. “I saw you.”

  “Then hurry up and get your arse in here,” came his pale English voice.

  Pantry.

  I opened the door again and found the ferret-faced Roger Wilson hovering over a large paper sack on the floor.

  “What’s so compelling about the pantry?” I asked him.

  “Salt.” He prodded the sack with his shoe’s toe. The transparent leather wafted through the packaging without making a dent. Ghosts have no substance, especially when they’re fresh. “Sprinkle it around the whole shop. Hurry up then.”

  “You want me to sprinkle salt all around the shop?”

  “Are you bloody deaf or something? Sprinkle it in a circle.” His drew a circle in the air with his ghost hand. “In an unbroken circle. Don’t fook it up neither, or we’ll both be fooked,” he said.

  Salt is the ultimate ghost trap. Put a ring of the grains around a ghost and they’re stuck inside until something or someone breaks the circle. This was recently acquired knowledge to me, but I’d witnessed the prison power of salt myself.

  I asked the obvious question: “Why?”

  “Because there’s a jolly great git out there who killed me, isn’t there? He’ll come back for seconds, you see if he doesn’t.” His expression turned sly. “Maybe he’ll get you, too.”

  Deep breath. “You know you’re dead, right? You’re a ghost. Nothing can kill you now because the ferry to Dead as a Doornail already sailed.”

  “Move your arse, you sodding cow!”

  Wow. And here I thought Roger Wilson was milquetoast. As it turned out he was what Greeks called a kolotripas—an asshole.

  Normally I’d balk at sprinkling salt all over someone else’s property, but the obnoxious jerk-face ghost was about to pop out of his skin—not that he had skin now, just the appearance of it. Living in Greece had given his corporeal face some color, but right now it see-through and stark white. The ghost of Roger Wilson was about pee its ghost pants. It couldn’t hurt to make a small salt circle. Once Roger Wilson and his shockingly foul mouth were safe inside, he might spew out a few useful answers. Betty of all people would understand, and besides, I would have the salt swept up before she returned to her shop.

  I carpe’d the sodium and worked quickly and carefully, forming a circle in the Cake Emporium’s kitchen.

  “I said around the whole shop,” Roger Wilson complained while he watched me work. “Are you deaf or something?”

  I straightened up. “Do you want to do this?”

  He had the audacity to look peeved. “I can’t touch anything without going right through it. It’s a right pain in the arse.”

  “As the person doing all the work, I get to decide how big the circle is. If you have any complaints, take it up with my boss.”

  “Your boss? Who’s that when he’s at home?”

  Sexist much? “That would be me.”

  “Tell your employee she’s a bloody moron.”

  Yeah, I’d get right on that.

  With a few more shakes of the sack, the circle was complete, and Roger Wilson and I were on the inside. I set the sack down and addressed the formerly alive man.

  “Want to tell me what’s going on?”

  Now that we were surrounded by salt, he had relaxed a little. Some of the color had poured back into his transparent face. He’d gone from milk to cream. “You can see me, then?”

  “That or you’re a figment of my imagination,” I joked.

  “No--you can see me. You can really see me.”

  Most of the time I don’t let ghosts know about my little party trick. The post-living can be real pests, and that’s putting it politely. Death does something to a person, besides pulling their plug. It distills their personalities in ways I don’t quite understand, amplifying certain traits and dialing down their inhibitions. Alive, Roger Wilson was never personable. But dead he was an obnoxious ass. My grandmother, wherever she was, had to be the most insufferable creature in the Afterlife. She’d been a real character, frequently dispensing useful information such as “A hard man is good to find, but three hard men is better if you know what I mean,” and “If you go without underwear you will save time and laundry”. But I was glad, in some ways, that she had never come back to visit. I wasn’t sure I could handle whatever kind of force of nature she’d become post-death. Today I was okay with Roger Wilson knowing my secret. With luck he’d soon buzz off to the Afterlife and never bother me again.

  I raised my hands, careful not to give the ghost the moutsa—a charming Greek gesture that means you’re rubbing metaphorical poop in the other person’s face and that you think they have a chronic masturbation habit that’s softened their brain to the consistency of pureed pumpkin. He wasn’t Greek so he might not even know about the moutsa, but old habits die the hardest, if they die at all.

  “You’ve got me there,” I said. “I see dead people.”

  His gaze darted left them right before settling on my face. “Go on then, tell me, do you see any one else right now?”

  “Nope.”

  “You didn’t look!”

  I looked. Apart from Roger I was alone. “Still no. So about that explanation …”

  “Are you sure?” His question slashed out like a knife. “That we’re alone, I mean.”

  “Positive.”

  He relaxed another inch. “All right. Someone tried to kill me--”

  “And succeeded, by the looks of things.”

  “Well aren’t you a clever clogs?”

  Probably that was one of those rhetorical questions, so I didn’t waste time answering that I avoided clogs because I like my feet. “Why don’t you tell me what happened?”

  “One minute I was alive, wasn’t I? Going about my business, heart beating same as ever. Then next thing I know I’m dead and some silly bint is asking me stupid questions.”

  Something told me I was the silly bint he’d mentioned. Was I supposed to be offended? And what was a bint anyway?

  “Any idea who killed you?”

  “A man, I suppose. Or a woman. That part is hazy, like I’ve had one too many pints down at the pub.”

  “What were you doing when you were killed?”

  “What do you think I was doing? Coming here, wasn’t I. Otherwise I wouldn’t be here. I don’t remember what happened so I suppose that’s it.”

  There was logic in there somewhere. In his mind. Kind of a wherever you go, ther
e you are thing. “Maybe you were looking for a hiding spot and this was convenient.”

  “Bloody hell, does it matter? I’m fooking dead. From where I’m standing—”

  “Hovering.”

  “Fook! I can’t even touch the ground.” He poked the tile with his transparent shoe toe. The shoe vanished up to the laces. “Listen, you have to help me, otherwise I’m buggered.”

  “Ghosts can’t do that, you know. At least I don’t think they can.”

  His face went blank. “Do what?”

  “The buggering thing.”

  “Are you obtuse or plain barmy?”

  “I’m going with obtuse since I know what that means.”

  He shook his head. “You have to help me.”

  “With what?”

  “Find the arsehole who killed me and make sure they wind up in the clink.”

  “The clink?”

  “The big house. Jail. Behind bars.”

  “So how am I supposed to do that?”

  “I don’t know. Come up with something. Aren’t you the island’s private snoop?”

  This was a road I didn’t want to take again. Solving crimes was police work. I liked to work on the sunnier, happier, less deadly side of the street, where there’s no grave dust and definitely no nagging, yapping ghosts.

  “Not even close. Mostly my job involves shopping online and occasionally hunting for a missing sheep.”

  “So do that then, but with a regular person who happens to be a murderer. How bloody hard can it be?”