I is for ... I Might Be the Ghost

 I Might Be
the Ghost

 

 

 

The woman slowed down to browse a few windows to her left, and I slowed down, stopped, and studied one myself. Some high-end clothes shop that I’d normally just pass without a second look. Shirts and ties pinned in a sparse display with their eye-watering prices displayed on tiny LCD screens beneath each item. Screens programmed to look like old-fashioned price cubes. Made you wonder what they thought technology was adding to the experience.

My peripheral vision told me when she moved on, and I shook my head at the display and followed. If I was going to catch up with Barnaby, then she was my Satnav, my TomTom in high heels.

She got to the end of the block and made a left turn, so I sped up and found myself on another shopping street that looked identical to the one we’d just left. She was walking faster now, and I matched the pace.  

I was getting closer to the man I sought.

Finally.

If I wasn’t trying to go unnoticed, I might even have put a spring in my step.

And then a bus behind me hit its air brakes and she turned around. I swerved to stare into another shop window, but I couldn’t have been more obvious if I’d been wearing a sandwich board that read: “I’m Following You” in six-inch letters.

She looked straight at me for a long moment, and I silently cursed my luck, but her face remained neutral, and she suddenly just faced forward and started walking again.

There was no caution, no increase in speed, and I realised that I’d got away with it

 

Ha!

See!

That’s what I’m talking about.

There’s that film, isn’t there? The one with Bruce Willis and that kid. I think we all know how that one turned out. And there was that James Herbert book, about the aircraft pilot who survived the crash, except it turns out he didn’t. Or the Flann O’Brien one about the Third Policeman. ‘The Third Policeman’, I think it’s called. Oh, and the Owl Creek Bridge story by Ambrose Bierce, where the guy finds out that the hanging rope didn’t actually break at all and … well, you know.

All narrated by, or focused upon, someone who finds out he’s actually dead, and has been pretty much all along. Most of them are ghosts, too, who just don’t know they’re ghosts.

I’m worried that I might fit quite neatly into that category.

Oh, wait a sec, there’s more.

 

                                    but I couldn’t count on it holding, so I took off the jacket I was wearing and carried it over my shoulder, and made sure I kept a person or two between us from then on.

     She wasn’t walking as if she was being followed. She wasn’t checking windows and the environment with sideways glances, or her phone, and her speed was neither overly brisk nor cautiously slow.

     She passed a beggar who gave her his best line and she tossed a coin into his cup without faltering in her step...

     When I passed he didn’t even look up

 

There!

C’mon. Twice ON ONE PAGE.

This is all foreshadowing. I’m certain of it.

See, this novel I’m in, there are too many odd things happening, and the author was pretty bloody vague about how I got out of that wrecked car in Chapter Twelve. 

“And then everything went black.”

Yeah thanks, very reassuring.

And then Chapter Thirteen – coincidence? I think not – starts with me waking up and there’s that misunderstanding with the nurse, played for comic effect, I guess, if you’re setting your comedy bar really low, and then I discharge myself because I know that my brakes were tampered with and I think I know who did it – Professor Barnaby Virgo – and I want to find him before he kills the last four on his zodiacal list and disappears forever, and the whole but why aren’t you more hurt? question is glossed over by the lean and muscular prose style, with its driving action set-pieces and its clever one-liners but seriously, man, I think I died in that crash.

And I know what you’re thinking: He’s not that kind of writer.

He tells two-fisted detective tales, not retribution-from-beyond-the-grave horror crap, but think about it. He’s not immune to over-egging his plots now, is he?

There was that stupid ‘twins’ reveal in ‘Double Negative’, which, now I think about it, is even there, bold as neon, in the bloody title.  And then there was that annoying bit with the psychic in ‘The Shell Game’ where, although she was using cold reading skills for her predictions, it was hinted that that last one was just too accurate, and that she had to have had another source, and I think wait a minute, perhaps … nah, couldn’t have been. Could it?

The book might as well have had a built-in MP3 chip that played the Twilight Zone theme when you hit that page.

♪ Doo-doo-doo-doo Doo-doo-doo-doo ♪

Anyway, the point is, my writer is getting bored by pure crime.

I think he only writes it because it’s a guaranteed sale.

But boredom can make a person do strange things.

Think about it.

He’s definitely getting bloodier and more sadistic in his plots. The first few books had killers, of course they did, but they were … believable. They certainly weren’t the outré genius-serial-killer crap of the last four. The killer always one-step-ahead-of-the-cops-in-some-perverted-chess-game routine that was tired before Thomas Harris wrote that Silence of the Lambs follow-up,  and stone-cold dead by the time he wrote the prequel.

And the villains just keep getting madder. That face-thief in ‘Shattered Visage’ was just grim, man. It had no bearing on the plot, it was just a ghoulish flourish. I think he’s just pushing things further than he needs so his publisher will object and he’ll feign indignance and use it as a reason to quit the series.

I guess eight books will do that to an author.

 

[insert more street pursuit here. I’m tired. Want to end on something exciting so I can pick it up easily tomorrow]

 

Finally, she reached the house. Now she started looking around to make sure she wasn’t being observed. From my vantage point behind the tree

     I’m telling you, I’m a ghost. I could basically stand right next to her singing ‘Lady in Red’ at the top of my voice and she’s still not going to see me.

                 I see her take out her phone and make a call.

     And now you’re screwing up your tenses.

She spoke for a few seconds and then put the phone away. She unclicked the gate and started towards the house.

 

You see, I think he’s been getting bored with me as a character as much as bored of straight crime.

And worse, I think he’s started to hate me.

Personally.

Case in point: The aforementioned ‘Shattered Visage’.

The last but one book.

I track Montaigne Gruber – and what kind of name is that? Doesn’t Louis read Montaigne in those John Connolly books my author’s been reading? And Gruber, that’s from fucking Die Hard. There’s a difference between allusion and laziness, mate – I track Montaigne Gruber to his lair with the clue that I got from the pawnbroker, only to have the tables turned the moment I walk in the door. Gruber was the pawnbroker and he’s sent me into his own trap. Realisation dawns too late, he stabs me in the neck with a syringe and I wake up in his dungeon … sorry, cellar … with the faces of his victims staring down at me. Except … well, except without eyes. So not staring, I guess. And I’ve already told Inspector Cowley that I’m going there, so it’s just a matter of waiting but then there’s that whole half a chapter of weird, out of place, homo-erotic torture that only ends after I’ve lost two fingers because Cowley got held up … You can see what I’m saying, no?

The first four books and all I get are bruises, a cracked rib, a bullet-grazed calf, oh, and a black eye.

Then it gets cruel. A knife wound in the buttock that Cowley still takes the piss out of in THIS BOOK. Two teeth knocked out by the Grey One’s acolyte in Book 5. He writes me pain for the fingers every time there’s a change in temperature. And he insists on giving me phantom pain in them. Phantom. Pain.

Phantom.

And what is the book called, this time?

‘Chasing the Ghost’.

I’m telling you, I’m a ghost in this one.