Ungrateful Dead Read Free

isn’t showing.” I stood, stretching. “You think she’s camera-shy?” I rapped loudly on the desk. “Hey – what was her name?”
    “Esther Wallis,” Charlie supplied, eyes darting around the chamber nervously.
    “Hey, Esther!” I called, rapping again. “Come out, come out wherever you are! Don’t be all coy, now.”
    “Ethan!” Charlie jumped up, grabbing my hand. “Don’t taunt the dead!”
    “Or what? She’ll curse me? You think ghosts can do curses?”
    “You’re thinking of mummies, I think.” Charlie slouched down in his chair again, eyes fixed on the lights overhead. “Did you see that flicker? That was a definite flicker, Ethan. I think you annoyed her.”
    I glanced at the light. It was definitely buzzing, but the thermometer was still steady at four degrees, so I didn’t think I could intepret it as supernatural phenomena. I made a quick note in my pad though, just for the sake of novelty. 11:27, lights buzzing . It wasn’t going to be my most exciting case ever. I could just feel it.
    Charlie made a trip to the vending machines upstairs, supplying us with coffee and chocolate, and then we returned to our respective filing and doodling. “Why d’you think they called the place Cloth Encounters ?” I asked Charlie. “ Brief Encounters would be a better pun, right?”
    The lights flickered again, plunging us into complete darkness for a few seconds before coming up again. Charlie twitched, splashing coffee on his papers. “Look at that!” he whispered. “She doesn’t like you talking about the shop. Maybe it reminds her of how she died?”
    The lights went off and stayed off. I frowned at Charlie’s silhouette. “Maybe talking about how she died reminds her of how she died?”
    There was a great clank, like something rammed into one of the steel drawers. We both jumped then, and I reached for my digital camera. Creeping over to the source of the noise, I ran my hand over the metal. There was a small dent, like someone had punched it, and it was warm, which kind of struck me as the opposite of ghostly, based on Charlie’s comments. “What’s the temperature over there?” I asked him.
    “Minus four and dropping.” Charlie’s voice was squeaky with nerves. “She’s here, Ethan.”
    Frigid air rushed past me, through me, and for a second I saw stars flash in the dark. It didn’t feel like faulty air conditioning. It felt fucking awful, like my bones had been plunged into ice water. I mean, it didn’t convince me we had a phantom on our hands, but it did convince me this wasn’t a maintenance problem.
    The drawer at my knees flew open, slamming me onto my ass. Pain cracked up my legs and spine and I yowled pretty unmanfully, clutching my battered knees. “Son of a ...”
    Cold air slapped at me, hard, like a physical blow now, shutting me up pretty effectively. Okay. I could be converted. Something weird was definitely going on here.
    “She’s mad at you,” Charlie whispered. The lights flickered on and off, buzzing like a jar of wasps.
    I picked myself up with a grunt. “What are you, her interpreter?”
    “The temperature’s still dropping,” he reported. “Do you think she can freeze us to death?”
    “Why would she?” I wondered, zipping my jacket up. My breath fogged in the air, and the chill of the room made my muscles ache. I tried to put myself in a dead girl’s shoes. I could get being pissed off about being dead, especially if I’d died in a bungled robbery at a fucking underpants shop and then got stuck haunting the morgue, but if that was my fate, what would I want? What would I expect the living to do about my predicament?
    I snapped a couple of pictures of the dented drawer while I considered it. Call me cynical, but people are pretty basic. Feed ‘em, fuck ‘em, and pay ‘em, and most will be happy. Especially if you do it in that order.Take those things away, throw in being dead, and yeah, I’d have issues too. But was Esther trying to take