Excerpt

Start the Grimdale Graveyard Mysteries series and dive into a new adventure in the same world :

“Go on, dearie. Let me have a little sniff of that salty goodness.”

“No,” I snap under my breath as I snatch the pretzels from the tray table and stuff them in my pocket.

For your information, I’m not hanging out in the world’s grossest sex club. (That was two years ago in Amsterdam. My shoes stuck to the floor.) I’m sitting in my seat on a flight somewhere over the United Arab Emirates, minding my own business and trying to ignore the ghost of a blue-haired old biddy who is annoyingly fascinated by my airline snacks.

“Pleeeeease? Just hold the bag out so I can have a whiff.”

I glare at her before turning my body toward the window. Outside, the world is dark – the kind of deep, unsettling darkness that makes you remember you’re hurtling through space at a gazillion miles an hour with only a computer, a hopefully not-drunk pilot, and the laws of physics standing between you and a fiery, dramatic death. We’re somewhere over the Middle East, but the cloud cover is so thick that it looks like we’re flying into a black hole.

Most people in the cabin are settling down to sleep, but I won’t get any peace as long as Chatty Cathy insists on a running commentary of my snacks.

“I know you can see me, dearie,” she sighs. I watch out of the corner of my eye as she hovers over the empty seat beside me. “My good friend the headless pilot told me all about you. Well, he didn’t tell me so much as gesticulated. He said your thighs were much bigger. You should eat more, put some meat on those bones – starting with those pretzels in your pocket.”

I groan. Stupid ghosts. They have no right to be gesticulating about the size of my thighs, which are perfectly fine as they are, thank you very much.

It figures that airplane ghosts talk to each other. There aren’t that many of them compared to, say, hospitals, old asylums, and Starbucks stores. They generally stick to the plane where they died but they can hop off at airports and float around in the terminals like some kind of spectral hen party, swapping gossip about their flights. The Headless Pilot and I had a run-in on my flight from Bali last year, and it was not a pleasant experience. I was on the loo, reading a smutty romance novel on my phone and enjoying hour three of absolutely no dead people when he stuck his torso through the bathroom door and shook his neck stub at me. I screamed bloody murder because that’s what you do when you have a see-through neck stub in your face, and the stewardess had to break down the door because she thought I was having some kind of fit. They didn’t believe my story about seeing a spider, and I’ve been banned from that airline for life.

Ghosts are nothing but trouble.

Usually, airplanes are one of the few places in the world where I’m blissfully free of ghosts for a while. Statistically, not that many people die on planes. It’s one of the reasons I decided to leave my small British village of Grimdale the moment I got my GCSE and embark on a backpacking trip around the world. It wasn’t the most pressing motivation, but it definitely factored high on my ‘reasons to get as far from Grimdale as possible’ list.

And now, after all this time, I’m heading back to Grimdale, a place I very much do not want to be, because of the terrible thing…

No.I squeeze my eyes shut. I don’t want to think about that. If I burst into tears on this plane, Chatty Cathy will never let me hear the end of it.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

I open my eyes and see the reflection of a man in a business suit in the window. Ghosts don’t have reflections, so it’s a real live person talking to me. That doesn’t happen often – my resting bitchface is so legendary that sonnets have been composed in its honor.

I spin around. Businessman McArmaniPants flashes me an apologetic smile. He leans forward and puts his arm on the back of the seat, right through the old lady’s spectral head.

“Argh, watch where you’re putting those skinbags, you rotten oaf!” She jerks away, holding her head as she hops angrily down the aisle. She looks like a chicken with her bony elbows jerking wildly. I cough into my hand to cover my smirk.

Businessman McArmaniPants flashes me a megawatt smile. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I noticed that this seat is empty. I wondered if I could sit next to you – I’m near the back and a kid spilled his orange juice and now everything is sticky?—”

“Sure.” I pat the seat, grateful for his presence. He’ll act as a buffer between me and the old lady ghost. “Please, make yourself at home. Stay as long as you like.”

“Do not make yourself at home!” Chatty Cathy huffs, glaring at the man as he lowers himself into her seat. “This is my chair. I claimed it first. Get your own snacks to sniff.”

“Do you want some pretzels?” I crack open the bag and offer it to my new seatmate, knowing that the ghost won’t want to risk getting close enough to sniff them now.

“Sure.” He takes a handful. “Hey, why are you poking out your tongue?”

“Oh.” A blush creeps across my cheeks as the old biddy huffs away. “No reason.”

Are you ready for a little ghost lore? I’m on the second leg of my thirty-two hours of flying from New Zealand to London, so I have time to kill.

Time to kill. Ha ha. I’m a comedian.

Here’s the skinny on the spirits of the dead, aka, Bree’s Ghost Rules:

Not everyone who dies becomes a ghost. You have to have unfinished business. Often, you don’t remember what that business is, which I’m sure must be annoying.

Ghosts hang around the location where they died. There’s an invisible force I call ghost mojo (it’s a highly technical term I came up with when I was eight, shut up) that acts like a rubber band that pulls them back to the location of their death. They can wander away from their death location, but the ghost mojo gets worse the further they go until it becomes painful for them to remain away and they get sucked back to their death place again.

Some ghosts, like my childhood friend Ambrose, aren’t tied to a death location but instead, a place that’s important to them. I don’t know how it works, so I blame it on ghost mojo.

Ghost mojo is also why ghosts can fly through airplane bathroom doors but don’t fall through the floor and out into space. Ghost mojo keeps spirits standing on the ground the way they did when they were alive.

Only very powerful or very angry ghosts can interact with the human world by moving things or flickering lights or writing on mirrors. Mostly they just waft around being annoying.

Despite not having noses, they can still sense strong smells, so they’re forever lingering around when people are eating and begging to sniff my salty nuts.

Ghosts hate it when humans walk through them. Hate. It. Sometimes I do it just because I know it pisses them off so much.

How do I know so much about ghosts?

Because I’m the only person who can see them.

I had an accident when I was five years old – I fell off my bike and cracked my head on a rock – and ever since I’ve been able to see the dead. See them and talk to them and be infinitely harassed by them?—

“Go on, dearie,” the old lady pokes her head out of the luggage rack. “Just a little sniff.”

I’m Bree Mortimer. And it’s going to be a long flight.

TO BE CONTINUED