Terence James Eeles
In the creepy dark of a dying autumn, the tiniest light will live for miles.
And still waiting on this ghost tour to start, stealing warmth from the strangers I’m huddled with outside this pub—The 8 Lives of 9—I don’t mean to offend, scare, or bore you with yet another ghost story . . .
. . . About living, about dying—or being stuck somewhere in between—but it was around Hallowe’en years ago when he first experimented doing this. Quarking about. Offing himself.
My brother—the Tremendous Dodo Head.
I lick snot water trickling at my nose and count the loose change of attendees: tonight’s turnout poor compared to other ghost tours I’ve suffered through in other towns on other nights, stalking my sib—the Enigmatic Corner Dunce.
By a jack-o’-lantern’s glow, dog walkers heel their mutts and Gore-Texed tourists wait poised with cameras. Behind them, a teenage couple—Ghoulfriend and boyFiend—hold hands, camouflaged in figure-hugging black.
I blow on a chestnut and then toss it into my mouth. Tongue folding steaming pulp, I mull over the remaining tour weirdo who belongs here even less than I do. He’s fancy dressed in vertical black-and-white stripes, face ashtray dirty, his eye sockets charcoal-painted pits. Swigging from a can, peroxide hair flapping erratically in the wind, he looks like Beetlejuice on parole. Or Kurt Cobain’s zombie corpse.
Popping another hot chestnut into my mouth—tasting if they taste right—I watch the amber haze behind BeetleKurt stretch out into the darkness. Stray beyond the jack-o’-lantern’s grin, and you’ll trek across rural Echmond all night, squinting in the dark with a headache behind your eyes and arms heavy from feeling out into nothing in front of you.
As kids, my brother couldn’t carve a pumpkin to save his life. Like that half term he tried sabotaging mine but instead put a kitchen knife through his hand—somehow missing the artery on the finger he’d flip me off with. He just patiently observed his blood tear into his own gutted pumpkin, like candle wax beading down an old-school candelabra.
“Good All Hallows’ Eve.”
We turn to face the pub’s entrance. There, a thick door closes behind the silhouette of a heavily cloaked shadow that lifts the nearby jack-o’-lantern by its rope handle.
“All alive and well, I pray,” he booms, lifting the lantern higher with fingerless gloves, his coat’s brushed leather shoulder flaps tolling level with his chest.
“I am your guide for this evening.” He carefully cherishes each word like the next might be his last: this, a lifetime of community theatre wasted. “Jack”—his am-dram histrionics boast—“the Day-Tripper.”
He then checks his notepad against the lantern light, and his long, grey sideburns tint orange as he soundlessly counts off the name of each paying nobody, making sure—doubly sure—there aren’t any freeloaders, any fare dodgers, any pikey hangers-on . . .
“Polterguests,” he says and rallies a chorus of polite laughter from the tour group.
I roll my eyes into their warm sockets.
“Get on with it,” says the striped loner BeetleKurt, slurring a stink of rotten toffee apples into his cider can. “I’ve somewhere to be . . .”
Tonguing my gums, I think, Me too—wherever the hell my brother, the Grand Bogey Eater, might be, if I ever find him—and I pop another chestnut.
“Somewhere, yeah,” a voice snipes—the gothy Ghoulfriend of the teen couple—“like an AA meeting . . .”
Eyes rolling again, I instead turn to Echmond’s village green. There—the trees wasted to just bones of bare bark with leaves dead at their feet, protected by some blah, blah Woodland Trust—is one tree in particular.
The lowest branch an outstretched arm on tippy-toes too high, shaped like an inverted L, it stands taller than the rest. Its branches are the colour of wooden stocks and spread out like scabbed-up veins.
Despite tonight being Hallowe’en, this tree is the reason why mini faeries, goblins, and witches aren’t running the streets and door-knocking for treats. Flower bouquets pile up against the trunk; Do Not Cross police tape cordons off the area, the material sighing like a lazily tied birthday present—the kind of gift my brother probably would’ve been ungrateful for.
Another uninvited birthday party the Outstanding Eejit surely would’ve ruined.
“The jack-o’-lantern,” the guide says, raising his voice, “is a spooky light—ignis fatuus, the will-o’-the-wisp—that hovers over bogs or by distance at twilight. Meaning ‘night watchman’ or ‘man with lantern,’ it is a tale of light surviving in the dark.”
I stifle a yawn. This tale I know already—where the tiniest light will live for miles. Like most oral stories there are variations, but the myth goes a traveller on his journeys called Jack—a different Jack—tricks ’n’ traps the Devil, ultimately stripping him of his powers.
“To release him, Jack made the Devil vow to never take his soul.” The guide puts a hand on his heart. “And so when Jack passed away many years later, he found himself stuck. Helpless, just like the Devil was before him. Too sinful to go to God’s heaven and barred from the Devil’s hell, he became lost in the darkness . . .”
Then the Devil mockingly threw him an ember from the fires of hell—this I know—a spark that would never burn out—blah, blah—an ember Jack put inside a carved-out turnip to use as a makeshift lantern, to lead him
across purgatory.
Towards a final resting place that would never come.
“‘Jack of the Lantern’ is the story of your unpurified sins against God.” My lips mime his words verbatim. “Exempt from punishment and damnation, from forgiveness and
redemption, it is the story of your soul being led across the darkness of purgatory with the Devil as your light.”
This feeling, I know, is like being turned away by the worst nightclub in town.
Such a waster, you couldn’t even get into hell. And for your trouble all you got was a twinkly turnip.
What. The. F%k.
“Stay close,” Jack says, the camp Hammer Horror actor dying inside him. “But not too close.” He fumbles inside his murder mac.
There’s a chunky click, then high-pitched scribbling. Faces in the tour group knot up in confusion as the audio of cartoon chipmunks erupts from Jack’s cloak.
“One moment.” He whips something out—something like an aeroplane’s black box recorder but travel size.
Bringing it close to the grinning jack-o’-lantern, Jack spanks the relic cassette player once—like the time our parents smacked my brother after he dared me to poke a power socket with a walkie-talkie aerial. Twice—for the bang that blew it from my hand, tripping the house lights, toasting the fuse box.
Thrice—for the black starburst it left around the socket pips and faceplate, for the indefinite grounding he was slapped with, as well as a raw arse—and I juggle another hot chestnut on my tongue.
“Those tea lights cooking smells of pumpkin pie.” Jack nods towards the residential lanes, buying himself time. “Those lights burning brightest also burn the shortest.”
He says, fingers clambering all over the junk player, “It’s those lights that also make the scariest pumpkins.”
My brother was always the kind to burn the candle at both ends—up to no good, since time immemorial—and when Jack finally thumbs the right button, uncrittered music rings out to soundtrack his narration.
“Wow,” the Ghoulfriend deadpans. Over the naff chills and mediocre thrills of scratchy organ music, she huffs, “Lame.”
Tourists always love a stunt, something kitsch. Even if tour intros boil your blood, strangers will follow you to the end of the strangest places if you attach a gimmick. Before rain washes away chalk outlines or tribute wreaths begin to rot at crime scenes, already queuing at your service are a cluster of leisure and tourism mercenaries, dying to help you relive the grotesque.
Even after death you can visit hot spots like the cobbled streets of Whitechapel where Jack the Ripper disembowelled prostitutes in 1888. Or the claustrophobic Pont de l’Alma tunnel where Princess Diana’s chauffeur-driven Mercedes-Benz wiped out in Paris in 1997. Or outside übercool LA nightclub The Viper Room where actor and teen heartthrob River Phoenix collapsed after fatally ODing Hallowe’en morning in 1993.
Not so much exploiting death as it is catering to a niche market.
“So let us reveal tonight.” Jack turns and smiles through clenched teeth, patching the veneer of his eroding performance. “And revel”—he takes tentative steps towards the dark of town, his cheap eerie music playing—“in the ghosts of Echmond . . .”
“To Echmond!” BeetleKurt, his makeup running, pupils massive like open urns, toasts up high, startling the dog walkers’ mutts into barking. He sloshes cider onto the tourists flinching beside him, inviting a host of WTF stares.
The thing is on a tourist trap of morbid fascination like a ghost walk; you have to perish first before you become interesting. Before anybody cares. That’s what excursionists through hearse-tinted spectacles really long for: where someone died, how it ended, where it all went wrong—begging you to dress it with backstory, build expectation, and deliver a payoff.
To Pied Piper punters around on hokey ghost tours at Hallowe’en.
“And ghosts!” BeetleKurt toasts again, wet landing on my neck as he crumples the can in his fist, but before Jack can turn to berate—tourees barging, shunting, and kicking the heels of those in front—BeetleKurt’s already gone.
Already he’s walking across the village green alone. With the collar up, his outfit’s vertical stripes evaporate the farther he gets from the amber of Jack’s lantern.
And just before he disappears for good, his breath an ignited cloud left floating overhead, he pitches his can into
the darkness.
“Weirdo,” the Ghoulfriend says, unSamaritan-like, triggering a moronic chortle from the group. I roll my eyes, then pop another chestnut.
“Let us endeavour once more,” says Jack, winding his routine back up to torture me—but I’m losing focus and blah, blah zoning out.
Already I’m looking around, where I am and who I’m with—but not because I’m lazy. My brother’s the half-arsed one. Such a bad liar, like the time he pushed me on a park swing, double daring me to go 360 and not to worry because gravity and science will take care of me. It’s because I’ve heard it too many times:
Death.
Eyeing the ghost tour attendees surrounding me, I consider too many kooky scenarios, too much apparatus, too many fancy names for it, like foaming canine gums . . . savage dog walker petting bite . . . hydrophobia rabies . . . blah, blah, blah . . .
The tightrope between rehearsed tour anecdote and recent town fatality blurs. The old and the new. So I forget which death was what. How I know it. And what town I’m in. Looking around the group, wishful thinking, such as murdered boyFiend . . . jealous Ghoulfriend . . . victim precipitated police homicide . . . blah, blah, blah . . .
Muddled tour or tragedy tales, such as packed tourist coach . . . icy midnight motorway . . . multiple-lane collision . . . blah, blah, blah . . .
I have to block out the morbid and remind myself how I got here. Live to the end of every ghost walk just to con guides like Jack out of rumours, about my brother, the Amazing Dipstick—who isn’t dead dead.
Not exactly.
Only in a magician’s sawn-in-half-, impaled-, drowned-assistant kinda way.
Magicians with monikers such as the Outstanding Klutz or Magnificent Spazmo. Specialising in hocus-pocus stunts such as conniving apostle stitch up . . . sturdy wooden cross . . . public crucifixion . . . blah, blah, blah . . .
So switching off—a habit bullied in from tramping through dozens of these tours in the cold, wishing winter was warmer, so I could then at least treat this like a holiday—I follow the tour into the Echmond dark, who themselves follow Jack and his lantern’s amber safety.
Blindly, like lemmings.
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Before the addictive computer game and celebrated false myth, lemmings gained a reputation for killing themselves—ironically—because of a natural instinct to survive.
When their population reaches a certain boom point, a crux in overcrowding, hundreds and thousands of the furry Indiana Joneses migrate in search of food and shelter, questing in all directions and coastlines, not full of death and suicide, but life and optimism.
Hope.
Norwegian lemmings’ reproduction oscillates so violently, so severely, that every four years they expand from overpopulation and shrink to near extinction, and no one knows why.
Every four years, the Lemming Leap Year of Death.
“. . . Noncustodial father . . . cliff-parked car . . . coastal drowning . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack’s maybe droning on his walk, I’m not sure, still occasionally thumping his cassette player, still flogging his tragic tour theme. Leading us down residential lanes and past houses with lobotomised jack-o’-lanterns glowing beside welcome mats, the candles melting grins into grotesque gurns that flicker up onto brickwork, he’s possibly boring. “. . . Cold turkey quit alcoholic . . . top-floor council flat . . . defenestration . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
If everybody else jumped off a bridge or a cliff, would you do it, too?
Or would you rather be the first lemming—the infamous martyr who started it all? Because among my bungee cord–fastened tour notes you’ll find suicide’s a dangerously popular pastime: the most common fatality of teenagers in the UK.
At Beachy Head, the highest sea cliff in Britain, around twenty people a year plummet to their deaths. The same figure goes for The Gap in Watsons Bay, Sydney, Australia.
Late noughties in the small town of Bridgend, Wales, twenty-five youngsters committed suicide in a little over two years, up from the annual average of three.
The majority by hanging.
And most having known each other.
All through junior school, there were party invites I got that my brother didn’t. Where the birthday peep would rather cancel than invite him. It wouldn’t have hurt him during high school to dress better, talk to girls, but his popularity’s boomed since then. These days, the Great Anti-Socialite is quite the unsocial networker.
Now it’s never him that misses the party.
“. . . Bullied transvestite . . . loft-beam noose . . . asphyxia . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack might be chivvying us, his lit pumpkin leading us into dodgy cul-de-sacs and down dark alleyways. Shuffling behind like some zombie chain gang, wearing the shadows of those in front the same way those behind wear ours, he could be goading, “. . . Bedroom tax repossession . . . industrial pesticide . . . toxic poisoning . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
Yet these suicide cliques are nothing new. They’re really just the modern story of Werther—from Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther—where the failed “hero,” plagued by unrequited love, commits suicide by pistol. Except his suicide became so de rigueur for other losers sucker punched by love that back then as many as two thousand young men took their lives in the exact same way.
As nonfiction.
For real.
So much so that shortly after publication the book became banned—one of the first examples of copycat suicide. In what became known as the Werther effect, young men even began to dress like Goethe’s “hero” out of Werther-Fieber: Werther Fever.
The same trend of misery back then that we see in the Ghoulfriend’s boyFiend imitating right now: black eyeliner, tight jeans, and high-maintenance hair, sucker punched by love until panda-eyed, maybe misunderstood, seeking attention and a way out, like Werther.
Fashion sells, but death sells more.
Even Napoleon was down with the kids. The young Bonaparte writing Goethe-style monologues during his war campaigns, The Sorrows tucked in the back pocket of the fashionable Werther threads of his day.
Trying to conquer Europe, looking like a girl.
“. . . All-girls’ school . . . body dysmorphic disorder . . . hunger apocarteresis . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack could be yadaing as buildings become sparser. Tarmac losing out to dirt track, tall grass more frequent than brick wall, he maybe badgers, “. . . Job redundancy . . . railway platform . . . train decapitation . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
In the late 1940s America, right after a front-page suicide story was run, around fifty more people would kill themselves. Simultaneously car-crash fatalities would also spike. And unproven suicides by auto wreck became a trend in US journalism for over two decades until new codes of ethics were introduced to stop influencing incidents. This also being why self-death can’t be promoted. Why your Sky+ box set doesn’t have a Suicide Channel—yet. Probably. Coming soon—terminal reality television.
Then at the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco, USA, like clockwork, one person jumps and dies every fortnight.
At the base of Mount Fuji in the forest of Aokigahara, seventy-eight suicides were found in 2002 alone.
Throughout the rest of Japan, online and group suicide pacts have tripled since police started keeping records in 2003.
I bite into another tepid, rubbery chestnut. All this info is catalogued in my tour notes—from following my brother, the Excellent Numbskull. And the ghost walk before tonight’s, an ambulance response call away in nearby Brichford, so far fourteen teenagers have thrown themselves off the town’s coastal pier and drowned. All because they heard about some new urban legend, some new prank-stunt myth. Some new adolescent choking game they thought they could get their teenage kicks from, get away with.
A game and faux cries for help that snowballed and went viral from one Brichford victim to the next. Each casualty also hearing of the Fantastic Phlegm Head who did it and somehow survived. So maybe to those kids this just seemed like a harmless game to play. A safe way to stop being ignored and invisible and make others pay attention.
But naïve to think this wouldn’t be permanent. The consequences terminal.
My brother, always excelling at trouble as a way to win recognition in my shadow, him and these cluster victims, their motives aren’t so different really.
But when the exit methods echo those that were used before, the experts in my ghost walk folder of newspaper clippings call that a copycat suicide. The Werther effect.
These copycat suicides cumulatively bumped together with a quick knock-on effect, like a line of falling dominoes, they call that a suicide cluster.
The same repeated cluster location, they call that a suicide hot spot—and whether it’s lemmings overpopulating, then
disappearing to near extinction, or young men idolising Werther like Kurt Cobain before throwing themselves off bridges, like clockwork, there are these patterns and trends that appear and disappear.
Then pop up somewhere else.
And then pop up somewhere else again.
“. . . Fled war refugee . . . visa refusal . . . self-immolation . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack might be hounding while I snack on another lukewarm chestnut, leading us over hilly bumps past decaying barns and skeletal ruins. Past hedgerows spiked with thorns and nettles flickered with lantern orange, he could be irking. “. . . Adolescent teen angst . . . safety razor blades . . . exsanguination . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
Trending patterns that pop up somewhere else like here in Echmond and recent as only last week: The 8 Lives of 9 pub where we met on this one-night stand gimmick of All Hallows’ Eve tonight. That stocks-coloured tree on the village green opposite.
The one shaped like an inverted L—which witness statements in The Echmond Guardian are calling the “hangman tree”: the word game where careless wrong guesses score gallows frame pieces.
Where so far five teens—each somehow knowing the previous—have snuck under and knotted yachting rope around their throats.
Then hung themselves from the lowermost branch.
And no one knows why.
Police cordon sighing in the wind, flower bouquets stacked below, ever since Echmond DIY and haberdashery stores have put an ID restriction on buying rope, sheets, and curtains.
All summer, it’s been easier for the GhoulFiends to stockpile underage booze than to buy a ball of heavy-duty string.
Yet if any of the names dedicated on the floral tributes placed beneath that tree had held on for just one more day, for just one more night—they just might’ve felt different in the morning.
Happier.
With the noose-thick stack of notes I’ve accumulated across these tours, because of my brother—the Super TombstoneLicker, I’ve made their loss my loss.
The thing I carry heaviest is the weight of his guilt trip.
It’s because of him and the Werther effect why parents won’t let their kids trick-or-treat tonight along the streets of Echmond copycat dressed as tiny devils, vampires, and warlocks. Let them chase each other as teeny ghosts, revenants, and zombies back from the dead haunting Boo instead of Boo hoo.
“. . . Crippling arthritis . . . accidental painkiller overdose . . . acute renal failure . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack possibly bangs on in the near dark, traipsing along until my feet are numbed into stumps. The squelch and smell of damp sod and earth the only proof there’s any ground below—ruining my trainers, staining my jeans—he maybe pesters, “. . . Inoperable bowel cancer . . . disposable BBQ . . . carbon monoxide euthanasia . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
Even without iconic Werther threads, my brother still fancies himself a rock star these days, a Cult of Personality.
Leader of an existential popularity contest, the Incredible Plebeian thinks everyone’s dying to be him—literally, because this lemming Russian roulette is now his idea of fun.
But continually pit stopping, forever day tripping, eternally chasing him as a constant tourist isn’t mine. Because it’s not as simple as walking into a travel agent and taking a brochure. Bad taste or not, it’s illegal to promote suicide—ethics, morals, journalism codes, blah, blah, blah—so local tourist boards won’t help you.
Some small towns—Brichford, Echmond—don’t even have a tourist board.
But every dead-end town with a population big enough for a cluster invariably has a ghost walk. Some spooky village tour with secrets and skeletons in its community closet that nobody wants to talk about.
Apart from me—schlepping county to county, town to town, my red Sharpie ringing round clues inside local newspapers. The ink-blotting stories of shady deaths near the front, and ghost walks at the back. Ads no bigger than postage stamps, jammed beside clairvoyants and house clearances.
From bereaving families. Moving town. Trying to start again.
“. . . Postnatal depression . . . electrical appliance . . . filled bath electrocution . . . blah, blah . . .” Jack perhaps nags as we pass frost-glazed fields, my ears stinging with cold, and turn—welcome’d—back into the jack-o’-lanterned veins of residential streets. My nose numb and dripping snot, pumpkins gurning with the smiles kicked out, he arguably bugs. “. . . Spurned lover . . . 12-bore shotgun . . . severe ballistic trauma . . . blah, blah, blah . . .”
Death lives longer underground. Obituaries may be filed and forgotten, but I’ve learnt the failed-actor ghost guides placing these ads are the unsung heroes of local folklore.
Heroic Pied Pipers like Jack—my light in the dark—chronicling and regurgitating creepy facts to flesh out their tour narrative, glossing over years of wasted am-dram theatre, thinking limelight and an audience—like reality television—will solve their amphitheatre of self-esteem issues.
My brother and Jack, they’re maybe not so different really.
And even though my Sharpie’s fading and clippings are tattering, I know I can’t be that far behind.
Always a step off the pace on this suicide tourism, this damage-control duty, I frisk the ghosts of yesterday for just enough info to foil him inspiring another copycat. Triggering another cluster. Defining another hot spot that somewhere ruins another community.
Wearing silly tight jeans, the Majestic Nincompoop,
looking like a girl.
And I pop another heatless chestnut.
The last I saw my brother were the gap years we took
before the unis we never went to. As we sat facing each other on our old garden seesaw, he said he didn’t hate me.
With his packed duffel bag waiting on the grass, he held up his hand’s Hallowe’en jack-o’-lantern carving scar. The same flesh hyphen burned onto mine from melted walkie-talkie plastic.
Mirrored, like the back of our scarred heads—his double dare to me vaulting off swing sets, my triple dare to him backflipping off seesaws.
Twinned, like our February 29 leap year birthdays.
“I just wish this was mine,” he said, making his raised scar a fist.
He was fed up of living in my shadow; now it’s me that lives in his. If you can call it living: my days now spent gorging on humble pumpkin pie on this morbid road trip, where the ultimate day trip is dying, and the greatest five-star package is death.
All piss and vinegar, my brother used to punch kids to leave dead arms. Now it’s dead bodies the Astounding Jackass leaves as he jumps ship from one cluster to the next . . .
Repeating stunts at the next location hot spot . . .
Decreeing himself the first outlier, the trailblazer—the Exceptional Copycat . . .
It’s then I—we—suddenly stutter to a halt, tripping, kicking the heels in front.
The Ghoulfriend turns around to glare. “Watch out,”
she says.
We’re now nearly full circle, back at The 8 Lives of 9, feet muddied stiff and hands numbed dead. Before I can reply, Jack interrupts me to thank everyone for coming.
My eyes roll up into their sockets when he mentions souvenirs. He then asks, “Any last requests?”
I throw my hand up—like I’m back at school and all teacher me-me-first against my brother. Back when we were fighting to be each other’s first accident.
Overpranking to be each other’s Patient Zero.
On overkill, dying to be the first lemming.
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“Yeah,” I say, pointing across to that cordoned-off tree on the village green. “What do you know about the first victim?”
In the silence the tour group scowls at me and heads shake, like somehow I’m the bad guy.
Jack holds my gaze, his eyes narrowing, searching mine. Tour guides always get uppity when asked about the latest copycat, cluster, or hot spot affecting their route. My modus operandi is to wait for Q&A at the end of walks on blah, blah autopilot, hoping they’ll trust me and not tip off the police about my curiosity.
Looking to The 8 Lives of 9 pub—with its beaten kitty-cat signage hanging overhead—we all know what happened to that cat.
And Schrödinger’s.
“How about for a chestnut?” I prompt, popping another cold one into my mouth, jiggling the withered paper bag at him.
Jack smiles at me like an old friend. Wanting to borrow money. “Not even for a chestnut.”
I tell the epic letdown it’s important. “It’s about my brother. He likes starting tours.” I point to his jack-o’-lantern still grinning in the dark. “Like yours.”
When we were growing up, most kids guessed through the alphabet to remember my brother’s name. We were a double-edged seppuku sword to our parents, our teachers—celebrating and praising present me, mourning and ignoring invisible him, sweeping any talent of his under the carpet, locking any achievement away inside a box.
Sealed, like a Copenhagen coffin.
If I’ve learned anything, it’s that bucking a trend is
impossible when everybody else is doing it.
Like Werther, to just stop copycatting.
“Competition?” Jack swaggers towards me, rubbing the lid of his black box player, his irises flickering with lantern orange. “Nonsense. I have merchandise and a foolproof gimmick.”
What if this is preemptive karma? Me, my brother, two sides of the same coin. Entangled. With the sins committed in this life—the trouble caused, the pain inflicted—coming back to haunt us.
Trap us. A bizarre Brothers Grimm fairy tale acted out, jinxed or punished by God.
Jack leans in kiss close to whisper, “Purchase a souvenir, and perhaps I’ll remember something.”
“Something you’re dying to know.” I smell Jack’s sinusy stink, feel his murder mac’s brushed leather touch my leg, as he taps his nose in poor pantomime and winks.
Yet what if that sin, jinx, or punishment turned out to be a talent, which was not dying? You’d probably shit a brick—a cassette brick, playing hokey horror music.
“Something you’d kill to keep quiet.” Jack hushes his cracked lips with a finger.
“About this dear brother of yours,” he trails off, waltzing away, taking the tour group with him.
It’s not until my teeth stab with ache that I realise I’ve stopped chewing.
That my jaw’s dropped, my mouth fallen open to Echmond’s icy Hallowe’en night.
As I follow Jack over to The 8 Lives of 9’s amber safety, and it’s now I really pay attention to his tour.
And toss another plasticky chestnut.
To understand this talent I share with my brother, imagine a coin tossed ten times. And with every coin toss it always lands tails. Ten consecutive tails will take nine hours of trying—a day bored trying to make sense of this limbo. But with every toss, time also branches and divides itself between two paths—an alternate outcome, lifetime, or universe you’re unaware of where the coin landed on heads.
Because all you’ve ever known in life is tails—and tails never fails.
“Buy your souvenirs!” Jack whips open his mac, the lining teeming, tinkling with amber from dozens of cassettes. “Buy your narrated ghost tour tapes here!” he booms.
And let’s just get this straight: I’m not a ghost. I don’t see dead people.
But instead of coin tossing for just nine hours, consider your whole life. Those toss outcomes instead being dangerous games of chance, life-or-death decisions, like stabbing arteries in your hand or power socket pips.
Scenarios with fifty-fifty chances of survival—like somersaulting off seesaws or loop-the-looping from swing sets onto your skull, accidentally taking your own life as some banal illusionist—the Brilliant Nappy Face. For every incident you probably didn’t survive, there’d be as many alternate lives where you improbably did.
Like branches of a tree—shaped like an inverted L—each twig an outcome dividing into a forest of scabbed-up veins. That one branch destined for tails forever, no matter how hard you try in many worlds—or the Copenhagen interpretation—to change it.
Pretty impossible but possible.
What mathematics experts with letters after their names will call probability—or improbability.
What science geniuses with more letters after their names than in them—like scary statistical witch doctors—will call quantum suicide.
And by extension—like dreaded decimal voodoo priests—quantum immortality.
So what if a Hallowe’eny thought experiment then turned out to be true, instead of a far-fetched ghost story?
What if you were destined to survive death with only a quark of maths on your side—always surviving when you least expect it, when you least accept it—all because your life is that tossed coin, forever landing tails side up?
“Relive the experience!” Jack flaunts the drama haunting his bones deeper than just am-dram theatre. “In this life or the next!” he blahs, his grin matching the jack-o’-lantern’s.
The Christian belief is that to take your own life is a sin against God, and for it you walk the earth eternally cursed.
Cursed and unable to die. Never dead dead—like me or my brother, resurrected Zombie Jesus, that Jack-of-the-
Lantern trickster.
Maybe even Jack the Day-Tripper, and I nom another chestnut.
“Are those roast chestnuts?” the Ghoulfriend says, looking to the bag I can’t feel. “Or horse chestnuts?” Horse chestnuts being the conker kind, the kind me and my brother would rap each other’s knuckles with until welted purple, before we started dying.
Why? I toss another into my mouth and offer her the bag bought from a street vendor who doesn’t know his suicide from his soufflé, his quantum from his quiche. I ask, “Do you want to play conkers?”
“My mum’s a doctor.” Her bunched cleavage heaves proud. “Horse chestnuts are poisonous. Haemolysis.” The toxins that rupture and destroy red blood cells or erythrocytes. “They might kill you,” she boasts.
Staring at her chest, masticating another cold chestnut, I say, “I doubt it.”
My tongue probes my gums and teeth for nutty shards and pulp. Even if they are horse chestnuts, it’d be just another miracle stunt to add to mine and that Wicked Dullard’s growing list of party tricks.
“Weirdo,” she huffs, dragging her boyFiend with her.
I shrug.
Even though that Spectacular Bastard’s up to no good, he’s still my brother. How quantum quick guilt catalyses hatred, it’s no wonder families become so f%ked-up.
The real curse is being flesh and blood.
“Be the first to scare your family and friends to death!” booms Jack, as tourists hang on his coattails, scrambling to get their picture with him and The 8 Lives of 9. His plastic audio wares rattling like imitation ghost chains shoo them away, the dog walkers unleash their mutts across Echmond’s village green, and the GhoulFiends head back towards the residential jack-o’-lanterns. What if purgatory wasn’t fire in your veins and creepy endless dark but instead something equally punishing? Like a family day out or a caravan holiday away.
Chasing your brother over mediocre towns in a lame limbo of tourism—forced to live when you want to die—still chasing the Astonishing Deviant years later across village greens . . . through Woodland Trust trees . . . via quantum suicide . . . blah, blah, blah . . .
And What If you were just lucky all along? This maths-science mumbo jumbo nothing more than a miscalculated belief system. A flawed religion. Fortunate and stupid, when one day my brother’s luck might run out, and I won’t have to stalk the Terrific Dicksplat out of sibling rivalry . . . at Hallowe’en . . . questing for quantum immortality . . . blah, blah, bl—
It’s then there’s a piercing scream—sharp like a knife wound. Then barking.
Way too much barking.
I turn like everyone else to the village green, where one of the dog walkers covers her mouth in front of the hangman tree, her eyes wide and white.
Above her a deadweight hangs from the lowest scabbed branch. Fancy dressed in black-and-white stripes, peroxide hair flapping, the jacket’s upturned collar hiding the slipknot.
Another tragic hero, another wannabe Werther.
Another lemming: Echmond’s sixth. After Brichford—another copycat, cluster, and hot spot CV credit for
my brother.
This time I don’t roll my eyes. This time I just close them.
Three incantations of BeetleKurt won’t bring him back. It won’t bring any of them back. And I’m such a hypocrite, but if I do catch my brother, I really will brain the Glorious Coward Weasel.
This time I swear, I really will give him something to die about.
But out here in the creepy dark of this dying autumn—suicide tourists or accidental lemmings—some of us were born to live forever.