Page 4 of How I Met Your Murderer

I had no idea what, if anything, I was doing wrong, and my stubborn pride prevented me from calling and asking for a replacement so soon into the job.

So once again, I got to thinking. Since zapping the spirit wasn’t doing anything to remove her like I was supposed to, and the handbook didn’t have any brilliant advice, I wondered if there was another way to move her on by offering her some closure on her unfulfilled dreams. The bog bride really seemed to want her wedding, seeing as she made the guest rooms reek of pungent, decaying flowers and somehow made old music drift through the inn’s hallway speakers. She was often caught rearranging guests’ beauty supplies or seen waltzing through the steam just outside the shower curtain while they bathed. And the minor floods she caused on the inn’s plush carpets seemed to be brought on by jealousy, occurring only when she happened upon an amorous couple in her wanderings.

The question was how to give her the wedding of her dreams.

Inspiration struck when I spotted a mop in the kitchen, and realized I could fashion a mop groom with a bowtie and a touch of whimsy. A potato on a stick would play the part of the priest, since none of the inn’s staff were willing to indulge me, and left a bouquet of moss and summer flowers for the bride on the podium I had borrowed for the altar.

Having attended very few weddings, I didn’t know the exact speech I was supposed to recite on behalf of the potato priest. But I improvised, and the ghostly bride seemed happy enough with my efforts.

She spun the mop around and vanished in a cloud of mist, leaving behind soggy footprints where she had finally gotten her special moment.

Was any of that in The Handbook under the section titled “Ghost Brides”?

Yeah, of course not.

Then came the case at The Abbey of Blackthorn Vale, taking me farther north. Several ghostly monks stirred up trouble in the abbey, which had been converted into a cozy shop selling handmade soaps and candles. The owners were fed up with shattered candle jars and soap shavings everywhere when they arrived in the mornings, and the endless, ominous chanting in a broom closet in what one of them had identified as Latin.

The five monks seemed to be Level Threes, like the bog bride, able to manifest more solidly than my misty fiddler and wreak more havoc as a group. They almost looked harmless, with their snowy hair and slim figures hunched in ancient robes, but their chanting was so disorienting in the dark, and there were so many of them, that I wound up falling down half a flight of stone steps while in pursuit. I was starting to see why many spirit extraction experts worked in pairs, but Gerald hadn’t offered me that option since ExorSquad’s services in Ireland were still so new.

Limping more than usual and sorely outnumbered, I languished on the abbey job for over a month while the shop owners tried to keep a brave face and sound encouraging. It was a good effort, but they were clearly becoming increasingly disappointed in me.

I was disappointed in me, too, losing hope of doing anything about the monks, aiming my ghost-zapping weapons at every strange sound in the abbey each night and getting nowhere.

Until one night, when I followed the chanting into the back of the building. I’d forgotten I had a protein bar stuffed in the pocket of my overalls until a monk rushed me and snatched it away, trying to unwrap it. And look, I certainly could have zapped him then, up close and personal. But it would have felt like pointing a gun at my granda, so even though the monks had been making a mockery of me for weeks, I couldn’t even try.

Since they just seemed hungry, I spent the rest of the night guarding the wall of candles and then hurried to the nearest open pub to order them a full Irish breakfast and a pint of lukewarm stout. Then I took the van to fuel up and bought Tayto crisps at the petrol station for good measure, and brought it all back to the abbey.

The monks immediately manifested around the spread I set up in the staff room in the hope of avoiding any more broken candle jars. The spirits couldn’t eat, of course, but hovering over the food and crinkling the crisps bag seemed to satisfy them well enough. They slowly dissolved from vaguely transparent figures into a cloud of grey mist filling the room. A light breeze pushed my hair back as a few words of whispered Latin settled over the abbey like a parting benediction, and the mist cleared.

The abbey’s new owners hadn’t heard any further chanting or found any more broken glass since they started leaving out a bag of crisps and a pint of ale in offering each week. Guess the candle business was booming. They even sent me on my way with a box of their bestsellers as a thank-you, which I suspected was more generous than any bonus I was going to see from ExorSquad. The candles made the van smell like a heathered meadow instead of stale sweat from my dirty gym clothes, and that was a definite improvement, but even lighting the latte-scented one didn’t make me feel any less exhausted before I headed to my next job.

There was never a shortage of requests for help with a haunting.

And look, maybe I should have quit then and there. It wasn’t as if I couldn’t go home. My parents might not love me spending all my time on the couch, but I was their only son, their only child, and I knew they were glad to have me around and proud of me no matter what. I could have swallowed my pride and taken a nice, safe, paying job as a hurling ref.

But hurling had been taken from me, not by choice, and now I had something that sort of felt like mine again. Even if it was often cold and dirty and admittedly dangerous, it was still something I could choose. Something I was maybe even halfway decent at. I mean, would Declan of the delicious abs, brilliant as he was on the field, have thought of staging a fake wedding with a mop and potato on the fly? I doubted it. Would he have bought the monks a stout? Well, maybe, but not because he had figured out what they needed.

Besides, despite the vaguely ominous posts I kept seeing online about how no one lasted long at ExorSquad, I was no quitter. Something as big as a torn ACL would have to force me out of this job, even if I missed having a normal sleep schedule. I liked that I was helping people. Making a difference in the community.

And, okay, maybe it was petty, but I fancied the idea that I was better at this than fecking demonologist Ronan with all his top-class formal training. He might have been possessed when he said those awful things to me, but I knew enough to be sure the entity had gotten those thoughts from somewhere—from him, all the things he had been holding in. The anger and humiliation still fueled my workouts, providing new strength even though I couldn’t move my knee like I used to.

I hadn’t had to fight any ghosts yet, and I doubted I would on my new assignment. Thanks to all I had learned in the past several months, I was pretty sure that handling the haunting at Ardruin Castle would be a piece of cake.

I’d been to the neighboring village of Ballycorven on a few school holidays. There was a small historical site complete with cottages to show how people had lived two centuries ago, and I recalled fragrant peat bricks burning in a hearth while actors in period costume explained daily life and gave bread-making demonstrations.

Watching over the village was a once-imposing stone structure that dated back to 1219. The original castle had been destroyed by conquering forces, and it was rebuilt in 1503 before once again, at some point, crumbling to the ravages of time and careless hands. I remembered a school trip back in 2010, when I was about fourteen, daring my friend Colm to sneak up to the ruin with me while the rest of the class ate lunch, but it was a long hike uphill just to get to a collection of collapsing stone walls with a bunch of yellow caution tape wrapped around the barrier fence.

More than that, something about the place itself gave me pause, even as a kid. The castle was missing its roof, which should have meant that the day’s brilliant sun lit the stones aglow. Instead, the cracks in the castle walls shut out every attempt the light made to find its way inside. It was like the place clung to its darkness, or even spun its own shadows strong enough to challenge the sun. A vague sense of wrongness had scratched at my mind as Colm and I stared up the hill, needling me like a tiny splinter in the pad of a finger.

Finally my friend had whispered, in his lilting Kerry brogue, “I heard a guy died up there last year. Leapt off the highest balcony ledge like a maniac. That’s what the cops thought, ’cause of his injuries. That, or he slipped and fell while messing about, but me mam swears something in there told him to do it. Egged him on, like. That’s why they closed it off and put up all the tape. Ardruin Castle is fecking cursed, it is.”

Well, fifteen years after that school trip, I was finally getting what I had wanted all those years ago: to explore Ardruin Castle. Or rather, I was being sent there to investigate the owners’ numerous reports of paranormal activity and clear the place of any restless spirits before its grand reopening—but it was more or less the same thing.

Apparently, a pair of silver spoon siblings, the Dolans, had bought the place in a foreclosure sale a few years back with a vision of turning it into a themed medieval dining hall. Céad Míle Fáilte, the brother and sister were rebranding it. The castle of “a hundred thousand welcomes,” a place where tourists would be served authentic meals while they listened to trad, and costumed performers taught them about the realities of castle life, an extension of the offerings in the village below.

One crisis or another had delayed the siblings’ plans until now, but they were in the home stretch at last, with a new roof on the place and a historic preservation specialist on-site consulting as the interior workers, designers, and decorators began their stage of the complex renovation. Their plan was to open for business on Halloween night—two months from now—to pay homage to the rumours of hauntings that had swirled about the place for decades, long before there was a barrier fence wreathed in yellow caution tape.

Hauntings they were currently experiencing, and which might be intensifying as the Dolans reimagined and rearranged the place. The sister, Caoimhe, had sent me so many pages of detailed reports she seemed to have typed up herself that I briefly considered binding it into a new version of The Handbook: Céad Míle Fáilte Edition.