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When one runs the most notable holistic detective agency in the Pacific Northwest, the second most frequent cases, besides the inordinate amount of kittens that go missing from Seattle, tend to be of the death-y sort. Clients are always concerned with who murdered whom, which was rather intriguing and mysterious early on, but by the umpteenth death, it really feels as if people can do much more interesting things than murdering one another. On occasion, murders were more intriguing, like the time with the deceased sentient alpaca and associated alchemical book smuggler, but of the late? It had been rather droll. That’s why when a reverse murder mystery came about at a local museum where the curators were concerned with who reanimated said dead bodies, Dirk Gently took the case without hesitation.
According to the client, the curators of the Clallam County Children’s Museum had recently put together an exhibit on mass epidemiological catastrophes in American medical history, including the twentieth-century typhoid and yellow fever epidemics amongst others. Charmingly next to the exhibit that turned kids into climate change superheroes and the museum’s resident ball pit, a large portion of the epidemiology exhibition was dedicated to the 1847 North American typhus epidemic and the coffin ships carrying Great Famine refugees that helped perpetuate its spread. An exhibition in the face of a global medical crisis is certainly a choice, and not necessarily a smart one, so the fact that it had become quasi-haunted seemed to come with the territory of poor taste.
It would seem rather obvious that when you gather a lot of dead people who died before their time, that you can't blame them for wanting their shot at their final years, albeit in skeleton form. Still, how one said body went from eight-out-of-eight dead-ish to five-out-of-eight dead-ish overnight to terrorize the night staff and the occasional museum patron is in fact, quite puzzling to the holistic detective and company. More puzzling is the fact that the only exhibits vandalized were the traveling Paddington Bear exhibition and the permanent exhibition on Washington’s pre-statehood history under joint British and American occupancy. While other areas of the museum are also ripe for exploitation, the burning of Bond’s first editions is infinitely more interesting to the anarchist skeleton who could preposterously outrun the Segway clad security team despite being very much less alive than the rest of them. Dirk wanted to suggest that the guards should do their jobs better, but Todd informed him that coming from an agency that solves mysteries by listening to the universe and doing whatever, the suggestion is a tad hollow.
Still, the fact that nobody knows which skeleton is the reanimated one is bizarre in and of itself. It would seem you could just poke and prod at every bone to see just who reacts, but the curators had already tried that, which is, of course, why professionals are needed. It doesn’t, however, stop Dirk from ordering Todd to do the exact same thing and letting out a minor shriek any time he thinks his combination-assistant-and-best-friend has found the right one. Whether or not Todd’s eardrums were still intact halfway through the initial investigation is muddy, so much so that Module B of the detective agency needs to rotate in to little avail.
After attending the museum’s sixty-four-and-a-half-minute funeral service for the cremated Paddington Bear folio, Todd urges the party to do another sweep of the museum to find clues to the reanimator and reanimated’s identity. As they do, Dirk studies each of the skeletons closely, poking around at the clothing and peeking under the wigs that make the bodies look objectively more terrifying than mannequins and are more apropos for a haunted house than a children’s museum. With some luck, Todd finds a skeleton in the Great Famine section with its jaw hinged shut and a glint of gold reflecting off of the light. With some strength, he wrenches it open to find a coin from Greek antiquity in its mouth and tries to free it.
“I’ve seen this before in—” Todd says, going to remove the obol from the skeleton’s mouth. When he tries to, bony hands clamp around Todd’s throat to pull the man into a chokehold. And the lovely little teeth? They bite down, ready for the single-man skeleton war that the bag of bones is waging.
Cursing loudly and flailing wildly to free himself, Todd draws Dirk’s attention. He prays Farah will wrench him from the rag clad skeleton’s jaws considering she has the physical capabilities to do so, but nevertheless, the holistic detective tries to utilize his fabled ninja training—which he still proudly asserts is the CIA’s doing even though the CIA is oh so kindly directly responsible for most of his life’s trauma— to free his assistant.
“Unteeth him!” Dirk yells, rolling his fists like a movie boxer at the skeleton who has all but ignored Dirk’s antics until the moment he speaks. The second Dirk’s overcompensatingly British lilt echoes throughout the dismal little display on Irish generational trauma, the skull would have stared daggers at Dirk if its eyes hadn’t decomposed centuries ago. It drops Todd to the ground without a moment’s hesitation and lunges hands-first at Dirk.
“I’ll warn you, my training— Shit. ” Dirk yelps, as the skeleton draws in closer and tries to use a very poorly aimed karate chop. However, the Briton cannot fend off the assailant’s intent to kill as it picks up a rusted knife from the exhibition. When it does so, Todd tries to full-body tackle the skeleton but the chassis narrowly dodges it, sending him face-first into the very uncomfortable fake grass.
“Dirk! Stop talking!” Farah yells as an antique pot shatters against the wall behind Dirk. It is intended to hit the skull to crack and incapacitate the reanimated body but instead makes for an egregious loss of human history.
“ Me !? You’re the one trying to re-murder him,” Dirk exclaims, eyes filled with haggard worry as the skeleton has not deterred its focus despite being assaulted by a third party via historical artifact.
“It hates you because you’re British,” Farah yells back, locking and loading the pistol at her belt. Before she can do so, the skeleton latches onto the detective in an attempt to choke the life out of him.
With a hand and knife at his neck, Dirk squeaks out, “But I’m not British!”
The skeleton’s grip loosens and it cocks its head to the side. One could surmise that a moment of clarity and confusion would have washed across the man’s face if there was the skin and muscle to do so. After pondering the thought, it reasserts its former line of thinking and points the knife again at Dirk’s throat.
“I was born—” Dirk starts, but is quickly interrupted by a gunshot that sends the chassis crashing to the floor as its left leg is shattered. As it attempts to get back up, Todd tackles the skeleton— successfully this time— so they can bag the figurative and literal bag of bones for interrogation.
Dirk lets out a sigh of relief as he exchanges a grateful look towards Todd and Farah, not fearing for his life in this fleeting moment once more. But in actuality, he knows there is nothing to fear because come on — it is Module C! Who else could have possibly stopped a maniacal bag of bones waging a single-man skeleton war against a children’s museum and their subsequent contracted Detective and Co.?
Precisely.
While Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency had turned out to be quite good at the whole ‘Detective’ thing— finding the clues in the stream of creation and the like— they hadn’t gotten quite good at the whole interrogating part, especially with a literal as opposed to figurative skeleton in the closet.
In the closet, Dirk and Todd sit in front of a body tied to the door handle with ropes. While if Amanda was here Todd is certain she’d make some obscene comment about the kinkiness of the whole thing it was quite practical actually. Obviously, having no meat on your bones makes for lithe wrists making subsequent arrests via handcuff useless. Farah, having secured the target, wanted to further research her own theory while standing guard of the room. Interviewing some of the curatorial team had led Farah to believe vandalism strain toward specifically Anglocentric exhibitions is the skeleton’s modus operandi. The skeleton is understandably upset, of course. Being systematically oppressed by an imperial power will do that for you. Still, why someone resuscitated a nineteenth-century dead man to send him on an Anglophobic murder spree in rural Washington of all places is utterly bizarre.
On the floor, Todd and Dirk wait for the dead body to wake up from whatever blackout that came with cracking one’s skull despite the brain tissue affected being long gone. While Todd seems fairly calm, Dirk fidgets with the beads of the rainbow-colored friendship bracelet loosely wrapped around his wrist. The more he fumbles with it, the tighter the bracelet gets, as if Mona is enveloping him in a warm hug in plastic form.
“Are you okay Dirk?” Todd asks in a whisper that cuts through the silence of the supply closet.
“Define okay,” Dirk flippantly murmurs.
“So no,” Todd replies, narrowing his gaze at the holistic detective next to him. “What’s going on? This isn’t exactly the first attempt on our lives.”
“Could’ve gotten hurt,” Dirk mumbles under his breath and makes eye contact with the wood flooring.
“Like the office is any safer,” Todd says, rolling his eyes and offering Dirk a knowing look. Dirk tries to hide the laugh he’s stifling from Todd because it’s true. Their office was the site of a number of injuries. Some were caused during unfortunate events like B&E’s while others were due to unfortunate objects like chairs.
“Besides, you helped ward him off by confusing him with a lie. He might not be as threatening as Farah thinks,” Todd says with a shrug and gesturing at all the different cinches, locks, and restraining devices to keep the seemingly dead skeleton who is not dead from making more people dead.
“Lying?” Dirk says, cocking his head sideways and eyebrows scrunching in befuddlement.
“Yeah. The whole ‘not British’ thing when the accent clearly denotes otherwise. Really sent him for a loop,” Todd states, running a hand through his hair.
“Ah,” Dirk tuts, pulling his knees to his chest as if trying to envelop himself in his red jacket and simply disappear. “That.”
Todd offers, placing a comforting hand on Dirk’s shoulder. “Hey, it’s not like you lose British citizenship when you apply for the dual one. It doesn’t make you like only half—”
Dirk flinches at the touch and doesn’t say anything, seeming to only continue his mental spiral. The two of them sit in a tense silence before Todd states, “You weren’t lying, were you?”
Dirk just nods affirmatively.
“Where are you from then?” Todd asks with a gentle curiosity to his voice. In moments like these, Todd would normally hold Dirk to provide comfort. But seeing as the detective is a bit touch averse at the moment, Todd does what he can with the intonation in his voice, hoping it conveys the meaning and care he wishes.
Dirk doesn’t say anything again, he just looks at Todd, as if he wants to explain himself but cannot find the words. Todd catches the way the bracelet on Dirk’s wrist wiggles about as if Mona is breaking character to help her friend. Dirk nods, patting the bracelet in thanks as the rainbow of colored beads shifts to a simple tricolor of blue, yellow, and red.
Todd squints at the bracelet for a moment before pulling out his smartphone. Bypassing his three-day-old text messages and three-year-old Chrome tabs, Todd Googles ‘blue, yellow, and red flags’ and tries to narrow through the results until he reaches a logical conclusion.
“You’re from Romania?” Todd asks inquisitively. When Dirk nods, Todd pockets his smartphone.
“Blackwing?”
Another nod.
“Why did you move to England? You didn’t want to go home after?” Todd asks, hesitantly.
“Couldn’t. Priest. And the language barrier,” Dirk states shortly, sighing as he speaks in broken sentences so different from the paragraph-long sentences and stream of consciousness rants he is often privy to. “And university. I was studying physics and maths.”
Todd nods, taking Dirk’s meaning. With the run-in during the Wendimoor case and a slew of others, Todd does not doubt that whatever family Dirk must have had in Romania, if he had any at all, were killed by the psychopathic Southerner. Except for some rare instances when Dirk chose to open up about it, he understandably never speaks of Blackwing. Still, Todd and Farah had done what research they could and learned the breach happened in late 2001 after the September 11th attacks. When considering Dirk’s age and understanding of the world, putting two and two together indicates that he would have been in Blackwing captivity for most of his childhood and adolescence. If he was forced to be around English speakers in an American stronghold, language attrition is not a stretch by any means of the imagination, especially given Dirk’s testimony.
Todd’s heart aches at the thought of even imagining just how much his partner had been through. For Dirk to have been so young and to have lost so much repeatedly, yet still be able to face the day with a smile and passion for life in all its little wonders is astounding. Each time Dirk breaks down like this reminds him just how deeply affected Dirk is despite his demeanor. Todd wishes only to protect him all the more so that Dirk never has to face these things again and the wounds still open from all those years ago can slowly heal in time. But Todd cannot rip apart the Central Intelligence Agency at its very seams and its subsequent Project Blackwing research division at the moment, so he will do what he can to comfort Dirk until he’s able to do just that. Todd opts to smirk and narrow his eyebrows at Dirk to crack a joke, hoping it’ll make the detective smile. “You’re making really good use of your education.”
Dirk’s eyebrows furrow in exasperated offense which Todd thinks is a much better look than ‘more-deceased-than the literal Skeleton in the closet.’ Dirk holds up his finger, as if he’s about to say something before his mind seemingly draws a blank. He bites his lip in thought before the train of thought comes back into the station. “I did use it to find Schröedinger’s cat. Thank you very much, Theodore. Also! That whole deal with the literal and metaphorical butterfly effect in Pennsylvania? The one I solved cause you were stumped? Physics . And there was that one time with the selkie woman, It’s actually a funny story…”
On a normal day, Todd would have likely cut Dirk off there, insistent that they should focus on the case at hand and only slightly annoyed at Dirk’s smug usage of his full name. But the skeleton is showing no signs of stirring and Todd has only just ushered Dirk away from his unbearable to witness funk. There’s some life in Dirk’s eyes again as he exclaims, and Todd will indulge him of this today, if it means that Dirk is faring as well as he can.
And after what seems like several hours of Dirk recounting any and every time he has used maths and physics in his life, the skeleton finally awakes. When it does, the skull blankly stares at the cast which reconnects fractured limb to limb. Dirk had, of course, insisted upon it: ‘Despite his homicidal intentions of the Anglophobic variety, the gentleman is a major part of the case, you silly man Todd.’
“Who did this to you? Why are you doing this?” Dirk asks the unresponsive skeleton for the umpteenth time. It tries to cross its arms, but finds them bound and instead sticks its chin up in defiance.
“You need a new angle,” Todd grumbles under his breath. “Talking isn’t working.”
“It’s an interrogation Todd, talking is something that is quite necessary for me to do a lot of,” Dirk blabbers back in whispered exasperation. He tries to ignore the chatter of teeth that sounds akin to a growl from the body sitting across from them.
“Well, he’s getting irritated with you.” Todd retorts, before running a hand through his head with a sigh. Rolling his eyes and taking a deep breath, Todd looks at the skeleton, “Sir, we need you to cooperate and let us know who did this to you.”
The skeleton opens its mouth, but instead of eliciting sound points to an obol inside of its mouth. Under his breath, Dirk grumbles, “Oh! So he’ll listen to you ,” which earns him a light elbowing in the side from Todd, who studies the coin. Tracing the markings with his eyes, a wave of realization crosses Todd’s face.
“I’ve got to make a call,” he says hurriedly, as he dials the number Google provides for “Styx & Headstones,” a funeral home and raft rental agency on the Upper Skagit River. Stepping outside the room, Dirk paws at Todd’s leg to try and stop him from leaving, but is waved off considering the skeleton is, in fact, tied down.
With a sigh, Dirk mutters, “And then there were two.” The hiss elicited from the skeleton across him makes the detective question if there will soon be one and thanks to the universe that Farah is armed and ready outside.
It is Project Mot and Project Cheron’s fault because of course it’s their fault. Todd knew it from the moment he set eyes on the obol, but having Project Cheron—Harold — here made things abundantly clear. A young man in his twenties is sprawled across the detective agency’s couch clad in a red checkered flannel, worn black jeans, multiple ear cuffs, and an eccentric down vest. The jury is still decidedly split if his aesthetic reads lumberjack vampire or queer mountain man punk, and Mona’s indecision isn’t helping the debate in any regard. It had existed since Todd and the Rowdy Three reunited Harold with his twin Cas.
If Dirk is reality’s debug function, Bart the antivirus, and Francis the builder, then Harold and Cas have been its clean-up crew as long as they’ve walked the earth. Ushering in death and helping one’s soul across the veil between realities, their first client had been their mother who died in the Blackwing facility they were born in after she needed help due to the mysterious circumstances of her pregnancy and anomalous readings she got in tests.
Though twins in nature, they are two sides of the same obol and were given separate project designations based on their respective roles: Mot as a god of the dead and Cheron as the ferrier of the respective dead’s souls. Together they could usher all those whose time had come through the process needed to ensure a quick departure from this world into the next, ensuring nobody and no body was waiting for pickup too long.
Blackwing did what they could to separate the two, to see if they could alter their form and function to make them more independent agents in the business of death. So much so that the siblings were separated by the Blackwing breach for years, trying to find the other. Harold spent years following the trail of bodies, knowing his sibling had tread there from the obol left in the deceased’s mouth, but he could never catch up. The twenty-first century only brought decades of perpetual wars in proxy lands, epidemics, and natural disasters that all added to the unending list of souls to account for and the distance between the siblings all the greater.
Thankfully, a few months back, Amanda had been tailing Harold to try and gather the tools of the universe to prevent the war for all reality or whatever the fuck the witchakookoo was doing these days with the Rowdies. Todd, having not seen her for a while, joined on the expedition where they got a bit more than they bargained for by reuniting the universe’s dealer and merchant of death with one another again. It had gone surprisingly well and was altogether less death-y than expected and the siblings had since gotten on well running the number one combination Whitewater rafting and funeral home vacation destination in the Pacific Northwest.
However, something had gone abundantly wrong, evidenced by the state of the agency that looks like the site of a B&E. It had just so happened an interview with the Duke of Sussex and his wife about their Southern California life on in the background had sent the skeleton into another murderous rampage with their flatscreen as its unfortunate victim. While researching how to help the skeleton, Mona tried to play background music, but the sound of The Beatles almost spelled the untimely end of her, the skeleton, or the agency altogether, depending on the form Mona took. Having fended off the skeleton from stabbing the jukebox she was currently playing, the holistic actress shifted into a multi-colored pen that Farah clicks, switching colors incessantly. Mona wishes to avoid the gentleman now sitting in the designated ‘undead time-out corner.’ Whether or not it will need a formal plaque for continual use after the case remains to be seen, but the paper signage works has worked well enough for now.
Todd hands Harold the obol, which the young man places in the skeleton’s mouth. He mumbles some things and gesticulates at the skeleton as if trying to channel something to no avail. As he tries to pull the soul from the body to separate the two, all he can get is the obol to keep falling out with each and every attempt. He simply shrugs and says, “Sorry, can’t help you.”
“Ferrying souls is literally your job. Your function in the universe’s toolbox or whatever…” Todd grumbles, placing a hand to his forehead in exasperation that the people the universe selected for its maintenance were so fucking incompetent at their jobs sometimes, which he had not learned from personal experience whatsoever.
“Soul’s not ready, no can do,” Harold says shortly as he subconsciously flips the obol up and down with the snap of his fingers.
Before Todd can deck their guest, Dirk places a hand on Todd’s chest to block him and says, “Let me get this straight, Harry. May I call you Harry? Harold is just so formal and why anyone would elect to—”
“Dirk,” Todd says, placing a hand on Dirk’s forearm to try and ground the rambling detective. To Dirk’s credit, Todd agrees Harold is a choice of a name. Cas did choose something rather symbolic: they said something about being an Angel of Death themself and naming themself after some queer trench-coated man on the telly with an arguably cognate set of skills. Nobody sees a man younger than an aggressively suburban heterosexual father of two and says, ‘Yes, that’s a Harold.’ So why a young man, who seems the furthest from the connotation, chooses that as his name is a valid question, but then again, Dirk is a quite bizarre name, so the pot shouldn’t be calling the kettle black, they had their respectively absurd yet deeply emotional meanings one supposes.
“Right,” Dirk stammers, tossing Todd a small smile before taking a deep breath to collect his thoughts. “So, you retrieved the skeleton’s—”
“Gilligan’s,” Harold asserts. When he’s met with blank stares, he nods his head towards the skeleton who waves in acknowledgment.
“Thank you, Gilligan ’s soul from the veil between worlds and reinserted it into his body a few days ago,” Dirk states with a sense of calm that would alarm an onlooker eavesdropping on the said conversation for both participants’ sanity.
“Business is usually the opposite, but yeah,” Harold says with a nod as he continues to flip the obol, seemingly happier when it ends on the presumably ‘tails’ symbol each time.
“Right, so you put the soul in there, Yes?” Dirk says with a puzzled expression. When Harold nods again, the detective thinks for a moment before a wash of realization crosses his face. He lights up and points between Harold and Gilligan with a sense of excitement. “Solved it! Just take it out again and we’ll be a-okay. Gilligan can go back to whatever things homicidal deceased Irishman do, you can go back to your… canoes? And the client will be all sorts of pleased with us. We might as well remove the arguable from our efficiency.”
Dirk beams at Todd and Farah, mid-panting from his impassioned rant, and half-heartedly snaps with a dramatic flourish. “Did it! That was an easy one, wasn’t it? Aside from the almost murder.”
Todd just rolls his eyes and smiles at Dirk with the same wonder and bafflement that comes with each of his partner’s grand deductions.
However, the celebration is cut short with Harold’s uttering, “One problem. Unfinished business.”
“Everyone has unfinished business when they die,” Dirk says, dismissing Harold’s comment with his hand and looking altogether too pleased and distracted by Todd’s expression.
“He did have hundreds of years to think about it,” Harold grumbles, tapping his fingers on his ear cuffs in thought. He shrugs and goes back to checking his Spotify algorithms that call out the overpopulation of pop-punk in his listening habits. Not making eye contact, he multitasks, stating, “And look I hate to break you all up over this, but really discontent souls don’t just want to stop possessing bodies, you know.”
Farah— the voice of reason as ever— sets down the case file they’ve compiled on her desk and states. “We can’t just let him eradicate the world from anything remotely related to England.” Holding up the photos from the children’s museum and gesturing to the apartment she adds, “It’s clearly his MO.”
“Well, that seems like a personal problem. Am I done here?” Harold asks boredly, running his nails clad with black nail polish through his disheveled hair.
“I don’t know,” Todd states, annoyed by the fact that the case is indeed more complicated than Dirk surmised, and more importantly that Dirk is pouting about it. “Do you know what else will put him to rest?”
“Look dude, I’m just the guy that ferries the souls. Aren’t you detectives or whatever? Can’t you just figure it out?” Harold says with a sigh, shoving his phone in his pocket. He gets up from the couch but props himself on the floor next to a rat that was the unfortunate victim of last week’s feral cat inhabitant who needed to be returned to his wolf pack. Snapping his fingers, he shrinks the obol and places it in the dead rat’s mouth, and wiggles his fingers to extract its soul.
“You literally caused this,” Todd accuses, getting increasingly frustrated with Harold who could completely care less about the whole situation. He shoots a look at Farah and Dirk, praying one of them will aid him in making the bizarre young man see the gravity of it all.
“Technically, Cas did,” Harold says in an aggressively defensive manner. A small yelp comes out of the bluish anthropomorphic rat soul on the man’s shoulder that looks eerily similar to those from the Patrick Spring murder case that started it all. Under his breath, Harold murmurs, “Hush, hush, it’s okay, love,” to the rat and nuzzles it with his nose, distracted once more.
“But you still fought with them,” Farah states, pointing Mona at Harold. In Farah’s hand, the pen quickly shifts into another rat, which nods and squeaks in agreement with Farah before becoming a pen once more.
“What can I say? Paddington 2 isn’t a superior film to Citizen Kane ,” he states in a similar manner to his earlier response. It seems as though only fighting with his sibling and the films’ respective scores on that squash review website are the only things that can deeply trouble the otherwise laid-back young man.
“An argument over a film caused this mess?” Farah says, crossing her arms as she lays further back in her swivel chair.
“Yes. Thanks for clearing it up,” Harold says with a confidence that no one would dare challenge as he makes his way towards the agency’s doorway, pocketing the tiny obol from the rat soul exorcism as he goes. “I’ve got places to go, funerals to plan, souls to canoe down the figurative Styx but literal Upper Skagit. You know how it is.”
With a chuckle, he flicks an obol to each member of the jacket team and states, “Give him one of these when he’s finally at rest.”
“What are the extra two for?” Todd asks, narrowing his eyebrows at the young man whose fashion sense is almost as egregious as his attitude towards his insurmountable duty to the universe.
“If he kills anyone, the next clean-up is tragically on me,” he says with a nonchalance that nobody should have about collateral homicide, but it was apparently just that sort of case. “They’re also redeemable for weekend excursions during our off-season, which is much preferred.”
Before Harold leaves, he darts over to Gillian and presses a kiss to his temple, and gives him a pat of parental support that only a twenty-eight-year-old can give to a two-century-old typhus victim’s skeleton. “ Please try not to kill anyone little buddy, I’ll see you on the other side.”
With that, Harold makes his exit, leaving the agency trio just as confused as when he first entered. The door slams shut, and Dirk stares at in confused awe. “Well. He seems nice.”
Filling the confused silence hanging in the air, Gilligan’s teeth start chattering in what a skeleton whisperer might claim is a whimper of separation anxiety from one’s parental unit. Todd and Farah just look at one another sharing a heavy sigh. They would have said something about how fucking weird that whole interaction was, but when you deal with pods of polyglot dolphins and missing gangs of former harlequin ghost children on a daily basis, nothing is off-limits.
And apparently, this includes becoming unwilling temporal assistants to the universe’s only combination rafting guide and soul ferrying stoner. Thank the powers that be that they only got twelve inquiries about missing cats this far this week as opposed to the usual forty-two.
“Solved it!” Dirk shouts, bursting through the front door of the detective agency with a tray of coffees. The slam of the door behind him causes Todd, who is sprawled across his desk, halfway between sleep and wakefulness, to stir. He lets out a groan as Dirk places a triple shot espresso on the desk before him, lightly ruffling his hair before presenting Farah with the same morning gift. She downs it unblinkingly as she doesn’t remove her gaze away from digital history sites documenting the Great Hunger to try and find anything remotely helpful.
Todd doesn’t believe it when he hears it. Last time Dirk said he ‘Solved it!’ they ended up driving to Yucipa, California to take part in an American Revolution reenactment adventure. While this seemed fun, ritual combat against the British to get a false sense of revenge and closure for the historic injustices committed against their colonial holdings is wonderful until it isn’t. Gilligan got a little too into his role as a Continental Army Officer which led to a cease-and-desist order, amongst other things. One of those things was a visit from Harold and Thanatos— that is, the deceased rat soul from the Detective Agency Thanatos, not the God Thanatos, of course. That being said, considering Harold and Cas’s role as tools of the universe, their joint project name could have been Thanatos, so whether the name is merely a rarer and sexier coinkydink or Harold trying to be funny remains to be seen.
Regardless, Harold was not happy that they had expended one of the obols he had presented the agency with on homicide. Homicide is bad enough as it is, but that young man was only pretending to be a British person. To be fair, if he actually was some eighteenth century Redcoat it may have been slightly more acceptable, but axe murdering a young Revolutionary War reenactor by day and pie maker by night was just unwarranted.
What was even more unwarranted was Harold trying to get Gilligan, who cannot speak mind you, to apologize to the very disgruntled actor’s soul for a number of hours. It neither put the souls to rest nor answered the question of if killing actual Englishmen would solve the case. But they had only one obol left for homicide and considering their job is to usually solve those, they don’t exactly wish to further research that hypothesis.
“We need to go to Gilligan’s Island!” Dirk announces with a sense of unwavering confidence in face of the utter nonsense he utters. The holistic detective simultaneously hands the man — or husk of a man — or whatever the politically correct term for a reanimated typhus epidemic victim’s skeleton from the 1800s is — of the hour a coffee which he sips earnestly. As the coffee literally goes right through him, the brilliance of Farah’s idea to litter the skeleton’s designated area with pee pads becomes apparent. Besides, it’s not as if they had anything else to do with the exorbitant amount of leftovers from when Mona decided to immerse herself in the acting challenge Havashu puppy for months on end before she decided to reprise her role as Dirk’s favorite combination scissor-stapler.
Todd, not entirely ready to deal with this at six in the morning after going the past forty-eight hours without sleep, just downs his coffee and jabs at a sliver of apple pie with a plastic work. Homicidal skeletons aside, at least they got phenomenal pie out of Riley’s Farm if nothing else. Not bothering to look up at Dirk, he groggily mutters, “I’m fairly sure that it doesn’t exist.”
“No, No! Gilligan’s literal Island,” Dirk wildly gesticulates, pulsing his hands for emphasis in what seems like a failed spastic jazz hands attack. When the enthusiasm is not apparently shared with the rest of the jacket trio, Dirk offers, “You know, Ireland.”
“We’re not going to Ireland,” Todd sighs defeatedly in a way that’s unclear if he’s more disappointed in the joke or by mere virtue that Dirk, who knows next to nothing of any relevant of popular culture, still knows apparently Gilligan’s Island, of all things, because fuck the universe, right?
Both Todd and Dirk look to Farah for a consensus, varying wildly in expression. Todd’s eyes look about as dead as Hypnos’s corpse — Hypnos, being the additional rat Harold claimed from their floor on his last visit— lying upon their floor. Dirk, on the other hand, is an excitable golden retriever in temperament, wide-eyes and waiting on bated breath for Farah to indulge him. Farah doesn’t acknowledge either of them, too busy focusedly typing on her desktop. However, when their phones bing with email notifications for tomorrow’s flight from Seattle-Tacoma Airport to Dublin Airport, Dirk does an excitable little dance because they are indeed going to Ireland.
Gillian even does a little dance alongside Dirk and it’s all well and good until a pop-up advertisement for British Airways turns on and all hell breaks loose, so it’s a typical agency Tuesday.
The trip to Ireland is going as well as one would expect of a nineteenth-century skeleton’s Irish homecoming. If how wonderfully TSA and customs went was any indication of their trip’s quality, they should have turned away while they had the chance. They tried to use Mona as a passport so they didn’t get arrested for fraudulent government documents, but no number of hats, sweatshirts, and sneakers could conceal the fact they were traveling with a skeleton.
Thankfully, TSA assumed it was some emotional support anatomical model and not a very real and very much alive one. Why anyone would have an emotional support skeleton aside from the physical support one inside your own body is egregious. Besides, you don’t want to make your own jealous lest it try and free itself of its fleshy sack, right? Still, they accepted the rationale, no matter how bizarre, and were forced to pack Gilligan in a crate like all the other emotional support traveling animals, as he’s too large of a carry-on, despite having his own seat set aside.
Gilligan was, of course, not happy with being packed up like the common museum display that he very much was before a tiff between agents of deaths made him more than that. The cost to board the cage also was disgustingly expensive, meaning an invoice would definitely be sent to Harold and Cas along with any and all travel fees associated with the case. While Dirk feels slightly bad charging other former Blackwing comrades such steep fees, it was their fault. And they are merchants of death and Pacific Northwestern tourism, so they undoubtedly have an abundance of money to spare via ripping off Southern Californians and the like.
They have spent a week so far in Ireland and after another day of disappointingly meager case progress, Team Jacket and its current honorary alive-but-not-really-living member toss back drinks at a local pub. The regulars seem to be milling about as some employees stand on ladders and try to cover the place with more extensive Halloween decorations.
“There’s literally nothing else we can do, Dirk,” Todd says with a sigh, taking a swig of whiskey from his glass. “We’ve tried everything.”
They did try just about everything they could think of from football to farming. They visited his former village outside of Newmarket-on-Fergus to the site where his family’s home and farm once resides to pay his respects, but that only made Gilligan depressed by the progression of time as man moves away from the traditional and towards the technological— or at least that’s what the groans and grumbles of a sentient skeleton implied. They really thought trying a potato from a local farmer because tasting a non-blighted crop from the motherland might rejuvenate the skeleton. But they shortly realized all the Irishman’s fleshy bits including the tongue had long been decomposed making the whole sense of taste thing a tad difficult.
And they’d grasped at straws to see what stuck. They tried to visit memorial sites of famous Irishman like Oscar Wilde, before realizing Gilligan was long dead before the playwright's time. They tried poaching wildlife on Dromoland Castle Lands as a ‘fuck you’ to the landed gentry classes of the past and present to get a rile out of the skeleton, who found attempted animal murder much less entertaining than actual murder of those whose speech patterns aligned with the colonizers.
That was taken out via Gilligan upon a security guard with an English lilt. His body could be thankfully stashed somewhere within the four hundred fifty-acre grounds where it could not be found, but it didn’t mean they were happy about it. Harold was the least enthused of them all as their summoning him interrupted Styx and Headstones’ boxing Twitch Stream. Since unboxing videos became a thing, the twins deciding packing boxes should be just as intriguing for viewers. And by boxes, they mean good old family-friendly live-streamed funeral home body and casket prep. As Harold collected the security guard’s soul, he focused half on the task at hand and half on his smartphone, grumbling annoyed at how Cas is ruining the entire neo-classical modernist rococo casket aesthetic he was going for.
The only thing that seems to make Gilligan truly content is taking him to a friendly football match between Ireland and England. They travel all the way to Dublin’s Lansdowne Road Stadium for it and pray another riot like ‘95 would not befall. Gilligan got quite into the whole deal, donned in proper colors and chattering his teeth at the top of his hypothetical lungs in support of the motherland. While it isn’t physical combat, the emotional and ritual component of it all seems to resonate with the unusually emotive skeleton more so than the Revolutionary War reenactment, as if you can see life in those empty eye sockets once more. When the Irish national team won in penalties, Todd was certain that Gilligan would drop dead right then and there, feeling sort of vindication. He didn’t, and while no riots broke out, a few post-game brawls with English drunkards did, which they had to drag the skeleton away from at all costs.
Overall, in a very short span of time, they had almost completed several ‘Ireland Bucket List’ posts on travel blogs. This is all to hammer in the fact that they had indeed tried everything. And at this point, while they are all much better off from a cultural education standpoint, they are nowhere near well off from a case standpoint. How not well off they are from solving the thing is positively egregious and there’s likely to be a whole new slew of cats and clues to sort out the moment they return to Seattle. The joys of recent cases solved with more than arguable efficiency meant that business is booming, and so is their backlog— a fact which Farah has never ceased to remind them of this trip.
“Well—“ Dirk says, lifting a finger, ready to reply before Todd loudly clears his throat. He gestures toward the skeleton sitting in the booth next to Farah, who is guzzling his third pint of Murphy’s stout. Well, guzzling isn’t exactly the proper word, splashing is a bit more apropos as the beer just splatters on the pub cushions and a rather disgruntled Farah.
She mumbles under her breath, slowly losing her patience at the unbothered skeleton, and tries to channel her energy into organizing the silverware and ensuring the inserts in the tabletop ad display are facing the right direction. However, as the splatters continue she wrenches the half-spilled pint from Gilligan’s literally bony hands. “ Stop. Drinking. ”
When the skeleton tries to tussle her for the glass, Todd just narrows his eyebrows at Dirk and takes another swig, “ Everything .”
“I think you’re wrong, you silly man, Todd. There’s still oodles of possibilities,” Dirk says confidently as he snatches Todd’s glass from his hand. He takes a sip, wincing as he does before setting it down with a frown. “We haven’t even seen Blarney Castle yet. Project Banshee should be haunting Lough Corrib— or was it Sheelin? Wait! Or we could get him the Book—”
“We’re not stealing the Book of Kells,” Farah chimes in with a grunt, shoving Gilligan off of her.
“You enjoyed grand theft archive-o last week with Mr. Chains. Or was it Cage?” Dirk says with a pout, pointing a chip from Todd’s basket at her accusingly.
Farah darts her gaze between Todd and Dirk, Todd looking as exceedingly puzzled as she is. A moment of realization floods his face, and he confusedly offers, “Cage? … Wait. Dirk, you do know National Treasure is a film , and therefore not something to try at home, right?”
“Not with that attitude, you shouldn’t,” Dirk says, wagging his eyebrows and popping the chip into his mouth. He leans across the table with a smirk on his face, “Besides, we aren’t even home!”
“It’s just a— never mind,” Todd mumbles, running a hand through his hair. He eyes Farah as she catches the chip falling from where Gilligan’s esophagus must have been in the 1800s before it hits the pub cushions. “Does he have any descendants?”
“His sister’s family survived the voyage to Baltimore, but I doubt we’ll be able to speak to every Irish person with the surname Gallagher to see if he’s their several-great uncle,” Farah states, lightly stabbing her fork into a salad in frustration. “And we’re not about to go through TSA with him again.”
The agency trio collectively groan and look about the restaurant, hoping that they can find something within the stains and scratches of the dingy hole in the wall pub. As if by coincidence, as Dirk’s eyes trail over a young barback putting up additional decorations on the ladder by the front door, the young man trips, falling to the floor. When he does, Gilligan gets up from the booth and moves towards the man, so Todd instinctively gets up to try and defend the wounded Irishman. He doubts Gilligan will kill one of his kinsmen, but they still don’t know with him.
Todd helps the man back to his feet and hands him one of the banners he dropped, reading, ‘Saoire Dheireadh Fómhair Shona!’ Upon reading it, Dirk quirks his head curiously as he tries to read the words aloud, struggling immensely. The barback chuckles and says, “Don’t strain yourself, just wishing our patrons a Happy October Holiday.”
“October Holiday, is that like Halloween or?” Dirk asks.
“Public Bank Holiday,” the barback says as he gets back on the ladder and shakes his head. “Wouldn’t expect a Brit to know our Republic’s National holidays.” At the words ‘Republic’ and ‘National,’ Gilligan quirks his head up oddly, but no one seems to pay him mind. The Barback lets out a small snort as he mutters, “Still condescending even though we’ve been free for a century. Ridiculous,” under his breath.
Dirk feels slightly offended that the man sees his curious question as a sign of some inherent British superiority complex he has over the Irish, even though he’s not British to begin with. However, the detective does not have time to process this as Gilligan drops immediately dead on the floor in a clatter. Everyone in the pub turns to stare at the pile of bones and the agency trio who brought them there, and Dirk just waves awkwardly.
“Was it that fucking simple?” Todd grumbles as he prods Gilligan gently with his finger and gets no response. It seems Gilligan’s soul is presumably at rest, having known that Ireland is, in fact, a free nation. The bones lie cold on the floor, which is great if not for the fact that having Gilligan do a single Google search on the nation’s status could have saved them weeks of hassle. That is, of course, assuming he could read but the fact that this whole thing could have been solved by “Ireland is free” so the dead man knew his people were not still under the yoke of oppressive British rule is a bit preposterous. But when wasn’t one of their cases? Todd groans as he takes the obol from his pocket and finagles it into Gilligan’s mouth. Upon placing it into the skull’s mouth, a gender-optional individual in their twenties bursts through the pub doors and tries to pocket it.
Before Farah can even go to stop them, Harold appears out of nowhere, full-body tackling the individual to the ground, neon green Crocs, candy cane striped knee-highs and all. After wrenching the obol from the individual’s fingers, Harold sits upon the assailant proudly and places the obol in a miniature backpack of coins that the death’s ferrier’s assistant, Thanatos the rat, now wears. The individual squirms under Harold who simply waves over a bartender from where he sits until the voice defeatedly mumbles, “You can do the next boxing.”
“And?” Harold states petulantly. He then orders a drink off the menu, as if he is sitting at the bar as opposed to a person.
“I won’t leave all my empty ketchup bottles in the fridge,” they pout, trying to flail their noodle arms and get Harold to move.
He doesn’t. He just sits admiring his nails. “And?”
“You were right about Citizen Kane ,” they squeal out. As they utter this statement, Harold wordlessly gets and makes his way over to the bar. Grabbing his scotch on the rocks, he flips a gold coin that more than covers it at the bartender.
The peculiar entity, on the other hand, scrambles to their feet and tries to pat down their egregious clothing to smoothen out the wrinkles their brother had caused. If their choice of socks and shoes isn’t a fashion sin enough already, they wear a neon pink vest decorated with merit badges. On first look, it seems to belong to some sort of Scouts or Adventure Guide organization, but the embalming, doula training, and formaldehyde usage badges speak to something else. Their hair is in a state of disarray that could challenge Bart with its assortment of clips and baubles dangling from every which way. Sporting short jorts and an ‘Ask Me About Death’ T-shirt, they march up to Harold and snatch the scotch from him with a hand attached to an arm full of rainbow jelly bracelets from wrist to elbow. They defiantly down the drink and slam it on the bar, wiping the drops from their lips. From the context clues and annoyed look in Harold’s eyes, this must be the prophesized Cas.
“Wait. Why are you here?” Todd asks, narrowing his gaze at Cas in confusion. Cas gives Todd a two-finger salute in acknowledgment and goes to say something before their brother cuts them off.
“Wait… is this, dare I ask, the infallible Cas trying to cover their mistake,” Harold asks with a faux enthusiasm that might earn him a punch from the bubblegum-pop camp counselor.
“Yes, smart ass,” Cas groans as they send their brother a death glare, “We’re all wildly aware.”
“Cas, if I may?” Dirk pipes up as he shoves another chip in his mouth, “You did literally have an entire month to cover this up before we got involved. You are a bit late.”
As Dirk says this, Cas puffs up their chest and tries to look rather intimidating with all one hundred sixty-five centimeters of their body and sends Dirk a very unamused stare. “Well unless you can use your ‘put people where they need to be’ powers or whatever the hell to get ‘em to vaccine clinics so the business of death doesn’t keep booming, Mister Detective, my schedule is booked.”
Cas finishes their rant off with a sickenly sweet smile directed at Dirk for emphasis before narrowing their eyes at Todd. “You spent how long looking for this guy? Like… really?”
“It’s kind of a funny story,” Dirk chimes in before Cas promptly cuts him off once more, eliciting a small frown from the detective.
“Actually, I don’t care. Look, it’s almost rafting off-season so we need to just put this whole mess behind us,” Cas says, running a hand through their frizzy hair. As they continue speaking, they glare at Harold for punctuation. “And we need to work as hard as possible until then and not slack off .”
“Not all of us have the time to clean up your mistakes,” Harold mumbles through gritted teeth as he sips another scotch nonchalantly. “Some of us need to actually prep caskets that don’t look like a seven-year-old vomited a crayon box on it.”
“Harold. That was twelve years ago. Besides, they said it was a celebration of life,” Cas retorts, holding up an accusatory finger to defend themself. Maybe it was a holistic thing?
“Yes. A classy one, not a kitschy birthday,” Harold says with a shrug and a look that could kill if he wasn’t the one challenging the universe’s literal grim reaper.
“You’re one to talk,” Cas says with a snort as they gesture at his outfit and snatch Harold’s scotch once more. “Look at what you’re wearing.”
“Certainly not that rainbow Cub Scout attire, if that’s what you’re implying, sibling dear,” he chastises, punctuating his words with the same sickeningly sweet smile Cas used on Dirk.
Cas sets down the empty glass on the bar again and puffs up their chest as if it’ll intimidate the tree of a man that is Harold. Harold conversely pats Thanatos on the head and urges him into the down vest pocket, as if to shield the eyes of the undead rat soul from what his father was about to do.
As if sensing the tension build, the pile of Gilligan on the floor starts to rattle again, as if ready to reassemble itself, which they did not need. The agency trio all look to each other, searching frantically for some sort of solution in the others’ eyes. Todd panics, not entirely sure how they can explain their way out of this. The whole situation with these colorful characters and a formerly undead but now very dead skeleton at their feet isn’t something they can just explain to the authorities: it seems like something out of some college freshman’s art-house film as opposed to reality. Wait. Shit. They use that as a cover.
“And scene!” Todd yells, pushing himself up from the table and giving Cas a pat on the shoulder as he tries to usher them outside. “Great work, Cas? Farah, can you get the props?”
Todd gestures his head at the pile of bones to which Farah rolls her eyes and collects their former skeleton frenemy’s remains. Dirk doesn’t quite catch on, causing him to short circuit when someone asks what they are filming. Harold graciously puts a hand on Dirk’s shoulder, ushering him out, and states, “Episodic hidden camera drama.”
When he receives blank stares, he shrugs, adding “It’s experimental,” and snaps his fingers, allowing the detective and patrons to get a brief glance at a young ginger figure trailing behind them in nineteen-century farming attire. He lets it disappear moments later as the pub door slams shut behind him.
Harold is taken aback as his wrist is tightly grabbed by an annoyed Todd who has Cas’s in his other. Looking disappointedly between the two of them, Todd grumbles. “We had to haul ass all the way to Ireland over your little family squabble, the least you can do is not unsolve the case we just solved.”
“Look on the bright side Todd, we did get a holiday out of it,” Dirk chimes in brightly. Todd narrows his eyebrows at Dirk’s preposterous admission as if urging the detective to explain himself. “We were attacked by assailants at least five times less than our usual case rate. I think it qualifies as a holiday.”
Todd just sighs, not ready to even contest the fact that yes, despite the fact two men, one rat, and one already dead man are indeed dead, this was one of their more normal and less dangerous cases. And the fact that all of this could have been solved with a simple Google search certainly made the agency live up to their model of arguable efficiency. In the end, Dirk got to announce that he “Solved it!” and they walked away with a deep-dive into Irish cultural history and several coupons for free white water rafting outings on the Upper Skagit River and any case related or unrelated funeral prep.
They would much rather take advantage of the former, but with the way that cases were going lately, the agency was most likely going to see much more of the twins. Hopefully next time, however, it would not be for problems of their own doing because the last thing the agency needs to do is try and solve the case of a resurrected Egyptian mummy gone rogue following a disagreement over whether or not Jojo Siwa is a true artist. But knowing the agency’s luck with this sort of thing?
Give it a week.