Movin' On

Movin' On

  Megan Hamilton

  Copyright 2012 Megan Hamilton

  Disclaimer: This short story is a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental. No reference to any person is intended or should be inferred.

  Acknowledgments: My friend Shirlene took my story and 'put it out there'.

 

  Movin' on...

  Bobby couldn’t remember feeling like this ever before – light and airy, no small aches and pains, in fact, nothing at all. It felt good actually, until he saw his body sprawled on the floor of the gym. Then, he noticed the blood, and realized that this was not good at all. He must be injured; the blood was still running from his head. He had to call for help, but there was no one around and he didn’t seem to be able to move very far from his body. He felt sure that this must mean that he was still alive. Weren’t you supposed to move into the light, or something, when you died?

  Someone was coming. That was good; they could call an ambulance, and then he’d be okay. It was one of the cleaners, the female one. She started work after everyone else had left for the evening. She approached his body, and began to scream. Bobby was annoyed. Screaming wasn’t going to help him. He obviously needed an ambulance. Meanwhile, the cleaner had put her hands to her face, turned, and had run (still screaming) from the room. Suddenly, Bobby found that he could run after her. Did that mean that he had died while she wasted time? He went back to check on his body. He was dead all right. He felt no connection with what now seemed like a piece of meat wearing a fitness outfit, and lying on the floor. Stupid cleaner, but she hadn’t killed him really. His favourite award, a small statue that he always carried in his gym bag for luck, was lying next to his corpse (nasty word, he thought). Someone must have hit him on the back of the head with it, but who, and why? He couldn’t remember anything.

  He settled gracefully on the floor. As a live dancer, even when he was competing, he had never been so supple, so graceful. This part was great; the rest of being dead might not be. For example, why was he still here? Why hadn’t he gone to Heaven, or Hell, or wherever else you were supposed to go? Where was Saint Peter when you really needed him? Another problem was that no one could see him; the cleaner hadn’t anyway. He sat and waited to see what would happen next.

  Someone somewhere had called 911. The police arrived just ahead of the paramedics. After checking for vital signs, and finding none, the paramedics left everything to the police. Bobby became bored with the proceedings. He’d seen enough police shows on TV to know what came next, and he didn’t really want to watch them manhandling his beautiful former body, and discussing it with what seemed to him to be very macabre humour. He decided to explore the rest of the building, and see if he could actually leave it.

  He’d once read that murder victims were sometimes permanently tied to the site of their actual deaths. He hoped not; he’d didn’t want to haunt a fitness centre, especially a community fitness centre – how tasteless. Even more especially, he didn’t want to haunt a fitness center run by the unholy trio, Averil, Phoebe, and Belinda. To him, that would be a form of Hell. He had had to suck up to them when he was alive because they had controlled the contract that he was under to teach Dancercise classes. What if he was tied here with them until they each died, or retired? This was a truly horrible thought. Although each of the three women weighed at least 80 pounds more than she should, they didn’t seem in any danger of expiring, and since they were all still in middle age, none of them was likely to retire any time soon either. Why hadn’t someone killed one of them? Everyone was nice enough to their faces, but he doubted if they were actually well liked. They were bullies. And what about Mouth Almighty, Zena, another fat, pushy woman with more power than she could handle? He’d have to see (and worse) hear her every day until the interfering old biddy died. Maybe this was Hell after all. Maybe his little peccadilloes had finally caught up with him.

  As he made his way to the front door, Bobby began to feel as if he were being stretched. There was no pain, it just felt odd, well, even odder than being dead did, although he guessed that, given time, he’d get used to being dead. When he tried to move beyond the front door, everything stopped. It wasn’t just that he couldn’t move forward; he didn’t even know where forward was. He stepped back a few paces (this he could do), and began to feel better. He now knew where he was. He also knew that what they said about ghosts (he might as well admit that he was a ghost) was true. They were stuck where they died until… until what? This was definitely not his idea of an acceptable eternity. Perhaps once the police solved his murder, he would be free to leave. As he was pondering this, they wheeled his body straight through him and out the front door causing yet another weird sensation. There seemed to be a lot to learn about being dead.

  The next day, the centre remained closed while the police technicians investigated the site of his murder; but the morning after, keys in hand, Averil unlocked the gym, and walked straight to the spot where he had died. There was still some dried blood on the floor. She shook her head, and then raised it. “Ollie, come here!” she shouted. When long-suffering Ollie appeared beside her, (he must have followed her in), she continued in a slightly less strident voice. “You’ll have to do something about this mess. I hope it hasn’t ruined the new gym floor. We can’t afford to replace it again. We had it done last year.”

  Ollie stared at Averil for a few moments, then muttered, “I’ll go and get the cleaning equipment.”

  Averil turned her back on him and lumbered away in the direction of her desk in the front reception area. Bobby followed, moving in close behind her. She shivered when he attempted to touch her, but seemed otherwise unaware of his presence. He sat on the floor beside the desk and waited; being dead was starting to get boring.

  A few minutes later in walked Belinda closely followed by Phoebe. They both stopped in front of the reception desk. Belinda, being the senior employee began to talk first. “Isn’t it terrible? We had to close down for a whole day and the murder will reflect very badly on the community centre. Why would anyone murder Bobby here? They should have done it somewhere else where no one would find the body, or at least, somewhere else anyway. Oh my shattered nerves! I never did like Bobby much.”

  The other two women both looked at Belinda for a long moment. It was well known that Belinda had had a crush on the much younger Bobby. When he first came to teach at the centre she had called him into her office in the back for no apparent reason on many occasions. On his part, Bobby had seemed monumentally disinterested in Belinda’s adoration, and eventually Belinda had given up, or had she?

  “The police seem to think it was a spur of the moment thing, a ‘crime of passion’ they called it,” said Phoebe. He was killed with that little statue he carried in his bag, the one he was so proud of, the one he showed to us when he first came here. They don’t know exactly when he was killed, but they’re guessing that it was after the evening Dancercise class.”

  “How do you know all this?” asked Averil. “They haven’t told us anything yet.”

  “Oh, I have a friend who’s with the police and she phoned me late last night, answered Phoebe somewhat smugly. “Someone will be coming to interview us all in the next few days. They’ll be especially interested in the last people here on the night that it happened. Did you lock up on Tuesday night, Averil?”

  “I always lock up; you know that – first in, and last out as usual,” snapped Averil. “That doesn’t mean that I killed him and it doesn’t mean that I know who did. He could have stayed behind until after I left. You c
an still leave the building after I lock up. You just can’t get back inside. I honestly didn’t hear a thing, no shouting, no arguing, nothing!”

  “Oh, my nerves,” whimpered Belinda, as she fled to her office and closed the door.

  Phoebe leaned on Averil’s desk and said, “No one, except the cleaners, can enter the centre after you leave, this means that both Bobby and his killer were somewhere in the building after you left if it didn’t happen while you were here. Didn’t you do a walk-through?”

  “I was very tired,” said Averil, “and I had a headache.” “I suppose you’re going