Ghost and Bone Read online

  Sally gave him a funny look.

  “Hey, I’ve got an idea,” Oscar said. “Can you send one of your amazing messages to Mr. Mortis? We could ask him why he saved me.”

  “No, it’ll definitely be blocked.”

  “Then let’s go see him. Surely he’s the best person to clear this up.”

  “He’s not really a person—more of…a god, I suppose. But I imagine he would. Only problem is very few ghosts get to see him. I don’t know anyone who’s actually met him—apart from the Archivist and a few other hotshots. And Northcote, of course—he’s Mr. Mortis’s private secretary.”

  Oscar remembered the small stressed-out man with all the pocket watches who had come into the room when Lady Margaret was questioning them. Mr. Mortis sounded almost impossible to get to. But there had to be a way.

  “We’ll get into his office somehow,” Oscar said. After his success at burglary, he felt full of purpose—like they could do anything they wanted, no matter how impossible. Besides, he had his powers. He could turn back and forth from ghost to bone—and that had to be a help.

  “My, you’re really getting into this, aren’t you, Oscar?” Sally shook her head. “Maybe we can’t fail? Let’s give it a shot!”

  With a flick of the reins, the carriage shot off down the road. Oscar was feeling so determined he didn’t even flinch when they drove straight through the oncoming number 73 bus.

  * * *

  The head offices of the Ministry were near Bank Underground Station, right in the heart of the oldest parts of London.

  The entrance, which bulged from the side of a tall, modern glass skyscraper like the architect had suddenly gone mad, was an ancient Roman temple with thick columns and creepy, blank-eyed statues glaring down.

  Inside, long corridors and winding staircases led Sally and Oscar up through London’s history. They passed Viking shields and silver death masks, faded tapestries with medieval hunting scenes, gilded pillars and highly detailed models of ancient ships, mighty castles and long-forgotten temples. Gradually, as they rose through the building, the decoration got more modern and they began to see more ghosts too: clerks bustling about with more piles of those ever-present manila folders, porters dragging tea urns the size of tugboats, and frown-faced secretaries taking dictation from speaking tubes.

  The building was like a maze, but Sally moved through it confidently. So confidently, in fact, that no one challenged their right to be there until they were just outside Mr. Mortis’s office.

  The most eccentric-looking receptionist that Oscar had ever seen sat at a desk. She had spiky glasses like butterfly wings, purple hair, and a lemon-sour smile.

  “What are you doing here?” she sneered.

  “We’d like to see Mr. Mortis,” Sally explained. “It’s very urgent.”

  “Do you have an appointment?” the receptionist asked.

  “No,” Oscar said. “But—”

  “No one sees Mr. Mortis without an appointment.” The receptionist opened a drawer in her desk and pulled out an enormous leather-bound book. It must have weighed about the same as a small car, but she handled it deftly, slowly turning the thick parchment pages and running her finger down the list of appointments.

  She carried on through her tome for a very long time, and none of Sally’s coughs or Oscar’s nervous foot-tapping had any effect on her speed at all. Oscar could feel Sally’s frustration rising with every page.

  At last, after about ten minutes of scanning, the receptionist tapped her finger on a line and looked up.

  “Ah, yes! You’ll be pleased to know I’ve found a space where we can fit you in.” She smiled wide, like a crocodile inviting a small fish into its mouth.

  “Great!” Oscar exclaimed. “When? Today?”

  “You’ll have to wait a little longer than that.” The receptionist’s smile broadened. “Not too long, though…I’ve an opening on the last Tuesday afternoon in March 2058….The twenty-fifth, I think. Does that work?”

  “Forty years! No, it absolutely doesn’t!” Sally growled. “You onion-swilling old trout! You prancing old prune! You made us wait all that time for that!” Oscar had to hold her back from going for the receptionist’s throat.

  The receptionist’s smile glittered even more brightly. She had clearly died just for the joy of moments like these. With a discreet nod, she called security.

  “Show these two the way out, please,” she murmured, slamming her book shut and placing it back in the drawer.

  Oscar was about to argue, until he saw the two men who had emerged from the shadows. One of them was a Viking warrior with a necklace of skulls around his neck. The other was a vast sumo wrestler, whose glistening rolls of oiled fat wobbled as he waddled toward them. They were both the largest men, or ghosts, that Oscar had ever seen.

  Sally looked like she was ready to fight them too.

  “Let’s go, Sally,” he whispered, tugging her away before she was flattened.

  * * *

  Outside, day was finally breaking on what had unquestionably been the longest night of Oscar’s life. The sun was rising just behind the tall church nearby, but Oscar realized he couldn’t feel the warmth on his skin. It was an odd feeling.

  There are things you miss being dead.

  He didn’t feel tired either, which was odder still, because he had been running around all night. Even so, the aura of invincibility that he’d been enjoying had definitely slipped. There was clearly no easy way to get to Mr. Mortis. Their investigation had hit an obstacle.

  “Forty years!” Sally yelled, still fuming. “It’s ghosts like her that make me wish there really was a hell. She’d fit in perfectly. Did you see how much she enjoyed that?”

  Oscar didn’t answer. The morning sun glinted off the marble tombstones in the churchyard. Oscar remembered that Mr. Jenkinson’s funeral was going to start in three hours. He still hadn’t finished dressing his body.

  “Sally, I should go home. My mum’s going to be really worried if I’m not there when she wakes up.”

  “No problem.” Sally whistled for the carriage. “Won’t take a minute. But I’m not letting that old trout beat me. We have to try something else. There must be a way to get Mr. Mortis’s attention. We can carry on the investigation later. In the meantime, I will try to come up with some other leads.”

  Oscar was quiet for most of the trip back home. The night’s madness was catching up with him at last.

  Sally kept on cursing the receptionist. She got even angrier the more she thought about it.

  “That’s the problem with being dead. We’ve got too much time to waste. It’s ridiculous….”

  Oscar tuned out her complaining. The carriage was moving so quickly that the whole world blurred around them. That was kind of how he felt too: everything was happening so fast that he couldn’t come to grips with it. Maybe if he had a sleep—or even better, a cup of tea—his life would start making sense.

  Before he knew it, they were rolling up Marigold Street. The solid little houses looked as cheerful and quiet as ever. It was hard to believe that they were real. Now Oscar was in ghost form, the living buildings had become dulled in color, and everything seemed as thin and flimsy as a stage set.

  “Righto, here we are.” Sally hadn’t stopped plotting for a second. “I’ll pick you up in the evening. And I’ve had a thought about what I can do to help the investigation. I’ll pay a visit to every ghost milliner in town. That’s a hat shop to you. There’re only three or four in London, and maybe one will tell me all about the ghost that bought a big floppy hat. You still with us, Oscar?”

  Oscar blinked and nodded. “Yeah, sorry. Um, it’s all just a little bit overwhelming. Thanks for…thanks for everything, Sally.”

  “Don’t mention it.” She gave him a wink and watched as he climbed down from the carriage.

  As
Oscar searched his pocket for his keys, he saw his crutch lying on the ground behind the bush where he’d chucked it away.

  That moment felt like years ago.

  With a deep sigh, he picked it up. Then, with a rising sense of dread, he turned himself back from ghostly form into his human body. Instantly, the buildings grew more vivid and the sounds of the living world returned: wind through the prim bushes and the blare of televisions.

  Oscar felt like the sky had fallen in on him, and his bones had turned to lead—all at the same time. He took a step forward and stumbled. His bad leg was aching, but that was nothing compared to the tiredness he felt. His bed was very far away. It felt like a colossal effort to get there.

  It was at this moment that the person Oscar least wanted to see in the whole world came running toward him—Gary Stevens, out for an early morning jog.

  Oscar was too tired to move, and Gary was too much of a bully to care.

  “Out of my way, limpy,” he muttered as he elbowed past Oscar, shoving him to the pavement. It hurt.

  Oscar suddenly realized that he didn’t have to take this anymore. He turned ghostly. The tiredness fell away. Gary Stevens gave a gasp of utter terror as Oscar disappeared.

  Gary backed away slowly, looking round to try to see where Oscar had gone. “What’s happening?” he muttered. “What’s this? Some kind of trick?”

  “Haunt him, Oscar!” yelled Sally, who’d seen the whole thing.

  Oscar crept around behind Gary. He turned bodily just long enough to whisper, “Boo!” then turned into a ghost.

  Gary Stevens’s head whipped round. He screamed like a frightened child and ran away.

  He sprinted right through where Oscar stood in ghost form. Once again, Oscar caught just a sniff of his thoughts as their bodies were together. There was a large dose of terror, a sort of purple wash of complete panic, and something else, very strange.

  Oscar was certain that Gary Stevens hadn’t recognized him. Maybe he just didn’t notice who I was, Oscar wondered. And it is pretty dark. But Oscar felt uneasy—like something wasn’t right.

  He and Sally watched the bully sprint away down the road.

  “Good work, Oscar!” Sally said. “If an examiner had seen you, they’d give you a pass in your Haunting exams on the spot.”

  Oscar frowned. Not being recognized by Gary had rather taken the shine off his victory. They’d only seen each other nearly every day for twelve and a half years.

  “You look dead tired, Oscar,” Sally said.

  “Ho, ho,” Oscar said.

  “Have a kip! We’ll get to the bottom of this or my name ain’t Sally Cromarty.”

  “Hope so. See you later, Sally.” Oscar turned bodily, and the tiredness came crashing down once again.

  He tried to turn the front door key quietly, but the latch squeaked all the same. As he opened the door, he reached for his spare crutch, which he always kept in the umbrella stand by the door. If he was feeling as bad as this, he’d need two crutches to get up the stairs.

  Weirdly, the crutch wasn’t there. Oscar groaned before dragging himself upstairs, trying to tread softly and keep his heavy breathing as quiet as he could. As he passed his mother’s room, he heard her talking on the phone.

  Great, he thought. That means she hasn’t heard me.

  He almost collapsed as he slipped into his room and didn’t bother switching the light on, instead feeling his way toward his bed in the corner of the room. He had never ever needed his bed as much as he did right now, and couldn’t even be bothered to get undressed. He just wanted to lie down and sleep forever. In fact, he was so tired that he didn’t notice what was wrong until he tried to pull back his quilt. His hand brushed thin air.

  What?

  Oscar hobbled back to the light switch and flicked it on.

  His bed wasn’t there anymore.

  He blinked, closed his eyes, counted to ten, and looked again.

  It wasn’t just his bed. Everything was gone.

  There was a bed, but it was in the other corner of the room. And it wasn’t Oscar’s bed. It was someone else’s—someone super lame. The cheerful skeleton-decorated bedcover he’d had since he was ten had been replaced by an ugly flowery comforter and starched white sheets. All his horror film posters were gone too—even his Ghostbusters II original—and the red wallpaper had been changed to match the red carpet, which hadn’t even been there before.

  All the photos of his mum and dad and Granny Grimstone had vanished from the dresser. The room was empty and soulless, a room for nobody.

  A spare room.

  “What is going on?” Oscar muttered. “Mum!” he cried.

  The door swung open, and his mum burst into the room just like he’d summoned her.

  She had a candlestick in her hand. Howling, she swung it at Oscar’s head.

  Oscar just managed to duck out of the way. His mum stumbled, carried forward by her wild swipe, but she quickly turned to face him. Her expression was full of fear.

  “Don’t you dare steal anything. I’ve called the police!”

  “Mum, it’s me! Oscar!”

  “Don’t call me that! I don’t have a son, you villain! You thief!”

  She swiped again with the candlestick. Oscar backed away. He wanted to run over and hug her. More than that, he wanted his mum to hug him, to tell him everything was okay. That it all would look better after a cup of tea.

  But when he looked in her eyes, he saw only fear, like his mum had never seen him before in her life.

  “Get out!” she screamed. “Get out of my house!”

  Oscar turned, moving as fast as his crutch would let him. As he bumped down the corridor, he realized that it wasn’t just his room that had changed. All the familiar photos were gone, and the furniture had been moved about.

  Nothing was the same.

  “Get out!” his mum screamed again from the top of the stairs. Oscar heard the triumph ringing in her voice. She’d scared away the monster.

  He crashed through the front door and hobbled in a daze toward the road, without any idea where he was going. Maybe he had actually fallen asleep. Maybe this was a nightmare.

  Far off in the distance, he heard a siren. Much closer, he saw a tallish figure in a wide-brimmed hat. The figure was standing in Oscar’s front yard. The figure’s face was muffled by a red scarf, as if that person really didn’t want to be recognized.

  Oscar jolted. He was so distressed and confused that he knew this was important but he had no idea why. Then a familiar itchy tingle wriggled down Oscar’s back. Phantasma. The shock was enough to jerk him out of his dream.

  As the figure in the hat raised its hand, mist appeared around the person’s ankles and curled across the lawn. The pair of shears that Mr. Kenright had left in a wheelbarrow outside of number 32 lifted into the air and flew straight at Oscar’s head.

  Oscar had no time to move, so he didn’t.

  He turned ghostly. The shears passed right through him like a guided missile and buried themselves in his front door.

  As soon as Oscar looked back at the ghost, all his exhaustion and pain lifted from his body. It felt as if a giant hand that had been gripping him tight had suddenly let go.

  Before Oscar knew what he was doing, he bounded forward, raising his crutch like a club.

  The figure didn’t try to throw anything else at Oscar’s head. It didn’t try to run either. Instead, from its pocket it pulled out a round object and let it drop from the end of a short length of wire or piece of string. It looked like a watch on a chain—or maybe a yo-yo.

  Oscar continued to charge, screaming in rage, fear, and frustration.

  But the figure didn’t flinch. Instead, it lifted up the object and began to move it very slowly. Oscar could see it wasn’t a yo-yo at all. It was a withered eyeball. It was yellowing
, crusty with a glowing, bright red pupil moving about. It was alive and it was looking—and as soon as the horrible thing saw him, Oscar stopped.

  The scream died in his throat.

  He felt a horrible sucking sensation tugging at his soul. He saw bits of his body and his clothes whirling away from him, swirling toward the glowing red eye.

  When Oscar looked at his body, he saw the sparkling shimmering light was fading, becoming more see-through, and parts of his fingers were disappearing completely.

  The eye was sucking him up! Swirls of ghostly mist were transferring from Oscar’s body into the wide pupil of the eye. The eye began to glow.

  Oscar panicked and tried turning back to human again to escape. He had the knack now, and it should have been easy, but he couldn’t do it right. The ghastly eye gripped him somehow. The front half of his body stayed ghostly and was being vacuumed away. Only the back half of his body turned human. But with the front half of him still ghostly, Oscar could see into the back half, which was still in living form. He could clearly see his human heart beating and his kidneys pulsing and his bloody raw muscles twitching as he tried to run.

  Oscar heard a scream behind him. His mum had followed him out into the street—but she wasn’t ready for the bloody butchery that she found. Even though she’d been an undertaker all her life, she couldn’t handle the sight of half a boy, organs exposed, flailing about on her front lawn.

  To be fair, very few people could.

  Her scream hummed with terror. It was nearly as good a scream as Oscar’s had been, and it was shockingly loud; so loud, in fact, that the eye was distracted for just a second.

  It turned to the noise—and the figure turned too.

  Suddenly the awful grip on Oscar lifted.

  Oscar took his chance. He turned fully human.

  Without thinking, he dived forward, trying to tackle the ghost before it could hurt his mum—but his arm and his crutch met empty air. He went straight through the figure without stopping and landed in a lavender bush.