Ghost and Bone Page 8

The figure was turning toward him, trying to get the eye to look at Oscar again. His mum was still screaming.

  Oscar knew that he was about to die. Later, if you’d asked him why he did what he did right then, he wouldn’t have been able to tell you.

  In that moment, pure animal instinct took charge of him. He did three awesome things very fast. He turned back into a ghost. He did a backflip out of the lavender bush, landing neatly on his feet. With his ghost strength and whip-quick reactions, he brought his crutch round in a mighty sweep. The crutch connected sweetly with the behatted ghost’s stomach. It drove the ghost up through the air, spinning it round like a ragdoll. Then the ghost thumped onto the ground with a satisfying bounce and dropped the eyeball. It burst, collapsing into dust.

  Oscar found himself a little startled, staring down at the crumpled figure of his opponent on the ground, with no clear idea how it had gotten there. Oscar’s body was twisted round with the force of his blow, his crutch high over his shoulder like a golfer after a mighty drive.

  It was his surprise at finding himself in this extraordinary position that allowed the ghost to escape. The ghost reached into his pocket and drew out a lilac-colored doorknob.

  Oscar watched in stunned amazement as the ghost turned the doorknob and opened a door in midair. In a flash, the ghost jumped through it, and the door vanished.

  His mum was still screaming as the police drove up with sirens blaring. Neighbors were appearing in doorways, woken by Oscar’s mom’s screaming, and they rushed to help. Oscar’s mum was taken inside and given a cup of tea.

  But no one noticed Oscar. As a ghost, he was invisible. He followed his mum and his neighbors inside and watched them huddle around the kitchen table. Gary Stevens appeared in the kitchen five minutes later. Whatever satisfaction Oscar had felt at whomping the man in the hat vanished as he listened to Gary talking to his mother about the break-in.

  “The thief said he was my son,” his mum said. “But I don’t have a son—though I’ve always thought of you that way, Gary. Thank you for coming and checking up on me.”

  “It’s no bother, Mrs. Grimstone,” Gary said. “You know, I think I saw the thief outside your house earlier. I tried to fight him, but he ran off.”

  “Oh, you’re so brave!” his mum said. “Thanks for watching out for me!”

  Oscar wanted to reappear and punch Gary Stevens in the face. But it wouldn’t have done any good.

  None of his neighbors remembered him. No one told his mum that they’d known Oscar since he was a baby. Worse, the police didn’t tell her she’d gone mad. That she had a son, named Oscar, who went to Little Worthington Middle School.

  Oscar had been wiped off the map. Obliterated. Erased.

  Without a shadow of a doubt, this was worse than any nightmare. It was worse than being actually dead.

  Oscar couldn’t take it anymore and walked out of his house, with no idea where he should go. He didn’t have any other family. He didn’t have any friends. And even if he did, they wouldn’t have recognized him anyway.

  Oscar Grimstone didn’t exist.

  “Where’ve you been, Oscar?” Sally hissed. “And get in here now—someone might see you!”

  Oscar ducked inside Sally’s office and shut the door. He felt like crying with relief. All through his epic journey to the GLE headquarters, he’d been terrified that Sally would have forgotten him as well. It had taken him an hour and a half by train and three night buses to get to West London. He didn’t have any money but simply turned into ghost form to get aboard, then turned living again once he was on the inside. As dawn had broken, the shimmering ghost streets of Londinium filled with ghost markets, spreading over the streets of the living city. Oscar followed the river west. When he finally reached the looming stone tower in St. James’s Park, he turned living and ducked through a wall while arriving in the lobby past the ghost at the front desk, before flicking back to climb the many staircases to Sally’s office. He wanted to give her a hug—but that didn’t feel appropriate. He barely knew her, after all.

  Oscar settled on smiling—his first smile since he’d left Little Worthington yesterday. He held his crutch close to his chest like a talisman—he hadn’t let go of it once.

  If his mum knew who he was, she’d have been proud of him. She was always trying to get him to keep hold of his crutch.

  “Why are you smirking like that?” said Sally.

  “Because you know who I am,” Oscar said. “You recognize me!”

  “I what?”

  “It’s a long story. Can I have a cup of tea? Do ghosts drink tea?”

  “There’d be riots if we didn’t,” Sally said. “I’ll fetch us both a mug.”

  Sipping from the small cauldron of sugary ghost tea that Sally brought him, Oscar soon began to feel a lot better. It helped that the tea was piping hot and tasted more or less as it should—though there was a strange dusty feel to the liquid, as if it wasn’t actually made with water.

  Oscar told Sally about everything: the attack, the fact that his mum thought he didn’t exist anymore, his struggle to find his way to London without any money or food or phone. He acted out his finishing blow with the crutch—nearly smashing Sally’s jar of boiled sweets in the process.

  “I’d never even been on the train by myself,” Oscar said. “I had to sneak onto all these buses as a ghost and then turn bodily so I didn’t get left behind when it drove off. Nearly got caught twice.”

  Sally was much less impressed by Oscar’s odyssey on the British transport system than by his second encounter with the mysterious hat-wearing ghost. She was positively amazed by the fact that he had defeated it.

  “Sharp work there,” she muttered. “You’re a pretty talented ghost, Oscar Grimstone.”

  She rootled around in the mess on Sir Cedric’s desk and surfaced with a kind of leather strapping.

  “Tie this on you—Sir Cedric uses it for his axes, but this way you’ll be able to strap your crutch to your back, and keep it on you in case you’re attacked again.”

  “Thank you.” Oscar worked out how to put on the harness.

  Meanwhile, Sally pulled out her typewriter and began firing off messages to various departments around the Ministry to investigate the attack on Oscar by the ghost with the hat. “We need to track down this Jessie Mur character before he manages to destroy you for good, Oscar,” she said. “I’m more and more convinced that he is attacking you because of your special powers. Why else would you be targeted?”

  For a few minutes, the office was filled with the machine-gun clatter of her fingers on the keys. Oscar sipped his tea.

  Soon her answers started arriving. A cascade of forms and letters appeared out of thin air and landed on Sally’s desk.

  “Now, tell me again what happened with your mum,” Sally said, looking through the papers as they arrived. “It sounds like a memory wipe—but it’s not just your mum, is it? It’s everyone. That’s a very difficult trick to pull off. Requires a huge amount of power and top-level organization—only specialists from the GLE Cover-Up team can do that kind of thing.”

  She held up one of the forms. “But here, look. This is from the Cover-Up team. They say they’ve done no work since they cleared up the mess you made by the river. No other big jobs have been authorized for over a week. So it doesn’t make any sense.”

  She riffled through the papers. More kept arriving.

  “Also, we already knew that the ghost in the hat could poltergeist. It already attacked you once that way, hadn’t it?”

  “Yeah,” Oscar said. “It likes flying sharp objects at my head.”

  “Not nice,” said Sally. “And not easy either. But the ability to poltergeist requires a lot of training. It’s not something any ghost can do, and even if you can, you don’t get permission to fly mundane objects around willy-nilly. The top brass don’t like it�
��it attracts attention, makes a mess.”

  “Why would someone learn how, then?” Oscar asked.

  “Most poltergeists aren’t murderous maniacs. They have applied for a permit and got training in order to complete some unfinished business that is keeping them in the living world—they want to haunt the person who murdered them, or scare someone out of completing an evil plot. Or they want to move an old photo to somewhere their living relative might notice so they feel comforted. It’s all very carefully controlled.” Sally picked up another paper from her desk. “This message is from the Haunting Department.” She held up another form. “They’ve given no permits for poltergeisting near Little Worthington this year.”

  “So what does that show?” Oscar said. “Couldn’t a ghost just do it by themselves, without permission?”

  “Yes, but they’d have to be very important to be taught how to do it in the first place. It’s a well-connected ghost that’s out to get you. That’s why that Ghoul Eye is so worrying.”

  “It hurt,” said Oscar. “Like every part of me was being sucked away.”

  Sally frowned. “For the GLE, extinguishing ghosts is the most terrible crime there is.”

  “What was the eye doing?”

  “Vacuuming up your phantasma. Killing you. Ghosts only contain a limited amount of the stuff, and when it all goes, it’s curtains.”

  “That’s not good!” Now Oscar was worried. “So is half of me gone, then?”

  “Don’t worry, by now you should have filled back up again. I’m told vigorous exercise gets the phantasma flowing.” Sally was still chewing her lip. “But this ghost is much more dangerous than I thought. That kind of extinguishing kit is impossible to find. It’s very, very illegal, and you don’t just bash it together in your basement. There’s only been half a dozen cases of involuntary extinguishing ever recorded. So the ghost that’s out to get you is very dangerous and very well connected. We need to be care—”

  The office door banged open. Lady Margaret stormed in. She was wearing a canary-yellow gown that showed off her bony shoulders. In her case, they were literally bones.

  “Brazen Grimstone!” she snarled. “I see that you’ve dragged your unnatural body back to the GLE. Did you think I wouldn’t notice?! You were ordered to remain out of sight at home. There will be consequences. Nasty ones.”

  She turned her eyes to Sally, looming above her like she wanted to rip her limb from limb. “And as for you, Detective Cromarty! Helping Grimstone will be the end of you! I will personally ensure that you are sent to the Other Side for this. You will hand in your ba—”

  Sally didn’t flinch before these terrible threats. Oscar actually thought she was grinning. Lady Margaret noticed this too.

  “Why are you smiling?” she shouted. “Don’t you realize the trouble you are in?”

  “You should look at this,” Sally said, holding out Oscar’s file, which they’d stolen from the Archive. It was open to his birth-and-death page.

  “Do you see who’s signed that?” Sally said, pointing.

  It’s hard for a ghost to turn white. They are already pretty washed-out to begin with—but Lady Margaret definitely turned a whiter shade of pale when she saw the initials MM.

  “Looks like Mr. Mortis was happy for Oscar to be the way he is, doesn’t it?”

  Strange emotions were flowing across Lady Margaret’s ravaged face. One of the tendons in the corner of her mouth was vibrating like a violin string. Oscar watched as her terrible anger and her fear of doing the wrong thing waged war.

  Sally twisted the knife. “You wouldn’t want to go against the direct wishes of the Boss himself, would you?”

  “But…” Lady Margaret squinted at the signature. “No…it’s really his handwriting,” she said, disappointed. “How did you get this?”

  “Contact in the department,” Sally lied, so smoothly that Oscar was impressed.

  “That’s strange,” Lady Margaret said. “And you should have gone through the proper channels.” Her mouth opened as if she wanted to say more, but the fight had left her. Baffled and broken, like a defeated army fleeing a terrible massacre, she turned for the door.

  Sally waited till they heard the clicks of her high-heeled shoes fading down the corridor before she burst into great peals of laughter.

  “Did you see her face?!” she crowed. “We got the better of her, all right!”

  “Why does she dislike me so much?” said Oscar. “She’s a very angry woman.”

  “Oh, she just hates everything that breaks the rules. To be fair, it makes her quite a good policewoman—wait a minute!”

  Sally grabbed her typewriter and dashed off a quick note, her fingers flying across the keys.

  “Who’s that to?” Oscar asked. “Why the hurry?”

  “Lady Margaret’s secretary,” Sally said. “I’m asking for her boss’s diary for the last four days.”

  “Why?”

  “Patience, Oscar—but I think I might have solved the case!”

  A few moments later, the secretary’s answer appeared on Sally’s desk.

  “Hah!” Sally said after reading through it. “I knew it!”

  Oscar peered over her shoulder, but whatever Sally could see was not immediately apparent.

  “Look,” said Sally. “You were attacked for the first time two days ago. On Wednesday afternoon. Have a look at what Lady Margaret was doing then.”

  “ ‘Three p.m. to six p.m.: Off Duty,’ ” Oscar read.

  “Exactamundo,” Sally said. “Now can you see the only other time that Lady M. was off?”

  Oscar scanned the page. Lady Margaret was very dedicated. She’d been working more or less nonstop for the last four days. She had meetings day and night, and when she wasn’t in meetings, she was going to engagements, or giving speeches, or…

  “There it is,” Oscar said. “Her only time off yesterday was a few hours in the morning.”

  “Precisely,” Sally said. “And when were you attacked for the second time, Oscar?”

  “Yesterday morning!” Oscar’s mind raced. “Lady Margaret’s the ghost in the hat!”

  “She certainly might be.” Sally nodded smugly. “Think about it. She has the opportunity—she was free at those times, wasn’t she? She has the means too. She’s a very powerful ghost, trained in memory wipes, and has poltergeisting abilities as well. I’ve seen her move cars around with just her mind.”

  “She sounds dangerous,” Oscar said. “But why would she want to kill me?”

  Sally looked less certain. “Motive’s trickier. Like I said, I think she hates the idea of you existing because you break the rules. Maybe she looked you up in the Department of Records—and now she is trying to get rid of a nasty mess.”

  “I’m not a mess!”

  “Well, you are,” Sally said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to die. We need to tread very carefully. Get out of here for a start.”

  Sally scribbled a note to Sir Cedric and hurried Oscar out of the building.

  “Sir Cedric’s been working really hard for you,” she said as they hurried through St. James’s Park. “That’s what I wanted to tell you when I went to your house. He found a hat shop owner who sold a suspicious ghost a wide-brimmed hat. The ghost said his name was Ernie Hoy.”

  “Ernie Hoy…Jessie Mur. Those are weird names,” Oscar said.

  “Well, she’s hardly going to sign herself Lady Margaret, is she? Come on. Let’s go to the pub.”

  The Shallow Grave was a traditional ghost inn and restaurant. Its secret entrance was on the Strand, tucked between a frozen yogurt stall and an umbrella shop.

  Oscar hesitated before he pushed open the low wooden door—he’d never been to a restaurant without his mum before. Of course, Sally sniffed out his uncertainty like a bloodhound.

  “Don’t wor
ry,” she said. “Ghosts won’t care about your age. Think about it, you can’t tell how old a ghost is from how they look. Take me—I’m more than a hundred ghost years old, but is that how I look?”

  Sally didn’t look a day older than thirteen—except for her eyes, of course. They were ancient and wise and a little scary, but Oscar decided not to mention that.

  They pushed through the door into a cheery fug of conversation and beery stink. The jukebox was playing Elvis. A few other ghosts were watching soccer on a big screen.

  “Come on, Busby Babes!” one of them shouted.

  “See what I mean?” Sally said, pointing.

  Two toddlers were sitting at the bar, with pints of some foaming, shimmering liquid in front of them. They seemed to be discussing horse racing.

  One of the toddlers pointed a finger. “If you can’t see that Red Rum is never going to lose a Ghost National, then you are the biggest fool I know, Jim!”

  “But the ground’s hard,” said the fattest toddler, who Oscar presumed was Jim. “That favors Desert Orchid.”

  “The ground’s always hard. You ever see it rain in the ghost world?”

  “What are you drinking?” Sally said. “Mine’s a licorice and apple.”

  “Ah…” Oscar blinked.

  Sally pointed at the foaming, bubbly silvery drinks that the toddlers were drinking. One had a candy cane sticking out, and the other looked like it had ice cream bobbling in it. “Ghost shandy,” said Sally. “It’s made of brewed and infused phantasma. Gives you quite a boost. You can ask for any flavor combinations you like. Just don’t get the extra brew.”

  Oscar thought of the thing he liked the most. “Apple pie?”

  The barman frowned for a second, then pulled on a tap. A silvery liquid zipped out, sending up sparkling flecks into the air that fizzed and crackled. Oscar saw a few appley bits emerge from the tap, finished with a slap of cooked pastry that somehow layered itself over the rim of the glass.

  Soon they were safely ensconced in a little snug booth off the main bar with the two drinks and a mug of homemade pork rinds. Oscar couldn’t help staring wide-eyed at the strange assortment of drinkers in the inn: some, like the toddlers, were naked; others carried swords or pikes or clubs. He saw stiff-starched lace, hippie kaftans, and mysterious robes. One ghost was missing its head, another had a round hole cut neatly in his chest, and at the table next to them a lady ghost was wearing a flowerpot on her head. Many were sitting at tables eating vast plates of extravagant food.