My limbs twitched then – a small but perceptible movement, like a puppetmaster had pulled my strings.
And then, with an eerily confident glance, Crawler seemed to stare straight at me, and for a fleeting second, I felt as if his shadowy eyes had looked right into my churning heart and picked out the one thing I was trying to hide.
‘Don’t you want to be seen?’
Crawler turned to Scanlon. ‘Well?’ he demanded.
Scanlon’s eyes raked my face and I gave one tiny, brief nod.
‘She’ll do it,’ said Scanlon in a flat voice.
Crawler’s face blazed in triumph. ‘Rehearsals start tomorrow.’
WHAT FOLLOWED NEXT was a month of gruelling drills. While Scanlon was put, reluctantly, in charge of rehearsing the others, Crawler appointed himself my coach.
This consisted mostly of him urging me to smash up my room in increasingly inventive ways. He pushed me to my limits. If I merely tore the duvet or pulled down the framed pictures, I’d be rewarded with a sneer. ‘Don’t be so pedestrian, Poltergeist. You can do better than that.’
He liked it when I pulled all the pictures off the wall, crying, and then made them fly across the room at his head. He liked it when I ripped all the linen and emptied the pillow of feathers and made the wardrobe fall over. ‘Rip into it, Ripley,’ he’d urge. ‘Unleash the beast.’
He pushed me to work on my stamina. ‘You’re going to be doing this for eight hours a day, every day,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to learn to pace yourself, and keep the rage going as long as you need.’
Sometimes he’d take Ghoul Aid himself, so he could speak to me directly. If I got tired, he’d tell me that ghosts didn’t get tired. If I felt wobbly or weak, he’d shake his head in derision.
‘You have to do it without thinking,’ he said. ‘Without feeling. Like a machine. It’s just who you are. Empty your mind of everything. Get rid of your frailties. Forget your memories. Stay in the moment.’ Then he’d check the timer. ‘Five hours and thirty-three minutes. It’s not bad. But it’s not great either. One more time, from the top. Scanlon, new stock please!’
After four weeks – when I was able to wreck and kick and scratch and break for exactly nine hours without a break – he even broke into a smile.
‘Bring in the mannequins,’ he said one morning.
‘Mannequins?’ I stammered, pushing some matted hair out of my face.
Scanlon silently wheeled in a trolley full of stuffed dummies, some child sized, some adult sized.
‘Of course,’ said Crawler, panting slightly from the poison in his system. ‘You didn’t think you’d just be chucking plates about, did you? People are paying for some fun here. You’ll be throwing punters across the room at least twenty times a day. Now, try to pick one up.’
Heaving and grunting, I tried to pick up the nearest one. ‘What’s it stuffed with, lead?’
‘Sand. Should make you feel right at home.’ He gave me an evil grin. ‘Try again.’
This time, I succeeded in picking up the smallest dummy by half a centimetre.
‘Oh dear,’ he sighed. What a weakling you are, Frances. Totally puny. Call yourself a poltergeist? Think anyone’s going to be applauding that? You’ve got star billing here, so try not to embarrass yourself.’ He looked closely into my face.
‘I can’t do it,’ I said, feeling beaten. ‘I just can’t.’
‘What a defeatist you are. Do you want to leave? Is that it? Well then, go. The exit’s that way. If you can’t be bothered, I’d rather you went, so I can go and find a poltergeist who really wants this.’
‘No,’ I stammered. ‘Y-you don’t have to do that—’
‘Were you this much of a deadbeat when you were alive? No wonder your parents didn’t bother coming back for you – if they would’ve been welcomed by an attitude like that …’
‘Shut up,’ I snarled.
‘Try again,’ said Crawler, smirking.
This time, I picked up that tiny child-size dummy and managed to hurl it as far as his feet.
‘Take it back,’ I muttered. ‘Take it back.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘It works. Look at you. You’re trembling all over with rage. You needed that.’
After a few more days, I could throw the biggest dummies across the room with ease. The most surprising thing of all was that I didn’t even need to make an effort any more. I was doing it automatically.
‘It’s better when you don’t feel anything,’ Crawler told me, and I believed him. ‘Too much emotion can make you hysterical, and renders you useless. You need to learn to make it happen without even thinking about it.’
One day, Crawler said, ‘Frances? Can you throw your bed across the room?’
I stared at him blankly.
Then he said, ‘Throw that bed across the room, Poltergeist’, and I did it immediately, without question, without thinking.
He gave me a satisfied smirk.
‘I think we’re ready to open.’
‘ER, WHAT IS this?’
The guest list had been drawn up, the invites had been sent out, the bookings had been taken. Every centimetre of the ghost train had been decorated with fake cobwebs and fresh splatters of artificial blood. From outside the Haunted House came a human mumbling sound and it was growing louder by the second.
Tonight was the premiere. I’d been primed and trained till I was destroying my bedroom with my eyes closed. And now Scanlon was standing in front of me and spraying something sticky and synthetic on to my face.
He had the grace to look ashamed. ‘Spray-on cobwebs,’ he muttered. ‘For the atmosphere. Crawler’s orders.’
Strands of it clung to my hair and eyelashes. It made my nostrils itch.
‘Is this an actual joke?’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ he muttered, trying to wipe some of it away, and failing. ‘If it makes anything better, everyone’s got to have this, even me.’
I met his eyes reluctantly and a little shyly. I hadn’t seen much of him over the last few weeks, apart from a few awkward moments during my training when Crawler shouted at him to bring in a cup of tea and an extra shot of Ghoul Aid.
‘Have you seen the others?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I see them every day. I’ve been putting them through … their moves.’
‘How are they?’
‘They’re …’ Scanlon hesitated. ‘Well, they were quite stunned at first, but now I think they’re just happy to be out of their cans and to have something to do. Isolde isn’t that thrilled, I don’t think, but it’s hard to know what she’s telling me. And I think the little girl is … just confused, and upset. She keeps trying to hug people, but no one has the time. And she’s always asking for her mummy. But the boys and Vanessa can’t wait to get started. They keep telling me how grateful they are, to have a bed and board and a job. It’s … it’s awful.’
‘Maybe you should have thought about that before you hunted us.’
‘You’re never going to forgive me for that.’ It wasn’t a question.
‘Does it matter?’ I said. ‘We’re here now. Perhaps Vanessa and the boys have a point.’
It felt as if my head was full of dust. Tired all of a sudden, I moved away. Outside, the excited chatter of the crowd swelled and burst.
‘You’d better leave,’ I said. ‘Go and do your thing.’
He moved towards the double doors and looked back over his shoulder. He’d smartened up for the occasion and was kitted out in a red tuxedo, like something a lion tamer might have worn. It made me almost miss his horrid lime and pink T-shirt.
Scanlon bunched up his lips and gave me a flash of those ratty teeth. ‘Good luck, Frankie.’
For a moment, there was a responding flicker of something inside me, something softer. I could just leave. Wait for the door downstairs to open, and slip out, into the woods. And I could take Scanlon with me. Neither of us was in chains. Really, when you looked at it, we could leave any time we wanted. That was the genius
of Crawler – he’d persuaded us all to stay because it was best for us. But we could leave, if we really wanted.
But was it what I wanted?
I felt a vast, nameless longing. I had known, once, but I didn’t now. This place had wiped it out of me.
‘Scanlon?’ I said, throwing out his name like a lifeline.
But in the split second before he turned around, I’d already rejected of the idea of breaking free. Where would we go? Where would be right? I’d seen how little either of us fitted in out there. Besides, it wasn’t like we were friends.
Anyway – I thought about all the training I’d done – I was kind of looking forward to putting on a show.
Scanlon lingered at the doorway. ‘Did you say something?’ he said gently.
‘Nope,’ I muttered.
A few moments later, he had gone.
Then all the lights in my room went out, and the spooky organ music started up. Somewhere from the depths of the building came the clatter of the ghost train as it brought me my first audience.
In the dark, I felt my lips stretch back, and heard a strange, dry chuckle, which scared me for a second till I realised it was mine. I moved my neck to the left, then the right, rolled my shoulders, circled my wrists. Felt things
pop and snap
and
tweak and wake.
DESPITE THEIR FINE clothes and fancy handbags, the crowd at the Crawler Lane Haunted House and Ghost Train™ (with Real Ghosts! And Live Performances from the Dead! Every Night!) all seemed quite ugly, somehow, and not just because they were often grey, bleeding from their eyeballs and vomiting over the side of their carriages. No: it was the delight in their eyes as they came clattering in, fresh from spearing Isolde and ogling orphans and watching people die for their viewing pleasure. They just seemed like not very nice people.
But they were a total picnic compared to the sad ones. The ones who’d lost relatives and loved ones, who stared at me with their desperate eyes, seeking comfort from me. I grew tired of them trying to grab me from their seats, begging me to tell them if I’d seen their little boy, or had any word from their sister, or come across their best friend anywhere, anywhere, had I? Could I possibly look for them? Would I mind? They’d be ever so grateful.
‘Leave me alone,’ I wanted to snap at them. ‘If you’ve lost someone, they’re lost for ever. Deal with it.’
I ignored them instead. No way would they interfere with my performance – I was too trained, too slick for that. And eventually they’d leave, with terrible strained smiles of grief, dabbing tears away, and I’d think, Phew. But then they’d come back. It was a nightmare. They wouldn’t give up.
In the end, Crawler, never one to pass up on an opportunity, made me lie to them, and say I had seen their loved ones. And, for an astronomical fee, I’d relay a message for them from their great-auntie Barbaronka Majonka or whoever. (Which I’d make up.)
Yes, I much preferred those who just wanted to stare at me, who treated me like a firework display of sorts, went oooh and aaah in all the right places. They wanted me to perform – that’s what I did, and then they left me alone. Nice and straightforward. Dead easy.
And Crawler was right about something else as well. I loved being seen. Whenever I heard that announcement over the speakers that let me know the ghost train was winding its way up the track towards me (‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, the star of the show, the ghost with the most, your very own ghoul with the killer-watt act, it’s POLTERGEIST TIME!’), I’d get all excited and shivery. And once everyone had gone, I’d lie on my bed and stare up at the ceiling and go over my performance again and again, working out what went down well, and refining what wasn’t so effective.
Within a couple of weeks, my whole attitude towards Crawler changed. Whereas before I’d thought of him as the very devil himself, now he seemed more like a benevolent benefactor. After all, before he’d come along, my whole existence had been about what I couldn’t do. My temper had been a curse – it had made people cry, not to mention wet themselves.
I mean, in essence, ever since I’d been born, and certainly since I’d died, everyone I’d ever known had seen me through a filter of can’t. ‘You can’t lose your temper at your little sister, Frankie. You can’t set fire to the village hall. You can’t scowl at Thea Thrubwell like you hate her guts, even if you do. You can’t roam around unaccompanied if you’ve died.’ Even my so-called friendship with Scanlon only started once he’d told me what I couldn’t do.
But Crawler wasn’t like that. He wasn’t interested in limits or what I couldn’t do. All he was interested in was what I could do. I was allowed to get angry. It was my talent. It was the big draw. He saw me through can. He saw me through the filter of do it again, and do it worse. He saw the storm inside me, and he encouraged me to let it out.
It was kind of refreshing.
Even the spooky organ music that played all day, every day, began to sound quite jaunty and welcoming, in its own eerie, discordant way. I hummed it when it wasn’t on. I missed it when it wasn’t playing. And I only really felt like myself when it began again. It was my soundtrack. It was my theme tune. It made me come alive.
After a couple of weeks, I didn’t recognise the people in the photo on the wall. I knew I’d lived somewhere else, once, and had a life, once, but that meant nothing to me now. There was nothing, absolutely nothing in my heart, apart from the ambition to make even more of a mess the next time that ghost train came clattering through my door. I had become something wonderful. I had become a professional, full-time, all-consuming poltergeist, and there was no longer any room for anything else.
I smashed things. I broke things.
That was who I was.
SCANLON APPEARED AT my door. ‘Frankie,’ he said in a frazzled, tight voice, ‘Crawler says to let you know that you’re heading out this morning.’
‘Out?’ I said, confused.
I didn’t like the sound of out. I preferred in.
‘Why? Have I done something wrong?’
‘No, nothing like that. You’re not being booted out. You’re being hired out.’
I stared at him dully. ‘Huh?’
‘It’s a private booking. We’re doing those now. There’s a Lady Someone-or-Other who wants you to put in an appearance at her daughter’s twenty-first birthday party. Dad thinks this could be a lucrative side business.’
I shrugged. ‘Okay. Hey, what’s happened to your teeth?’
His cheeks went pink. ‘Dad paid for them to be straightened and whitened,’ he said. ‘I’m front of house now. I greet the guests, and I’m in charge of corporate booking and international sales. He said my smile was frightening the punters. Or, as he put it: “You’re not part of the show, Scanlon. You can’t look more frightening than the spooks.”’
‘What does corporate booking and the other … thing mean?’
‘International sales? Big bookings for large companies,’ he said. ‘Lots of business people have started coming for their office parties. People are travelling here from all over the world, and you wouldn’t believe what they’re paying.’
‘So you’re doing well then, I take it? I mean, the teeth whitening and the private bookings and the money?’
Scanlon busied himself straightening his cuff. ‘I guess.’
‘Are you still living in the caravan?’
‘Not any more. We’ve got a penthouse. A big one. With a pool. And staff. Someone cooks for us.’
‘That must be nice,’ I said.
His eyes met mine. After a pause, he shrugged. ‘S’pose.’
‘So it’s worked out for everyone then. I mean, you and Crawler are set up for life, and everyone’s happy downstairs?’
There was a flash of something in his face then, and for a second I was reminded of the scathing awkward boy I’d once known.
‘Depends what you mean by happy, Frankie.’
He had a confessional look. There was something inside him, I could sense, that he want
ed to tell me, if I would only ask the right question. Some secret of his that he wanted me to break wide open, like a clam. But I’d lost the habit of friendship. Besides, why should I waste my energy on another of his riddles? Asking questions of Scanlon only led to disturbing answers.
So all I said was: ‘Are we going to this party then, or what?’
Scanlon closed his eyes for a second. When he opened them again, that look had gone.
‘The limo’s outside.’
A few hours later, our flying car lowered over a vast field before parking neatly outside a creamy stately home. We stepped out on to a crunchy path edged with twigs.
‘This way,’ said Crawler.
The ground was black with frozen leaves. A bird tried fruitlessly to peck at the hard ground. And a startling question flared into life inside me, for a moment.
‘Scanlon,’ I hissed.
He looked over his shoulder.
‘How long have we been open? The Haunted House?’
‘About eighteen months,’ he said, regarding me quizzically. ‘Why?’
Eighteen months? It didn’t feel like eighteen months – a month at the most. I stumbled on the path. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘What’s—’
‘No whispering,’ snapped Crawler, knocking on the wooden door in front of us.
It swung open.
‘Good morning,’ said Crawler. ‘I’m Mr Lane, from Lane and Son Spectre-cals? We’re expected.’
‘Yes,’ said someone.
We were ushered into a cool hallway.
‘Follow me.’
I had just enough time to observe how many dead stuffed animals were mounted on the walls before we were whisked off down a wide corridor, lined with portraits of men and women and inscribed with their lifespans. The Right Hon. Fancypants of Posh House, 2056–2117, that sort of thing. More dead people on the walls.
I rolled my eyes. Same old. You might as well take them down, chum. The people who live here can’t see them anyway. Trust me.
A vast ballroom lay before us. Overhead curved a domed turquoise ceiling, studded generously with golden cherubs. They reminded me of something. We regarded each other a moment, but their blank gold faces gave nothing away.
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