The smartly dressed crowd of young people within the ballroom chatted lazily, admiring each other’s clothes. Around them circulated catering staff, pouring drinks and dishing out snacks. At first glance you would have mistaken the waiters for humans, until you spotted the whirring silver discs that made up their lower halves.
Our escort said discreetly, ‘Madam?’
A tanned, red-haired woman with a wide, freckly face looked over unsmilingly.
Crawler gave a short bow. ‘Lady Craven,’ he said. ‘I have your order.’
‘How perfectly fleck,’ she said, clapping her hands together a little too loud. ‘Drixie! Drixie Tink! Mummy’s got you a birthday surprise.’
The young woman that slowly materialised from the crowd was even more tanned than her mother, and very thin, with big round eyes fringed by delicate pink feathers.
‘Mum, I thought we agreed – no more surprises,’ she said. ‘I still haven’t got over that ten-tonne tightrope walker you booked last year. No one sitting underneath him stood a chance. I still hear their screams in my nightma—’
‘This surprise is different,’ said Lady Craven quickly.
‘How?’ said Drixie.
‘I’ll show you,’ said Crawler.
At a nod from his father, Scanlon walked slowly around the ballroom, pouring out the poison.
TO SCANLON, CRAWLER said: ‘Get it in position.’
Scanlon looked at me, his cheeks reddening. ‘Fran—, er, Poltergeist, do you think you can go and stand on top of that box, over there?’
‘What?’ said Drixie. ‘Who is he talking to?’
‘You’ll see in a minute,’ said Crawler smoothly. ‘Now, has everyone got their Ghoul Aid ready?’
Scanlon was pointing to the middle of the ballroom. I saw a tiered plinth, the sort you’d find under a statue in a museum.
‘That box,’ said Scanlon again.
‘What – you want me to break it?’ I said.
‘All you’ve been booked to do is, erm, stand on it.’
‘Really? That’s all? But I could throw it! Or chuck it at the window?’
He shook his head, checked the form in his hand. ‘Our client was very specific about ticking the “No Destruction” box when she booked. Doesn’t want any of the antiques broken.’
‘Certainly not,’ said Lady Craven. ‘They’re priceless.’
So she is happy to poison her daughter, but watch out for the furniture? Er, okay.
To Scanlon, I said: ‘But what shall I do instead?’
‘Just …’ Scanlon looked awkward, ‘stand. You’re a display. You’re just here to be looked at.’ He gave me a strained smile. ‘Please.’
I thought of those animals on the walls, the deceased people in their frames. These people, I thought abruptly, seemed to like their dead that way. Hanging about. Part of the furniture. Not quite around, not quite free.
‘Smash nothing?’ I checked, flustered and a little rattled. ‘You sure?’
Scanlon nodded. ‘Think of it as the easiest gig you’ll ever do. You won’t have to lift a finger.’
‘And … drink!’ shouted Crawler, with a flourish.
The guests, as one, downed their poison, swapping excited looks.
Something flapped in my head like a sheet on a washing line. If I wasn’t here to show off what I could do, why was I here at all? If all Lady Craven wanted was a dead thing for her daughter to gawp at, why not just buy her a pack of sausages?
Above the usual sound of people moaning with nausea as the first drips of poison trickled into their veins, I heard a terrifying, cold voice of doubt. Why am I doing this? What are we doing to ourselves?
What we did in the Haunted House had begun to feel almost routine. If you do anything long enough, it starts to feel normal; practice and regularity sand down any brutal madness into smoother shapes to swallow. But here, in this new place, lit by the stark light of winter? Suddenly what we did seemed very, very wrong.
Life needs to live, I thought wildly, unexpectedly. And if only the living could make the most of life, then the dead can be set free.
The sight of Scanlon made me feel desperately sad. My throat grew tight with regret, until I gave myself a little shake. I was forgetting my training. What had Crawler taught me? ‘It’s better when you don’t feel anything. Too much emotion can make you hysterical.’
‘Frankie?’ said Scanlon gently. ‘What’s going on?’
My lips worked but no words came out.
‘Is it on the box yet?’ snapped Crawler.
‘Nearly,’ said Scanlon. ‘Just making her – its – way now.’ He lowered his voice. ‘Do you need me to do anything, Frankie? I can try to postpone – ask if they want to reschedule …’
My thoughts were still rearing up in fright. I didn’t trust myself to answer. Instead I counted to three inside my head, nice and slow. Nothing happened. Everyone’s faces seemed to fill with an untold horror, and the world crackled with menace. What are we doing? I asked myself again. Madness opened its wings inside my mind, ready to swoop.
With a flash of inspiration, I glanced over at Crawler. Just one glimpse of his arrogant, inscrutable face helped my mind right itself. I remembered what he’d told us, that very first day in the Haunted House. ‘Most people really are happiest when they just have something to stare at.’ Why was I even questioning that? Everything was fine. Everything was normal. No need to panic. All I had to do was think of this place as just … another haunted house.
‘I’m fine,’ I told Scanlon, and I began to mount the steps.
Yet a trace of restlessness remained.
They had the only captive poltergeist in the world at their command, and all they wanted it to do was stand on a box? I mean, it seemed a tiny bit of a shame, didn’t it? A slight … waste?
Also … I threw a critical eye around the place. This party, not to put too fine a point on it, sucked. Lady Whatsit and her guests seemed ever so stiff. And I suddenly shivered all over. You know when you find a frozen puddle in a field and stamp all over it, just for the pleasure of hearing it crack? I wanted to do that. I wanted to do that right now. Things needed to break in here.
‘Look, whatever you’re thinking, Frankie, just … don’t,’ said Scanlon.
‘I don’t know what you mean,’ I said, sticking my nose in the air.
‘Yeah you do. You’ve got that look on your face. Listen, Dad’s been planning this booking for months. He’s really touchy at the moment. If we don’t do what he says—’
‘Chill out, Scanlon,’ I muttered, getting into position.
I patted my salt-crusted hair and faced the crowd, making sure to smile widely enough so that the cuts on my face split open a little. A nice touch.
‘I’ll give them what they want,’ I said.
A FEW SECONDS later, the guests began to nudge each other.
‘Look,’ they said. ‘Over there.’
The poison had entered their bloodstreams completely, and the show was on.
‘Wh-what’s that, Mother?’ said Drixie faintly, squinting in my direction.
‘Ah, it’s the latest thing, darling,’ said Lady Craven. ‘You’re standing right in front of the Cliffstones poltergeist. My treat.’
Drixie’s bloodshot eyes widened as she entered death’s waiting room, and at last her eyes took me in. ‘It’s … dead?’ she said.
‘Very,’ said Crawler loudly, from the other side of the room. ‘Drowned. But somehow stuck on earth. Isn’t it brilliant? Take a look at her injuries – awesome bit of detail …’
Any minute now, I thought complacently, she’ll start to shriek with excitement, just like they do back in the Haunted House.
But Drixie didn’t look excited. Drixie had spent approximately one nanosecond taking my appearance in before she averted her eyes, looking …
… disgusted. She actually flinched. As if I was a plate of something going off in the fridge. It was a small expression, not much more than a nose wrinkle, and she compos
ed herself rapidly – it was all manners, manner, manners with this lot, you couldn’t fault that – but all the same, I saw it.
‘What do you think, my presh? Is it the best thing you’ve ever loaded?’ said Lady Craven hopefully.
Her daughter delicately spat into her hanky. ‘Not really, Mum. It’s just … depressing?’
An awkward silence filled the ballroom. The young people next to Drixie nodded their heads in agreement.
Her words were like a slap. Depressing?
‘Bit of a thrill kill,’ said someone in the crowd. ‘Not what we’re into.’
‘Major unlike. Please swipe,’ spluttered someone else. ‘Or wipe? Just make it stop.’
Drixie nodded. ‘Can you delete, or something?’
‘Delete?’ said Crawler. ‘But … you’ve got at least four minutes left before you need to take the antidote.’
Drixie shrugged and turned back to her friends.
An involuntary gasp left my lips. Had she literally just turned her back on a poltergeist? Did she not know how dangerous that was? I stared around the room. Shock and embarrassment erupted on my skin. My limbs twitched with frustration. I was the star attraction. But she thought I was depressing?
Lady Craven had turned to Crawler. A defeated smile fell out of her face, as empty as a nut thrown by a squirrel. ‘Looks like I got another surprise wrong,’ she said softly. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Lane, but you might as well take it away—’
‘Nope,’ I heard myself shouting. ‘Big fat nope to that.’ My voice flew around the ballroom and its echo came back at us like a gunshot.
Scanlon gave me a warning glance.
I glared back at him. ‘Scanlon, we’ve come all this way, I’ve barely been on this stupid box for more than a minute, and now these … these icy puddles are telling us to leave?’
‘Icy what?’ he said.
‘If you insist,’ Crawler was saying to Lady Craven. ‘We’ll administer the antidote right now.’
‘Oh no you won’t,’ I shouted. And then I located the source of my anger, and raised my voice even more.
The tiny tanned teenager turned around from her friends, surprise and pain carving up her face. She seemed to shrink a couple of centimetres as she finally registered my fury.
‘The poltergeist is shouting at me,’ she gasped, her lips white and trembling with sickness and indignation. ‘She’s fleck shouting at me. Can’t she see I’m not well?’
‘Tell it to stop,’ said her mother. ‘Right now. How disgraceful.’
‘Oh, get over yourself,’ I snapped, jumping off the box on to the middle of the marble floor. ‘You wanted me to entertain your guests, didn’t you? Well, now you’re going to get what you paid for.’
I mean, come on, Lady Big Bucks. Think a little. You don’t invite a poltergeist to your party and then not expect it to get angry. It was like stroking a sabre-toothed tiger and being surprised when it bit off your arm. Wake up and smell the ectoplasm, yeah?
THE PARTY GUESTS began to back away from me slowly, their hands out in a placating gesture as if I was a rabid dog. The few that weren’t doing this weren’t being polite or anything – it’s just that they were too busy slipping into unconsciousness.
For a second, I almost forgot where I was. A tiny, strangled cry came from my left, and I whirled upon it almost gratefully. Ah, yes. Drixie. Drixie Tink. I mean, what sort of a name was that, for starters? That was enough to make me lose my temper right there.
Anyway, Drixie Tink was swaying violently, still on her feet but barely, and quite purple. Erratic gulping noises escaped from her mouth as she took in that unnerving proximity between her and me. Her eyes widened with horror at my battered, bloody, salty corpse, the gaping wounds on my cheeks, the yellowing bruises, those awful nailless fingers that spoke of my last scramble for life.
Grinning, I took a small step towards her.
She fell to the floor, moaning. Her heels drummed out a weak beat on the floor as she tried to inch away from me.
‘Stop,’ she spluttered, wriggling like a woodlouse. ‘Please!’
‘What’s wrong with you? Worried I’ll stain your dress?’ I said.
She’d turned her back on me. She’d made me invisible. It was like dying all over again. Sometimes not being seen is the most violent thing in the world. But I’d make them see me whether they liked it or not.
I didn’t even need to smash anything in that room to destroy it. I mean, I did, obviously, you know me, but actually I caused the most damage just by being there. In their home. Their lives. That was the most destructive thing of all.
Because I showed them what they’d become one day.
At first, I chased them. That was fun. They scattered like weak little pigeons and crammed themselves into corners, crying and whimpering. That was when I sat next to them. I patted their hair. Moved my fingers tenderly up and down their cheeks, and watched as they cried and flinched and – yep – had tiny little accidents.
Crawler ran over and tried, half-heartedly, to stop me by making vague, hugging movements with his arms, but he hadn’t taken the Ghoul Aid so it was easy to dodge out of his reach. He didn’t seem that desperate to stop me either.
When I got bored of prodding them with my clammy fingers, I began to fling china plates at the walls right next to their faces, which was really satisfying. Then I ripped the robot staff in half, which was much trickier than I’d first thought, and sort of like pulling a massive television to bits – so many wires. But when I had about five of those silver spinny discs at my disposal, I plopped five conscious guests on top of them and pushed them, screaming and wailing, down the marble floor and out through the double doors.
Scanlon kept running around the room, darting between the flying crockery and the guests on wheels, giving out the antidote, and shooting stunned, surprised glances in my direction.
I turned my attention to the trestle table, laden with party food, and began to grab great handfuls of it, a vague plan of smearing it in Drixie’s hair formulating in my head. I’d just grabbed some squidgy chocolate cake when my anger disappeared as quickly as it had arrived, replaced instead by a small, sad realisation.
The life I could have had, I thought abruptly. Who would I have been, had I not died? I felt the cold, dead weight of all those days I wouldn’t know, like damp logs that would never burn.
Somewhere in the room, although it might as well have been a million miles away, a boy was saying a name over and over but it meant nothing to me. My brain felt as if someone had thrown a huge towel over it. I peered around the room but all I could see were thick white snowflakes falling, coating the world around me until there was no one there but me. Had it started snowing inside the ballroom?
Or was there something else going on? I felt so blank all of a sudden, tired and drained.
The cake slipped out of my hand and on to the floor.
‘Okay, I’m done,’ I said. ‘Can we go home now?’
There was a muffled sound of crying, and broken china being swept away. Then slow, wary footsteps. Through the white fog stealing over my vision I saw Scanlon and Crawler appear. While Scanlon looked pale and shocked, Crawler was beaming in delight.
In a quiet, discreet whisper, he uttered: ‘That was the best show yet.’
‘Dad, she destroyed millions of pounds’ worth of serve-tech. Those waiters on wheels cost a bomb. Lady Craven is demanding a refund. There is wee all over the floor,’ said Scanlon. ‘And she – it – the poltergeist looks one udder. I mean, worse than usual. Sorry. It was a disaster.’
Crawler waved his words away with a flap of a hand. ‘It was ten udder. The publicity from this alone will keep us sold out for years.’
‘Dad, look around you. We’re going to be in so much trouble—’
But Crawler merely rolled his eyes. ‘Our contracts are watertight. When Lady Craven booked us, she knew there was a risk of harm, pain and damage. That’s why she booked us, even though she won’t admit to it.’
Scanlon and I looked at each other uncertainly. But Crawler was delirious with confidence. As the guests continued to limp out of the ballroom, shocked and crying softly, he spoke feverishly, as if to himself.
‘There’s nothing more on-brand than an unpredictable poltergeist. Wish I’d thought of it myself. If they know you’re going to explode like that, they’ll want you even more. I mean, people like running with bulls, even though they might get gored to death.’
The truth, at last, dawned on me. If I did what I was told, that was good. But if I broke the rules, that was even better. Everything I did, everything I thought, belonged to Crawler. And the more I struggled, the more I was caught in his binds.
I gave one last look at the cherubs above us. Finally I realised what they reminded me of, stuck up there in that plaster. Like little golden flies, trapped in honey. Their helpless heads seemed to swivel in my direction as we left. And by the time we’d got outside, that white snow blizzard inside my head was falling thick and fast.
I BLINKED.
I was back at the party. Had they asked for an encore? After everything I’d done? Looked like Crawler was right; they had loved it.
But the crowd seemed quieter, and the walls and ceiling had shrunk. The cherubs had vanished – maybe they freed themselves, after all – I thought feverishly. Bright balloons hung from the ceiling instead.
‘They must have redecorated,’ I said through a mouth that was thick and slow.
Scanlon looked at me strangely. ‘Huh?’
‘The ballroom. Redecorated. Right?’
He gave me some serious side-eye. ‘Er, Frankie … we’re here for Nate?’
‘You what?’ My words sounded like they’d been stuck together with toffee.
‘Nate,’ he repeated.
I checked in with my brain. Meant nothing.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
Scanlon looked over his shoulder. Standing there shyly, like an overwhelmed toddler meeting Father Christmas for the first time, was a small thin boy with sticky-out ears.
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