“Oooooooooh, that doesn’t sound good,” he moaned. “Not good at all. No!”
Hetty Hyssop stood up abruptly. “I’m most annoyed, Mr. Bigshot. Extremely annoyed!”
The manager slumped down. “Well, I thought, there’s no point making things sound worse than they are. Do you see what I mean? All the hoo-ha, the guests…”
“My dear sir, you just don’t understand!” Hetty Hyssop thumped the desk. “Thanks to your earlier misinformation, we haven’t brought the right equipment! So I can only hope that we really are just dealing with a small problem here!” She turned to Tom. “What do you think? We could still risk an initial fact-finding mission, couldn’t we?”
“Of course!” said Tom, although he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the idea.
“Hugo?”
“That shoooould be enough. Fire Ghosts are as dumb as doorknobs.”
“Right, then!” Hetty Hyssop picked up her suitcase. “Let’s go and have a look at the fourth floor. Where can we get changed?”
Alvin Bigshot quickly sprang up. “Please, be my guests. Along here!” He led the three ghosthunters into a small side room and, bowing profusely, left them alone.
“Well, then!” With a sigh Hetty Hyssop opened her suitcase. “To work, my men. Let’s hope it’s no harder than we thought it would be!”
3
When the three ghosthunters returned to Mr. Bigshot’s office, they looked rather strange.
All three were wearing fireman’s helmets and flying goggles. Hugo’s goggles were tinted to protect him from daylight. Hetty Hyssop and Tom were wearing special suits made of heat-resistant foil, which they had smeared with a special paste consisting of SPF 30 sunscreen and sugared olive oil. This paste was, admittedly, somewhat sticky, but extremely useful in an encounter with a Fire Ghost.
In addition, Hetty Hyssop had a baking tray on her back, and attached to her belt, a mini vacuum cleaner, a package of sugar cubes, oven gloves, and a device that looked like an enormous hair dryer.
Tom was carrying his backpack, which contained cake icing and several other useful things. In his right hand, he held a baking baster with a particularly large nozzle. It was filled with green cake icing.
Finally, Hugo, who like all ASGs detested heat, had covered himself in a bag made of heat-resistant foil. The only things left poking out were his head in its helmet, his wobbly fingers, and his feet — which were covered by special shoes just like Hetty Hyssop’s and Tom’s. This had one great advantage: It stopped Hugo from leaving behind his slimy trails, which could be quite a danger for his ghosthunting colleagues, since they could easily get stuck in the slime at the most precarious moments.
Alvin Bigshot stared at the three ghosthunters as if they’d appeared from another planet.
“You must have an elevator,” said Hetty Hyssop. “Could you please show us the way?”
The manager still stared at them, quite transfixed, but finally he pulled himself together and hurried to the office door.
“The service elevator,” he said. “The best thing to do is to take the service elevator from the kitchen — because of the guests, if you get my drift!”
Hastily, he led the ghosthunters down a long corridor. Delicious smells wafted toward them, and Tom realized that he was hungry.
“Hugo, you better get into that backpack!” he hissed to the ghost.
“Yeah, yeah, alright!” grumbled Hugo, disappearing just in time, for Alvin Bigshot was already opening the door to the massive hotel kitchens.
As soon as the ghosthunters walked through the door, the chefs and trainees alike dropped all sorts of things into their cooking pots that didn’t belong there. (Several guests would later complain that the chicken soup tasted of raspberry and the chocolate pudding of fish.) And when Hugo’s white hand waved from Tom’s backpack, two head chefs (identifiable by their large hats) fainted on the spot. One took three saucepans with him, the contents of which splashed all over his spotless white shirt.
“No cause for alarm, staff!” cried Mr. Bigshot. “These are just three well-respected ghosthunters who have come to sort out our little problem on the fourth floor!”
His words didn’t have much effect. On the contrary, the chefs turned as white as their hats.
“Ghosthunters, sir?” asked the fattest of them. “G — g — ghosts?”
“Precisely,” said Tom. “So if you wouldn’t mind, where is the service elevator? We haven’t got all day!”
“Along here!” Alvin Bigshot cleared a path through the chefs, who were still standing there like wax figures.
At that very moment, it happened. With a loud bang, an oven door burst open and something bright red and repellently stinky flew out with a terrible scream. The clothes and hats of five chefs turned to ashes on the spot, leaving the poor men standing there clad in nothing but their underwear. One of them, totally baffled, was holding a burning spoon in his hand.
Tom immediately pulled out the icing baster, but the chefs — now hopping, wailing, and running wildly all over the place — blocked his view. However he craned and strained, the Fire Ghost was simply nowhere to be seen.
“What’s the matter?” Tom heard Hugo asking from within the backpack. “What’s all that noise about?”
“There, Tom!” cried Hetty Hyssop, shoving two chefs aside. “There, in front of you!”
Like a firework, the flickering ghost whizzed away over their heads. Tom felt unpleasantly warm even under his helmet.
“No water!” cried Hetty Hyssop, but it was already too late. One chef raised his arm and chucked a whole bucket of water at the ghost. Hissing, the water evaporated as it hit the wobbling red body. The Fire Ghost licked its flickering lips and sizzled right up to the ceiling. Soot tumbled blackly down onto the hats and into the soup, which the guests would later find revoltingly crunchy. Horrified, the chefs stumbled against one another, but Tom and Hetty Hyssop finally saw their chance.
“Eeeeeeeaaaargh!” screeched the fiery creature, blowing its hot breath at them — but Hetty Hyssop’s splendid special paste reduced it to room temperature. All Tom could feel was a pleasantly warm tickling sensation on his skin.
“Come and get it!” he cried, and squirted so much icing at the ghost’s chest that it looked like a wedding cake. Hetty Hyssop leaped to Tom’s side and switched on her mini vacuum cleaner.
The sugared Fire Ghost desperately tried to fly off, but the cake icing made it heavy and slow, and it became thinner and thinner as it was drawn toward Hetty Hyssop’s vacuum cleaner. With one last desperate effort it tried to hide under a stove fan, but Tom, quick as a flash, pulled on an oven glove, grabbed the ghost — which was as thin as a shoelace by now — and stuffed it into a thermos.
“Hooray!” cried the chefs, throwing their hats in the air — with one, unfortunately, landing in the tomato soup. A relieved smile appeared under Alvin Bigshot’s mustache.
“Well, that must have been it,” said Hetty Hyssop. “Looks as if we’re spared a trip to the fourth floor!”
But Tom nudged her and pointed to an electric socket.
“I don’t believe it!” he whispered. “Look!”
Sparks darted out of the sockets, followed by little clouds of vile violet smoke. The two ghosthunters exchanged worried looks.
“What, um, what does that mean?” Alvin Bigshot asked nervously.
“That means we’ll have to go to the fourth floor after all!” replied Tom. His stomach suddenly gave a peculiar lurch. “There!” he said, pressing the Fire Ghost–filled thermos into the baffled manager’s hand. “Don’t open it, whatever you do. Now, where’s that service elevator, then?”
4
“I suggest we only go as far as the third floor!” said Hetty Hyssop when the elevator door closed behind them. “And then we’ll creep up the stairs. OK?”
Tom nodded, and pressed the button.
“Can I fiiiiinally come out?” grumbled Hugo, wobbling out of the backpack. He looked around, astonished. “W
hat’s all this?” With a jolt the elevator started moving, and Hugo was jerked against the wall.
“Help!” he wailed. “Help! What’s going on?”
Tom giggled. “It’s an elevator, you dumbo!”
“Oh, really?” Irritated, Hugo blew his moldy breath into Tom’s face. “And what use is that to anyone?”
“Shh! Just be quiet!” Hetty Hyssop looked anxiously at her feet. “Do you notice anything?”
Tom looked down. He could feel something warm, very warm, beneath the soles of his shoes. Fortunately his shoes, like Hetty Hyssop’s, were filled with aluminum foil folded thirteen times over, and had specially coated soles.
“What’s that?” he whispered.
The floor of the elevator turned bright red and bubbles started to form. “I’m suffocating!” wailed Hugo, and floated up to the ceiling.
But it was no cooler there, either.
“Watch out!” cried Hetty Hyssop, and she and Tom clung to each other. The elevator went faster and faster, as if someone were shoving it along from below.
Any second now we’ll go through the roof, thought Tom. He squeezed his eyes tightly shut, but that made it even worse. So he opened them again — only to see a fiery finger boring a hole through the red-hot floor. Tom jumped back with a yell.
Another finger appeared, and another, and another, until an entire hand was poking up through the floor, fiery red and steaming. Snap! It made a grab for Tom’s legs.
Hugo was hanging beneath the ceiling, howling like a dog. Hetty Hyssop, however, sprang protectively in front of Tom, who was trembling and kicking wildly, and threw sugar cubes all over the fiery hand. Like frightened worms, the fingers jerked back and disappeared into the floor, hissing as they went.
The elevator raced on, braked sharply, plunged back down, whistling as it went, and rattled up again. The ghosthunters desperately tried to stay on their feet. Tom kept bashing the emergency brake, but nothing happened. Then, with a terrible jolt that almost threw them onto the red-hot floor, the elevator finally stopped. Groaning, it hung on its cables.
“What — what’s wrong now?” whispered Tom. He got the answer at once.
With a hiss the elevator door opened and a truly repulsive fiery red head with eyes like lightbulbs grinned at them. It opened its massive mouth, and yellow ghostly flames licked Tom’s legs.
“The icing!” cried Hetty. “Go on, Tom!”
His fingers trembling, Tom shot the rest of the icing into the fiery mouth.
The grisly creature clearly didn’t like the taste. It had a terrible attack of hiccups that shook the elevator as if it were a baby’s rattle. Hetty Hyssop grabbed the baking tray from her back and banged it hard on the gruesome ghost’s head. With a belch, the head disappeared into thin air.
The door banged shut, and the elevator hung clanking and groaning in the air somewhere between the floors.
“It’s turning cooler again!” whispered Tom. He was still trembling slightly. His icing baster was empty;
Hetty Hyssop’s baking tray lay on the ground, dented beyond repair.
“That certainly wasn’t any normal Fire Ghost!” grumbled Hugo, floating gently to the ground.
“No, it certainly wasn’t!” Hetty Hyssop tried to fix her baking tray onto her back again. She looked very irritated. “That Bigshot played down the problem so much that we almost ended up as incense sticks. He’s in for it — if we ever get out of here in one piece!” The tip of her nose was positively hot with rage. “What do you think, Tom? Should we go up or down?”
“Up,” he replied.
“Up? What do yoooooou mean, up?” Hugo waggled his icy fingers around indignantly under Tom’s nose. “Doesn’t anyone care what I think?”
“Nah,” said Tom. “In any case, you run off and hide the moment things get a bit tricky!”
“Fine. Fiiiiiine. If that’s how yoooou want things!” Hugo folded his white arms across his chest. “Then yooooou can save yooooourselves from this thing. I’m not helping yooooou! No, I have my pride, tooooooo!” And with that, he disappeared into Tom’s backpack.
“Pass me the spare baster,” demanded Tom.
Hugo’s white hand emerged and threw the baster at Tom’s head. Tom just grinned and pressed the button for the third floor once more. The elevator set off again with a jolt, and rattled as it flew upward.
“My dear Tom,” said Hetty Hyssop. “You really are a remarkably brave young man. I simply couldn’t have a better assistant!”
“Oh, it’s nothing!” murmured Tom, straightening his glasses in embarrassment.
Then the elevator stopped.
But not on the third floor.
It stopped on the fourth.
5
The elevator doors opened with a faint squeak. Thick clouds of violet-colored smoke wafted in. They stank. A stink that somehow managed to be simultaneously sweet and burnt. It made Tom cough.
“Clips on!” said Hetty Hyssop.
“Here yoooooou go!” Hugo passed two nose clips out from the backpack, and poked his own nose out. He sniffed around. “I don’t know what your problem is. It smells delicious, absolutely delicious!”
“To ghosts, maybe,” said Tom. “But it smells pretty nasty to me!” The nose clip made his voice sound funny, though Hetty Hyssop didn’t sound any better.
“Look at that!” she said through her nose.
Tom cautiously stuck his head out the door. The violet-colored smoke was making his eyes burn and water. But what he could make out was rather disturbing. The elevator was situated at the end of a long corridor with countless bedroom doors. The cream carpet was disfigured by a trail of burned-in footprints, all of them worryingly large. But what was even more worrying was this: Huge flames were leaping out of the walls and doors. They crackled and stank, and bathed the corridor in a reddish-violet light. The only window at the end of the corridor was completely covered in soot. The wall lamps between the bedroom doors had melted, as had the brass room numbers.
“My dear Tom, I fear the worst,” muttered Hetty.
“A Category Three Fire Ghost?” whispered Tom.
“At the very least!” Hetty whispered back. “In fact, I fear something quite different. All this looks suspiciously like a — no! We can’t even think of it!”
Tom looked at her, disturbed — but Hetty Hyssop gave him no time to think about what she’d said. She stepped boldly out into the burning corridor and walked right through the midst of the flames.
“Come on, young man!” she cried. “It’s just ghost-fire. No problem for our specially pasted suits!”
With trembling fingers, Tom set his glasses straight and followed her. She was right. The flames engulfed him, reaching right above his head and dropping down onto his helmet; but the only thing he felt was a faint tingling on his skin, slightly unpleasant but perfectly bearable. Tom looked around. All the bedroom doors were shut, their locks all hot and bent. He could feel Hugo rummaging around in the backpack. That pesky ASG was just too nosy to stay hidden the whole time. Eventually, he peeked over Tom’s shoulder.
“Nice work!” he commented.
“Yuck!” whispered Tom. “Do you have to keep blowing your breath right in my face? It’s stinky enough in here as it is!”
“With that stupid clip on your nose, yooooooou can’t smell anything, anyway,” breathed Hugo. “Know what? Yoooooou sound like a duck!” His hollow laugh sounded very spooky echoing through the burning corridor.
“Hugo!” hissed Hetty Hyssop. “Come on, make yourself useful. Float through the bedroom doors and see if you can dig up any guests!”
“What? Me?” Hugo immediately disappeared behind Tom’s shoulder. “Through there? I’d evaporate most miserably!”
“Oh, come off it!” Hetty Hyssop put her hands on her hips. “You’re a ghost. This dreadful heat can’t do you any harm at all. Especially not with that bag you’re wearing. So off you go!”
Grumbling, Hugo floated across the corridor and disappeared th
rough the first closed door.
“Nothing!” he declared when he reemerged. “It’s all pretty chaotic in there, but no guests!”
Hugo floated into one room after another, only to find the same thing every time. All the guests had vanished without a trace. Hetty Hyssop’s expression became ever darker.
“This just confirms my worst fears,” she murmured when in the last room Hugo once again failed to find anyone. “My very worst fears of all. Tom, stay clear of the sockets!”
“Wh — wh — why?” stammered Tom. His courage was gradually ebbing from him after all.
“I’ll be better able to explain once we’re back downstairs,” said Hetty Hyssop. “Come on, let’s skedaddle. But we’ll use the stairs this time!”
They had almost reached the stairs when all of a sudden they heard a knocking. They looked around, shocked.
“It came from that cupboard over there!” whispered Tom. He pointed to one of the linen cupboards right next to the elevator. Cautiously they crept back. The knocking came again.
Holding the mini vacuum cleaner in her hand, Hetty Hyssop wrenched the cupboard door open with a jolt.
In a corner, between the bedspreads and piles of hand towels, cowered a small bellboy. He was trembling so much that the metal buttons on his uniform clattered together like castanets.
“Good heavens!” Hetty Hyssop carefully pulled the little man out of the mountains of linen. He was as skinny as a stick insect. “How long have you been in there? You must feel like a roasted turkey!”
The bellboy managed a tiny and desperate smile, but could not utter a word through his trembling lips. He wouldn’t have been able to stay upright without the two ghosthunters’ help.
“Ha-haaaa! Something’s certainly given him a good fright!” Hugo grinned mischievously and shoved him in the chest. The bellboy gave a sharp scream and immediately made for the cupboard again — but Tom and Hetty Hyssop held on to him.
Ghosthunters and the Gruesome Invincible Lightning Ghost Page 2