Rules for Ghosting

by A. J. Paquette

  Dahlia came back to herself with her particles heaving and weaving in and out of focus to her blurry eyes. This was it—the Anchor, the unfinished business, the thing that had been tying her to Silverton manor. She’d found it. And yet she now felt worse than ever.

  She thought of her own portrait, nestled in the dark of the attic. Was that why her mother had stored her there, safely out of sight? Had she found it simply too painful to remember the girl she had loved and lost?

  Now Dahlia had all the pain, all the agony of the memory. But what she didn’t have, what inexplicably had not come with the Anchor, was the last thing needed to complete her Liberation process.

  She still had no idea how she had died.

  Chapter 24

  The rest of the afternoon and evening passed all too quickly for Oliver, who was kept busy running from one chore to another, laced in his too-tight shoes that pinched his feet and his pressed pants and his hated plaid flannel shirt. He wondered where Dahlia was, and hoped she was having a better time than the rest of them.

  Once the guests started arriving, the kids were put into helper mode, offering tours to the main rooms of the house, refilling glasses and passing around trays of appetizers. Oliver wasn’t sure why the appetizers couldn’t stay on the side tables for people to grab themselves, but apparently this was part of the charm. Mom still held out hope that Rutabartle might change his mind—she’d obviously grown attached to the house too—but Oliver knew better. More than one group of guests he’d escorted around had muttered to themselves what an intriguing property this was, musing about prospects for future land valuation, and would this be a good investment property, all things considered? Oliver had to bite his lip to keep from offering a hundred and one reasons why this would not be an ideal place for them to live. But the more time passed, the more discouraged he got.

  At eight o’clock, Mom trundled JJ up the stairs and whipped around the attic room with a giant duster. Oliver dragged in a pile of bedding and pulled together a bed for them. Poppy claimed the four poster, and Oliver rolled out his own mat next to the chest by the window. If all went as expected, he wouldn’t be spending much time tonight sleeping, anyway.

  “Now, isn’t this going to be fun?” Mom said enthusiastically to JJ. “A sleepover in a secret room! I’m trusting you two to stay tucked quietly in bed, all right? Absolutely no sneaking downstairs.”

  “It’s kind of cold up here,” Poppy said, though she was swathed in old-fashioned bedding. Mom had put clean sheets on the bed, but Poppy had insisted on sleeping with the original pink satin comforter. Considering they belonged to a ghost—a dead girl—Oliver thought that was beyond creepy. But it didn’t seem to bother Poppy in the slightest.

  Mom squinted up at the air vent on the wall above the bed. She checked it and cleaned some dust out of the passageway, holding her hand above it. “Yes, it seems to be working. I’ll go down now and turn the heat up. I can’t even imagine how much it’ll cost to heat this place in winter! But we won’t worry about that for tonight.” She frowned. “Or any night, I suppose, since we’re … Well! We’ll get you all toasty and warm, and—Oliver, is that window still open? Close it up right now.”

  Oliver pulled the window down and flipped the latch shut. He left the curtains open, though. “Do I have to stay up here all night, Mom? I want to see the auction.”

  “You will do no such thing,” she said sternly. “We’re on shaky ground with Mr. Rutabartle as it is, and I don’t want anything to go wrong tonight.”

  “Go wrong?” Oliver exploded. “How could it get any worse? We’re being kicked out of our house!”

  “That’s enough, young man,” Mom said sternly. “You’ll stay here and that’s final.”

  With those words she kissed the twins goodnight, patted Poppy on the head, and exited the room, shutting the door firmly behind her.

  “Argh!” Oliver groaned, throwing his pillow across the room in frustration. “How can she just stand there and do nothing? And Dad—he didn’t even say anything when he heard the news. All he can think about is his stupid puppet show!”

  “Puppet show?” JJ perked up, peeking out of their joint sleeping bag like a two-headed inchworm. “We want to see the puppet show!”

  Oliver sighed. “You’re going to get a special showing tomorrow. I don’t know why we can’t go down and watch now, but whatever.”

  “Well, I know why,” Poppy said, and Oliver couldn’t help but smile. Poppy was right. If JJ got loose among the party guests, there was no telling what kind of trouble they would get into. Of course, that might not be so awful. Maybe they could scare the guests a little, lose a few potential bidders?

  He sighed again. “Go to sleep, okay?” he told the twins.

  They put their little noses together, gibbering away to each other, then Junie’s hand shot out toward Oliver, holding something in her fist. “Here!” she chirped.

  Oliver squatted down next to her. “What’s this?”

  She opened her hand and handed him a crumpled green piece of … money? It was a twenty-dollar bill.

  “I grabbed it from Daddy’s wallet,” said Joe with a giggle. “He didn’t care. He saw me and he wagged his finger.”

  “He was doing puppets!” Junie clapped her hands in triumph.

  “We want you to have it!”

  “For the house!”

  “For the action!”

  “Auction,” said Poppy from the other side of the room. Then she frowned. “Yeah, me too. I don’t want us to have to leave. I kind of love this house.” She leaned over the side of her bed, where she had brought a sparkly pink overnight bag. Oliver had laughed at her for this earlier, bringing a bag to a sleepover in another room of the same house, but he wasn’t laughing now. “I’ve been saving my pocket money for …”

  “For years,” he said. “I know, but you—” Poppy didn’t spend her money for anything. Not anything. Not ice cream or toys or any of the impulse buys that had left Oliver with just coins in his coin jar. “Really?” he said.

  She nodded very seriously, and put a pile of bills into his hands. She took a deep breath. “There’s two hundred and eighty-five dollars there. It’s all I have. Do you think it will be enough to buy the house?”

  She looked so eager, so hopeful, sitting there holding the money out to him, and JJ too, with their little hands clasped around each other’s shoulders, like adoring twin bugs. How could he let them down?

  “I don’t know,” he said. He did some quick math in his head. Three hundred and ninety-four dollars and twenty-one cents was nowhere near enough to buy any kind of house, not even a crumbling old haunted mansion out in the middle of nowhere. So actually he did know, but he could let them dream a little longer. “Maybe I should sneak down and see if I can sit in on the auction. You never know, right?”

  “Yeah!” said Junie. “You never know!”

  “I know,” said Joe, confused. Junie bopped him and they started wrestling and yanking each other’s hair and howling, and Poppy dived over to get them to settle down. “Hey!” she said, motioning to Oliver to make his getaway while she tamed the wild beasts. “If you guys get quiet I’ll let you up in the fancy bed!”

  Oliver gave her a thumbs-up then slipped out of the door, closing it quietly behind him.

  He eased down the steps, pausing as he reached the bottom of the attic stairs. A dark figure slunk around the far hallway corner. Oliver shook himself. For a second he thought he’d seen Rank Wiley! It was good that nasty ghosterminator was out of their hair, and the Aspirator safely stowed in Oliver’s room. One less thing to worry about.

  The guests who had wanted tours of the house had all been accommodated earlier on, and the party was now gathered in the main open area at the base of the stairs that led to the second-floor hall. Oliver found a spot on the far balcony that stretched up over the room, behind a decorative skeleton, where he could spy without being spotted. At least fifty guests were milling around, the women all decked out in floor-l
ength gowns and the men in tuxedos. They held crystal glasses that twinkled in the light of the chandeliers. Rutabartle moved among them, speaking a word here, giving a pat on the back there, and generally mingling and working the crowd with the self-satisfied air of one for whom all is unfolding exactly as desired.

  Wispy tendrils from the smoke machines hidden in the alcoves curled around the room, giving a suitably spooky-chic air to the party. Even Oliver, who knew all the behind-the-scenes tricks, was impressed.

  The wall on the far side of him shook a little bit, and something let out a low moan.

  The nearest guests let out a cluster of subdued giggles. “Ohhh,” said a portly lady in a spangled hot-pink dress, “that was the most realistic one yet! How do you manage these effects, Mrs. Day?”

  Mom looked classy in her sleek black gown, but there was a blank look in her eye at that question that surprised Oliver. Well, he hadn’t set up any shaking walls or trick noises. And it was obvious Mom didn’t know anything about that either. So where had it come from? A low rumble rippled the floor.

  Dahlia? Oliver thought to himself. But she’d never seemed to be that kind of ghost. She was more like, well, a girl who just happened to be dead. Not really into the haunting side of things, at least as far as he could see. Oliver chewed his lip.

  Just then there was a loud shriek on the other side of the room, under the far rim of the balcony. What now?

  He scurried down the hall to get a better view. A woman downstairs was letting out piercing yips. Something yellow oozed out of the collar of her dress.

  Oliver stopped. He looked around, and—oh no! Peering over the banister partway down the staircase, was …

  “JJ!” he hissed, dashing over to them. “What are you guys doing out of bed?”

  “Did you see that?” Joe could hardly form words for giggling. “Did you hear that lady yell?”

  “We used up all our goop,” Junie said a little sadly.

  “But for a good cause!”

  “Yes! To help you make all the bad people go away.”

  “Then we get the house!”

  “No,” said Oliver.

  Poppy darted up, panting and out of breath. “I’ve been looking everywhere for these rotten tomatoes. I feel like tossing them in the garbage can.” She tucked one twin under each arm and herded them back up the hallway, muttering and scolding all the while.

  Down below, the gooped-on woman seemed to have recovered. Mom was pressing a slice of chocolate raspberry tart into her hand, and a man was wiping the last of the yellow mess out of her collar. The crisis seemed to be averted.

  Which was a good thing, right?

  Chapter 25

  Even before the Day kids started moving their blankets and sleeping bags into her old bedroom, Dahlia knew she had gotten all she could from the place. Touching the Anchor had brought back those memories of her past, but had left her no closer to freedom. What was she missing? She could still feel the walls of her Boundary on the edges of her consciousness, pulsing like an angry parent saying, You may not leave! Not now and not ever. It seemed more impossible that she would ever find a way out, or be able to rescue Mrs. Tibbs.

  But the more she examined the problem, the more she came back to the one connection she hadn’t yet fully explored. This room had been blocked since her death—or before, probably—and this was the room where her Anchor had been. Some force in this room had kept her out, until she’d brought in the Seesaw. This entity, whatever it was, had been jolted out of the room by her Manifesting machine, allowing Dahlia to enter freely in her ghostly form.

  Dahlia didn’t know a lot about how the ghost world worked, but she realized there was one thing she did know for sure. Every expired object immediately began to rise. Energy, force, entity—whatever it was, once it expired it rose and it didn’t stop until it got where it was going. There was only one exception: if something—if someone—was Anchored in the place of their death.

  Dahlia sat bolt upright. Thing 1: this had been her room, but it had belonged to someone else first—Laura Silverton. Thing 2: the force that had been in this closed-up room had not left the house; she could hear it even now shaking and rattling around in the walls. Dahlia saw no other possible explanation.

  There was another ghost in Silverton Manor.

  In the moment it took for the idea to sink in, Dahlia became a humming ball of energy. She hadn’t seen wisp nor whirl of such a being anywhere in the house, but it was the only possible answer. She had to find this fellow spirit. She had to!

  Her mind working at a furious rate, Dahlia studied the little attic room, watching the Day kids as they milled around and talked to each other.

  For some reason the trapped presence wasn’t able to—or didn’t like to—materialize in the open air, so how could it now be traveling around the rest of the house? Dahlia thought of how she herself had found comfort in following living-world pathways—maybe this spirit, too, needed that kind of structure when moving through an unfamiliar place. But what kind of pathways? She scanned the room for possibilities: it was sealed as tight as a drum, from the closed window to the tiny chinks in the wall edging that had been carefully filled in with plaster. The only way out was through the slatted opening, which was now pumping out warm air.

  Of course—the vents!

  Another low rumble shook the walls, and Dahlia needed no further encouragement. She curled herself into a tight spiral and shot up into the heating vent. The passageway was narrow and extremely dusty. The ripples of heated air coiled over and around her like a living thing, and she swam easily through them, winding down passageways at random, her ghost ears perked for any unusual sound.

  “Hello?” she called gently ahead of her. “Is anybody here?”

  “Whoooooo …” came a sudden low howl. Dahlia stopped. She focused her Clearsight, but it didn’t seem to work for finding ghosts in the way it did for living people. She closed her eyes and let herself drift. She could feel a distant thrum, a free-floating energy spike she hadn’t felt before, and she let herself move toward it.

  When she next opened her eyes, she was passing through an insulated partition. She felt a sharp crackle, a surge like she had felt when the attic room was closed off to her. In front of her was … nothing. Well, not nothing exactly. There was definitely some kind of ghostly energy, but it was as formless as a plastic bag floating underwater.

  As Dahlia zeroed in, the shape started moving again. It whipped across the crowded gathering hall, upsetting a tray of puff pastry and toppling two full glasses of champagne. Several guests shrieked. Dahlia whisked after the misty gust. There was definitely someone in there; she could sense it!

  “Hey,” she whispered. The shapeless ghost shot into a heating vent on the floor and Dahlia followed through several walls before it slowed to a stop. The form hung motionless in front of her.

  “Hello,” she said again, very softly. “I’m Dahlia. Who are you?”

  The form trembled. It seemed to be elongating, stretching itself into a vaguely human shape. There wasn’t much room in the narrow crawl space, but Dahlia didn’t want to risk pulling the being out into the open. The idea of spooking a ghost would have been funny if she’d let herself think about it. But she forced herself to stay still and wait.

  The mist swirled tighter, and Dahlia could faintly see two eyes peering out of the glom. “It’s okay,” Dahlia said. “Nothing’s going to hurt you.” She reached out her hand. The presence burbled and a stringy wisp extended, slowly shaped itself into an arm, and then a hand stretched out to grasp her own hand tightly.

  As Dahlia squeezed back, she focused all her energy on this new form, trying to send thoughts of quiet and peace and strength its way. She also gently pulled the ghost after her out of the cramped heating vent and into the nearby boiler room, where there was plenty of space to expand and no living folks likely to wander by.

  Before her eyes, the figure took complete shape. First the eyes got less wild, settled into a soft pale-
blue fringed with dark lashes; then two long, dark braids became visible. The rest of the face came slowly into focus, followed by an elaborate gown with a high lace collar and a wide fancy skirt. And then the ghost spoke.

  “I am Laura Silverton,” she said. “Where am I?”

  So she’d been right! It was the girl from the article, from the family Bible, one of her ancient ancestors—who had died when she was not much older than Dahlia. And yet this answer just opened up a bunch more questions.

  “Why are you still here?” Dahlia asked. “Have you been in the house this whole time?” Obviously she hadn’t crossed over, and Dahlia knew as well as anyone how the Ghouncil could lose track of people who were supposed to be given help. But Laura had died well over a hundred years ago!

  “I only just went to bed,” Laura said slowly. She was fully formed now, and her eyes scanned the dusty room. “But where is everyone? Why does the house look so different this morning?”

  Could she really not know that she had died? Had she been trapped in that formless void inside her attic room, like some kind of Sleeping Beauty who closed her eyes and woke up over a hundred years later? Only this time, there was no prince and Sleeping Beauty was a ghost. Dahlia sighed. All this time they’d been so close, yet had never known it! She slipped over and wrapped her arms around the taller girl’s shoulders.

  “Laura,” she said. “There’s a lot we need to talk about. Come with me?”

  The new ghost was weak and trembly, and followed Dahlia easily at first. But as they reached the boiler room wall, Laura would go no farther.

  “What’s the matter?” Dahlia asked, but the girl shook her head so hard her long braids flashed out like a whirligig. There was something about her … though she had to be an older teenager, Laura almost seemed younger than Dahlia herself. Did that have to do with having been ghost dust for a century … or was it something more?