The Gloomy Ghost

by David Lubar

  I ran up to him and said, “Hi. Can you hear me?” I didn’t really need to talk to anyone, since I was being fixed up and wouldn’t be a ghost much longer, but I guess I just wanted to talk, anyhow.

  The man glanced down at me, then shook his head and looked away. “My car. My poor car,” he said. “It’s wrecked. They’ll never be able to fix it. The whole thing is wrecked.”

  “It’s just a car,” I said. But it didn’t look like he’d heard me. I walked down the hall a little more. There were three older kids—two boys and a girl. They looked like they were in high school. Sometimes high school kids scare me, because they’re so big. But I figured it was okay to talk to them here in the hospital.

  “Hi,” I said.

  “It’s your fault!” the girl was shouting at one of the boys.

  “I’m Rory,” I told them.

  “Hey,” the boy shouted back at the girl, “don’t blame me! I didn’t drink that much.”

  I tried a little more to talk to them, but they were so busy shouting at each other and blaming each other that it was no use.

  There was a woman down the hall from them. She didn’t want to talk to me, either. Neither did the next two men I saw. They were all busy with their own problems. And I guess they were all just used to ignoring kids. I’m not going to be like that when I grow up. When I’m an adult, I’m going to listen to every little kid who ever talks to me.

  It didn’t matter if they ignored me. As soon as the doctors fixed me, I’d be able to talk to Becky and Tony and all my other friends. I might even be glad to see that bully, Pit Mellon, even though he stole one of my action figures last week. He pushes everyone around because he’s bigger and stronger. It wasn’t fair. No, I changed my mind—I wouldn’t be glad to see Pit.

  I’d been wandering around for a long time. I checked my watch. It was 7:53. I decided to go back and see if the doctors were almost finished fixing me. I figured it would probably be a good idea for me to be near my body when that happened. I went back down the hall. Even though I knew it was no use, I said hi to all the other ghosts. That’s just the way I am. I like saying hi to people. They didn’t pay any attention to me. Boy, was I getting used to that.

  When I got back to the place where I was, I wasn’t there. I mean, I was gone. The room was empty. I looked around to make sure it was the right place. It was. I remembered the poster on the wall, and the big machine in the corner with all the knobs and buttons.

  Don’t get scared, I told myself. I had to be somewhere. I knew they must have moved me. I’d seen that on television. They bring people to the emergency room, then they move them so other people can get helped.

  I ran down the hall, looking in all the rooms. I wasn’t in any of them. I went up the stairs and started looking there. But the next floor was just X-ray machines and stuff like that.

  So I went up another floor. Right away, I saw Sebastian and Angelina. They were sitting in this place that had a bunch of chairs. There was a table with magazines on it, too. I guess it was a waiting room. There was a big door behind them. When I walked up to the door, I could see Mom and Dad inside. I went through.

  I saw myself in a bed. I looked away. There were still lots of needles and tubes in me.

  A doctor was talking to Mom and Dad. “We’re running tests,” the doctor said.

  “How is he?” Mom asked.

  “We’re trying our best, but we have no idea what caused this.” the doctor said. “We’re running every test we can think of. Unless we find out very soon…” He stopped talking and shook his head.

  “Berries!” I shouted at them. “I ate poison berries! You just have to look. They’re right on the bush where you found me.”

  “How long?” Dad asked.

  “Twelve hours,” the doctor said.

  “All you have to do is look,” I said.

  Now Dad shook his head. “I knew he was too young for that bike. It’s all my fault. He must have hit his head when he fell. I told him to wear his helmet.”

  “I wasn’t on my bike,” I said. Then I remembered how I had pushed myself away from the bushes and out into the middle of the yard—right next to the bike.

  They’d never figure out about the berries. Not unless I found some way to tell them.

  Thirteen

  GETTING THROUGH IS HARD TO DO

  There had to be some way to let them know about the berries. But they couldn’t see me or hear me. And I couldn’t touch anything. My hands went through everything. No. That wasn’t true. I realized there was one thing I could touch—sort of. I could move myself. Maybe I could make my hands move. It would be like playing that game where you make people guess words just by using your hands.

  I went over to my body. I really didn’t like looking at me, on the hospital bed. My face was so pale, it looked like my real body was the ghost. But I had to do something. I put my hand through the bed under my body’s hand. Then I started to push. It was almost like I was playing with a Rory puppet. That idea made me laugh.

  Even better—it was working. My whole arm started to move up from the bed.

  That’s when everything went crazy all at once. BEEEEEEP! An alarm started screeching and things started ringing and flashing and the doctor bent over me and the nurses came running in and Mom and Dad started shouting questions.

  I jumped away from my body.

  The alarms stopped.

  “Some kind of stress,” the doctor said. “Something was putting an extra burden on his system.”

  “What?” Dad asked.

  “I wish I knew,” the doctor said. “I’ve seen it happen before, especially in unconscious patients, but we’ve never been able to explain it. Just be thankful it stopped so quickly. Sometimes, it doesn’t stop at all. And then, we’re in serious trouble.”

  I stepped back some more, just to be safe. I guess I couldn’t take any chances trying to move myself again. But what else could I do? At least I had more time. Before, I just had two hours. And I’d saved myself. This time, I had twelve hours. I checked my watch. It was 8:05. At night. That was easy to figure out. Twelve hours would be 8:05 again, but in the morning.

  I jumped as I felt someone tugging on my arm.

  “Hey, come on. Answer me.”

  I looked down. There was a little kid next to me—one of those real little ones who aren’t even in kindergarten yet. I think he might have been talking for a while. I’d heard something, but I hadn’t paid any attention to it. I had my own problems.

  “Come on,” the kid said again. “Talk to me.”

  I didn’t have time for this. I needed to tell Mom and Dad about the berries. There had to be a way. I looked down at the kid and told him, “I can’t talk to you right now. I’ve got problems.”

  “That’s what everyone says. You big people are all alike,” he said. Then he stomped his foot. It was kind of funny, since it didn’t make any sound. I guess I laughed.

  “It’s not funny!” he shouted. He turned and walked out.

  You big people? I thought about that ghost in the hall, who just kept talking about his car. And I thought about all the other big ghosts who didn’t notice me.

  “Wait!” I called, running after him. “Wait up. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to laugh at you.”

  He stopped. I ran up to him and said, “I’m Rory. What’s your name?”

  “Scott,” he said. “I’m real sick. Are you?”

  “Yeah. I ate some red berries,” I told him.

  “Wow. You’re kidding? Those are poison. Everybody knows that.”

  “I guess so. What happened to you?”

  Scott shrugged. “I got some kind of disease. I don’t know what it’s called. My parents don’t talk about it. They never tell me anything. I wish they would. But all they ever do is whisper about it.”

  “That’s rough,” I said. Except for now, I’d never been really sick. I had the chicken pox once, but that wasn’t so bad. Mostly, I just had to stay in bed that time, and Mom bought me a bunc
h of coloring books and a new box of crayons. “I hope you get better.”

  He shook his head. “I don’t think I’m going to.” Then he smiled and said, “Hey, want to see me?”

  I looked at my watch. A whole minute had gone by. But it wouldn’t take long to go with him, and I still felt bad about how I’d treated him at first. “Sure.”

  “This way. I’m right down the hall.”

  I followed Scott to a room. Boy. I thought I was hooked up to a lot of stuff. Scott made me look like a free kid. He was wired all over the place. There were two people sitting in the room, looking real sad and holding hands.

  “Are those your parents?” I asked.

  Scott nodded. “Yeah.” He pointed at the woman and said, “That’s my mom.” Then he pointed to the man and said, “That’s my dad.”

  I guess little kids like to point out stuff. Before we’d gone into the room, he seemed happy. Now he looked pretty sad. I had an idea. “Hey, I’m going to go outside for a while. Want to come with me?”

  Scott looked at his parents. Then he looked at me. “I’ve been here for days and days. I haven’t gone anywhere. Yeah. Come on. Let’s go.”

  “Great.” It would be nice to have someone to talk to, even if it was just a little kid.

  “Were those your parents back there?” Scott asked.

  “Yeah. And Angelina and Norman and Sebastian. But his friends call him Splat,” I said.

  “Why?” Scott asked.

  “It’s pretty silly,” I told him. “And he doesn’t think anybody knows. But I heard my mom telling Mrs. Nissman at the bakery all about it, so I know the whole story. When Sebastian was really little, whenever he needed his diaper changed, he’d jump up in the air so he came down on his rear end.”

  “Gross,” Scott said.

  “Yeah. Pretty gross. When he hit the ground, the diaper would make a sound like splat. After a while, Sebastian started to shout ‘Splat!’ when he jumped. He’d do that until Mom came and changed him. So Mom used to call him her little Splatty-bottom. That turned into Splat-bottom. By the time she stopped, other kids had started calling him Splat, even if they didn’t know the reason.”

  “That’s really stupid,” Scott said.

  I shrugged. “Yeah. I guess it is. Come on—let’s get out of here.”

  “Where are we going?” Scott asked as we walked down the hall.

  I realized I couldn’t tell him. It wasn’t a secret. It was just that I had no idea. No idea at all.

  Fourteen

  OUT AND ABOUT

  We walked down to the door by the stairs. “I wonder what would happen if we went out up here?” Scott said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “You know. Walked through this wall,” he said, pointing to the wall at the end of the hall.

  “I guess we’d fall,” I said. “But so what? We can’t get hurt.”

  “Let’s find out.” Scott rushed ahead. I ran to catch up with him. We both went through at the same time.

  We fell. But it wasn’t fast. It was like we were two leaves floating down. I found out I could spin. I stuck my arms out and pretended I was a helicopter. I can make a really great helicopter sound with my tongue.

  “That was fun,” Scott said. “Let’s do it again.”

  “How about we do it later,” I said. “I really want to get going.”

  “Okay,” Scott said.

  I stood on the ground outside the hospital and tried to figure out where to go. “What’s a good place for ghosts?” I asked Scott after I’d been thinking for a whole two minutes without getting anywhere.

  “I know,” he said. “How about the graveyard?”

  “No way!” I felt a chill run through me when he said that. I shook my head real hard to try to get rid of the thought. “The haunted house was bad enough,” I told him.

  “Haunted house?” he asked.

  I told him about the Winston House.

  “Spooky!” he said when I was done. “Can we go there?”

  “Nope. There has to be someplace else.” I started walking. I didn’t know where I was going, but I figured walking was better than standing still.

  We walked for an hour. We saw three other ghosts—all adults. I tried talking to each of them, but it wasn’t any use.

  “Boy, big people don’t pay any attention to kids,” Scott said.

  “Yeah. Tell me about it. But how come there aren’t more ghosts?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Shouldn’t there be thousands of ghosts? Maybe millions?” I wondered why the whole place wasn’t filled with ghosts.

  “I don’t know,” Scott said.

  I thought about it. I remembered how I’d started to float up when my body was almost all dead. Maybe people didn’t stay ghosts for long, except some people. Maybe most people weren’t ghosts at all. It was too much to think about, and I had something more important to worry about. I still didn’t know where to go. I finally told Scott the truth.

  “What do you want to find out?” he asked.

  “How to get a message to my parents,” I told him.

  “Are you sure you can do it?” he asked. “I tried and tried to let my parents know I was there.”

  “Yeah. I’m pretty sure. You hear about ghosts all the time. People see ghosts, and they see things move, and hear things, and all sorts of stuff like that. So it has to be possible. If it wasn’t, people would never even know about ghosts. Right?”

  “I guess,” Scott said, but he didn’t sound like he was too sure.

  “Think about it,” I told him. “You hear people talk about baseball all the time, right?”

  “Sure,” Scott said.

  “And there really is baseball.”

  “Yup.” Scott nodded.

  “You never hear them talk about mooseball or hamburgerball, do you? Or zoopydoopyball.”

  “Nope.” Scott said.

  “That’s because they aren’t real. But people talk about seeing and hearing ghosts. So it’s possible I can get them to hear me. I know it is. I just have to find out how to do it.”

  “If I got better, I could tell them for you,” Scott said. For an instant, he smiled. Then his smile faded. “That won’t work. I know I’m not going to get better.”

  I didn’t like hearing him talk that way. “You’ll be okay.”

  He looked toward where the hospital was. I guess talking about himself made him think of his parents. “Rory, would you get mad if I went back?”

  “No, I understand.” I figured he wanted to be with his parents as much as possible. “Go ahead. Maybe I’ll see you later.”

  “Yeah. Good luck.”

  “You, too,” I said.

  Scott turned away from me and walked back toward the hospital.

  I was sorry he was leaving. He wasn’t bad company for a little kid. He talked a lot, but that was okay. As I watched him go, I thought about another place where I might find some ghosts. There was a small museum in town. It had lots of old stuff. And ghosts seemed to like to hang out around old stuff. There was even a mummy.

  Maybe the mummy’s ghost was in the museum.

  Fifteen

  OLD STUFF

  I walked over to the museum. It was closed. That didn’t matter, since I could go right through the door. But it was dark, and that mattered. There was just one little light on in each room. I really didn’t like walking through a dark, empty place. The spookiest part was that my feet didn’t make any sound. I think it would have been better if I could have heard footsteps.

  When I walked through the room with the swords, I realized something funny. It would have been great to be here by myself if I could touch the stuff. But being a ghost was like being in a store with Mom. “Don’t touch anything.” That’s what she always said. She especially said it when we were in those stores with all the stuff that breaks real easily. Now, here I was with whole rooms full of really cool stuff, all alone, and I couldn’t touch any of it.

  When I
reached the Egyptian part—it was just one room because the museum isn’t all that big—I saw him. He was standing right next to the mummy. I mean, he was the ghost of the guy who’d been made into the mummy. He looked like the pictures of Egyptian people I’d seen in this book Angelina had. The best part was that there was nobody else around. He had to pay attention to me.

  “Hi,” I said. I ran up to him. “My name’s Rory.”

  He looked down at me and smiled. This was great. Then he said, “Rory.”

  “Yeah. That’s me,” I told him. “I need some help.”

  He said something.

  “What?” I asked. I didn’t understand him.

  He said something else.

  I didn’t understand that, either. Then I figured out what the problem was. “You don’t know English, do you?” I asked. “You just talk Egyptian. Right? That’s because you’re an Egyptian mummy.”

  He smiled at the word mummy. Then he said something I understood. “Look at the mummy.”

  That was better. Finally, I’d found an adult who would talk with me. “Yeah. Look at the mummy. That’s you.”

  “Look at the mummy,” he said again. “Oh, gross. Oh, cool. Look at the mummy. Attention, please. The museum will be closing in five minutes. Look at the mummy. Don’t touch.”

  I realized he was just saying all the stuff he’d heard people say when they were in the museum. He kept on talking. “I said don’t touch. That’s it. I’ve had it. We’re leaving. Look at the mummy. Oh, yuck. Eeewwwww.”

  “Well, thanks,” I told him, “but I have to go. Bye.” I waved.

  He waved back, then said, “I have to go to the bathroom. I gotta go. I gotta go badly.”

  “No, you don’t,” I said. I walked through the rest of the museum, but there weren’t any other ghosts. On the way out, I stopped again to look at the swords. I really wished I could have touched one.

  I stood on the steps outside the museum. “It’s not fair,” I said. I know I say that a lot, but this really wasn’t fair. Cool stuff happened to everyone else. Sebastian got to be a vampire, and Angelina got to be a witch. Even Norman got to turn into a wolf. What did I get? I got dead. That’s what I got. I got to be lousy, stinking dead. I could walk through stuff. Big deal. And I had no idea where to go or what to do.