All Died Out

by Misty Simon

  Her. Whole. Life.

  She hadn’t realized it, just thought she was the keeper and they hung around because it was the safest place. The warm fuzzies bubbling up in her chest were almost too much for her to handle. Her life was far fuller than she had ever thought, far fuller than she had ever truly given credit to.

  Chapter Five

  Mel couldn’t whisk through walls, so she took the stairs down to the kitchen where, sure enough, Becker was at the stove whipping up pancakes that looked like ghosts. He’d commissioned a pancake frame from the local metal worker that could be placed on the griddle and the batter poured in to make the shape. The ghosts got a kick out of the way he was embracing the whole situation. And she couldn’t possibly love him more for not only staying but enjoying. She was so thankful she’d found him through an ad in the paper to hang out with someone. What had just been a desperate plea for friends had turned into so much more.

  Conversation was flying fast and furious at the table in the kitchen. Laughter echoed throughout the room, and Mel smiled. It was good. She needed to stop worrying that something bad was going to happen and just go with the flow.

  Taking her place at the table, she jumped into the talking pool.

  “So do we know anything about the guy who died and left everything for auction? Is he one of the ghosts that came with you?” She grabbed bacon from a platter placed in the middle of the table and crunched while she listened.

  “Mortimer Latimer,” her dad said. “And no, he’s not among his things. At least, not that I could tell. I guess he could have attached to a remaining object after I left, but he’s not with us. Everyone here feels older, at least fifty years and more.”

  “And no one else bid against you?” She still couldn’t believe that no one had tried to buy any of the objects. She had seen several antique pill boxes and a few lamps that would fetch a pretty penny at any other selling venue. How had her father gotten them for a quarter apiece?

  “No one.” He nodded to Becker as he placed a plate of pancakes in front of him. Darren chuckled at the shape of the pancakes, and Mel absorbed the sound. It had been a while since she’d heard her father laugh. But then he got back down to business. “I found it strange, but I also appreciated that I didn’t have to fork over huge amounts of money. I only sold enough stock to buy a few objects, but once I got there and felt how many ghosts there were, I thought I was going to have to talk with my broker again.”

  Stock? Why wasn’t he using the funds from the trust? But she wasn’t going to discuss that kind of business in front of everyone. “And not a single counter bid?”

  “Nope. I even started high on the first few things, thinking I would get as many as I could with the money I had with me. But then, when no one else lifted their bidding paddles, I got a clue and started out really low.”

  “And now we have over two hundred new ghosts.” Just the thought of all those entries gave her a headache. She was going to be wearing the spectacles until her eyes wanted to fall out.

  “I don’t think most of them will stay. They might need a few days of being out of that house to move on, but there was a vibe in there that most of them didn’t want to be here forever.” He shrugged and cut up his pancakes.

  “Okay, when we’re done with breakfast, we should get back to unloading and logging them.”

  “You’re the boss,” he said with a smile. Those warm fuzzies rose up again, and she had to beat them back. It was that or have them leak out of her eyes.

  They talked about non-business things after that, like who had won what championship and what the stock market was doing. Becker leaned down to kiss her on the cheek when he delivered her pancakes, and she swooned just a little, having to readjust her big bow in her hair to right herself.

  Once everyone was full to bursting with good food, the guys went out to the trucks and Mel went to get the book.

  Taking it off the shelf was easier this time, and she was extremely grateful for that. The book didn’t always cooperate, but when it did, it was a good day.

  She stationed herself on the porch again, glad she’d thought to bring a jacket with her. The sun was climbing higher in the sky, but there was still a nip to the air.

  The first ghost came up when one of the movers placed a cast iron skillet on the table next to her elbow. She smiled at both the man and the ghost, ready to do business.

  The book opened without a single issue, almost flipping open all by itself as if it were eager to get this business done.

  Except that when she put on the spectacles and raised the pen to start writing, the last entry was from two weeks ago. Nothing she had written yesterday was on the page. Not a single thing. What the hell had happened to Mabel and all the other ghosts?

  The sixty entries she’d made yesterday were nowhere to be found. It was as if she hadn’t done a thing yesterday.

  “Dad!” she yelled and sat back, stunned. This had never happened before. So much for her twenty-five minutes of thinking everything was going to be okay.

  Darren didn’t dawdle this time. Instead he dashed to her side. “I just don’t know, Mel. I’ve never seen anything like this before.” Her dad turned the book toward himself and took the spectacles.

  “Never?” she asked, wringing her hands.

  “Never. The ink is permanent, color changing, yes, but permanent. You can’t remove it no matter what you do. You can only cross out. Your mom tried white-out once, and the book slammed shut on her hand. It does not like to have things removed at all. When someone moves on to the next realm, it changes but never removes.”

  While he kept looking at the book and flipping pages, Mel took a step back and about twenty-seven deep breaths. This was not good. She had known something was going to go wrong, and she was right, because this was so wrong. How had this happened? What did it mean? Crap! Had the ghosts disappeared with their entries?

  She yelled Chester’s name, and he materialized in front of her between one breath and the next—number twenty-eight and twenty-nine, to be exact.

  “Where’s your friend Mabel?” Mel demanded.

  “I can’t find her this morning. Maybe I said something wrong last night when we sat in the back seat of that old Ford. Cranston wouldn’t leave her alone, and she got this blank stare, and then she left. I looked for her but gave up because this weird vibration ran through the air.”

  Mel pointed at the book and explained what had happened.

  “All gone?” Chester gasped.

  “Only the things she wrote yesterday,” her dad answered.

  “Well, that’s something, at least.” If he were solid, he would have been pacing. Instead he floated from left to right with one hand on his chin and the other on his hip. “So only everything from yesterday?”

  “Yes, all those ghosts I catalogued and listened to are no longer in the book. And I don’t even remember everyone, so how am I going to get them back into the book?” The thought of trying to rebuild all that info made her head hurt. She couldn’t remember so many.

  “So we just look for things that aren’t in the book.” Chester stopped in front of her and placed his hands on her shoulders. He pretended to shake her, since he couldn’t physically move her. “We can do this. We need to do this. Did you put anything in the junkyard itself, or is everything in the house?”

  “It’s in the back room!” Mel crowed. Thank the heavens she’d been too lazy to actually set anything out where it might permanently reside. By the time she’d finished registering, she’d just wanted to go to bed and snuggle in with Becker. They’d tucked the uncatalogued things back into the truck and the catalogued things into the back room.

  Mel and her dad tromped back to the room to the left of the laundry room, with Chester floating before them.

  The door wouldn’t open, though. There was no lock, no need for one, but none of them could get the door to budge. Even Chester couldn’t go through. He even tried to come up from the basement, or down through the ceiling, but it w
as as if the whole thing was lined with repellant.

  “This, then, is not good,” he intoned. “I can’t find Mabel, and we can’t get into the room. Something is very, very wrong.”

  “Thank you, Captain Obvious.”

  “Hey, just trying to help, doll.” He bounced in the air. “How else can we get in? How else?”

  Since he appeared to be talking with himself and not coming up with any answers, Mel turned to her dad. “Another thing you’ve never seen?”

  “Sure enough. I don’t get what the heck is going on, but it feels big, and it feels dangerous.”

  “Thanks for that. Not scared at all, in case you were wondering.”

  “We don’t have time to be scared. We need to get to the bottom of this and fix it. The Hargrove way.”

  Chapter Six

  The Hargrove Way. Those words were not welcome, no matter how you said them. The Hargrove Way meant ripping things down to their core and then rebuilding one block at a time, and that was a daunting thought.

  But Mel was a Hargrove through and through, and that meant she’d be doing this. She wouldn’t have time for anything else for a while, but that was nothing except a blip on her radar. She’d roll up her sleeves and get it done.

  “Let’s start with the book. The words either have to be there or there’s some way to detect what happened,” she said. “I’ll put in a few calls.”

  “You need help?” Becker asked. “I know I’m still new to all this, and not a Hargrove, but I can help if you’ll let me.”

  Mel hugged him hard around the waist. “Can you ask Great-Grandpa if he knows anything about all this?” Maybe the ghost of Becker’s great-grandfather, who resided in a pocket watch Becker carried everywhere, could help them.

  “Of course.”

  Mumford trotted into the room and made a beeline for the book. They’d moved back into the living room, which they called the Hub, as it had been for years. But now it was more a war room than a hub for everyone to congregate or hang out.

  Whereas her normally happy dog would never hurt a fly, he went into attack mode as soon as he got to the book. Barking and snarling emitted from her docile little pooch. He tried to sink his teeth into the binding, but she caught him at the last second. He was determined, though, and she had to fight him to keep him away. Her dad grabbed up the book and placed it on a shelf where Mumford couldn’t reach it. But he still tried.

  “Mumford, no!” Mel said, breaking out the spray bottle. She wouldn’t shoot him directly because it always made her feel bad if she got him straight in the face, but something had to calm him down.

  Spraying wasn’t necessary, though, when Dougal whisked out of the collar and stood before the dog. The ghost had come with the dog several months ago under terrible circumstances, but ever since then he had slowly been mellowing out and working on not blaming himself for things he’d done when he hadn’t been in control of himself. Mel didn’t know if he’d ever totally get over his past, but at least he was now in a safe place and had the ability to breathe instead of destroy.

  Right now, though, he looked ready to destroy. “Mumford, calm.” He stood before the dog with his arms crossed over his chest and his face set in a scowl.

  For his part, Mumford continued to growl, which was so unlike him. On any other day, he was like that happy dog from Up who always ran after squirrels. Though small and stumpy, right now he was fierce. Mel found she did not like that at all.

  “Is there anything we can do to get him to calm down, Dougal?”

  Dougal shifted his stance to keep one eye on the dog and one on her. “I can’t tell what he’s reacting to. Normally, I’m able to share his space, but right now it’s just chaos in there, and he’s deranged. We either need to get him out of the vicinity of the book, or get the book out of his sight.”

  “Won’t he try to run after it?” Though run might be a little bit of an exaggeration, since Mumford was tubby and round and had legs like a Corgi. He more trotted than ran, but the fierceness he was displaying right now could very well goad him into an actual run.

  “I don’t know, and I almost always do. He doesn’t always listen to me, but at least I can reason with him. This is more like when you trained that red light on the floor and I couldn’t get him to stop trying to catch it. But this is tinged with anger and fear instead of fun.”

  They all stared at the dog, and then Becker stepped in with his great-grandfather beside him hovering inches above the floor.

  “Mumford, this is not the way,” Great-Grandpa said.

  The dog stopped mid-bark and stared at him with drool coming from his jowls. It only lasted a second and then he went back to barking and bouncing up and down with his front end like one of those cars with hydraulics.

  “I’m going to pick him up,” Becker announced.

  “Be careful!” Mel held out a hand to stop him, but he swooped down and scooped the dog up, putting a blanket over his head at the same time. He spoke softly to the poor baby, which immediately calmed the dog.

  Becker nodded to her as he headed out of the room and put Mumford in the laundry room.

  She could hear him talking with the dog but had no idea what was being said. She was not a big believer in things that just happened to happen, and there was no reason for the book to cause that kind of reaction in the dog when it never had before.

  Fortunately, Chester was standing at her elbow, and her mother had come out of her record player. “Thoughts?” she asked them. “Because I don’t have a freaking clue, and I don’t like to see my dog acting like that around something that he’s seen day in and day out for months.”

  Penny moved around the book, peering at it from all angles. Chester stood back and watched with his hand rubbing his chin.

  “I don’t see anything wrong,” Penny said, swooping a little closer. Her whole non-body stiffened and fell back like an ironing board to hover a few inches above the floorboards.

  “Chester!” Mel ran to her mother, but there was literally nothing she could do to help the ghost. Her hand passed right through her, and it wasn’t like she could do CPR to someone who was already dead.

  Chester knelt next to her. Thankfully, he was able to take her hand. What Mel wouldn’t do to hold her hand. She shook the thought off because it didn’t help this situation at all.

  “Her eyes are open, and she’s still here, but not.” Chester leaned in. “Her form is stable. I don’t know what the hell is going on.”

  “Should I close the book?” Mel asked.

  “You can try, but don’t end up on the floor like your mother. I can’t help you, and I think the fall would hurt you more than it did her.”

  Mel snuck up on the book as if it had eyes. Who knew what it could see? For all that she knew about the junkyard, the book was one of those things that was just accepted and worked with, but she didn’t know its history or even how it worked. She only used it for the purposes she needed it for. Maybe that should change… as soon as she closed the damn thing and got her mother to wake up.

  She thrust her hand under the edge of the front cover and flipped the thing closed. She must have surprised it, because it closed right up without a single issue. Or maybe it had wanted to close. Who knew? What Mel did know was that as soon as it was closed, Penny gasped, even though she no longer had to actually breathe.

  “What in the living Big Bad was that?” she asked, floating to a standing position.

  Chester shrugged, and Mel followed suit.

  “Can you tell us what happened?” Chester asked.

  “I have no flipping idea. I touched the book, and it was like an electric shock went through my entire being. Then I was in a twilight kind of coma. I could hear what you were saying and feel all the things I normally feel, but I couldn’t move a single thing, not even my eyelids.” She blinked a few times. “Well, at least those work now. Jeez.”

  “Are you okay? Mom?” Mel wanted so badly to put her arms around her mother and feel that she was okay, but
that wasn’t going to happen. And where on earth was this need to touch everyone and be more interactive with them all coming from? For years she’d been happy to be the keeper, the overseer, and now she wanted more. More was not going to happen. She needed to just let it go and figure out this latest mystery so the junkyard could go back to its normal chaos instead of this elevated state of crap happening.

  When Becker came back, Mel looked at him anxiously. She could feel the muscles of her face pulled tight and her heart in her throat. That little dog was her baby. If he was hurt or upset about something, it tore at her.

  “He’ll be fine.” Becker sat on the couch. “I don’t know what his deal was, but as soon as he couldn’t see the book anymore it was like the whole episode went out of his little fluffy head.”

  “My mom just had an episode where she touched the book and it toppled her like an uprooted tree. What in the hell is happening? I don’t need another thing to go wrong, and now we have a huge shipment and no way to touch the book.”

  “Did you try to touch it?” Becker demanded. “I don’t want you hurt.”

  “As far as I know, the thing can’t hurt me beyond slapping my hand like it did before. I’m the keeper, and it can’t hurt the keeper.” At least she didn’t think so. Then again, she didn’t know as much as she should about this whole situation. For years, she’d floated along, doing what she’d been taught but never curious. And now, when it was super important, being curious might very well make her into one of the very things she’d been tasked with caring for.

  They all stared at the book. Mel poked it with her finger, and it flapped open with a thunk.

  Red words with the tangy smell of iron were scrawled across two pages: Give me what’s mine or I’ll take what’s yours.

  Chapter Seven

  “So what do you think it wants, and who is the ‘it’?” Her head hurt, but nothing more had happened after she’d poked the book. Well, other than Becker scolding her fiercely for touching the thing when she’d seen what it had done to her mother. But Mel wasn’t a ghost—Becker had been sure to remind her that she wasn’t yet dead in response to that comment—and she’d plowed right over him.