Dragonbreath: No Such Thing as Ghosts

by Ursula Vernon

  It closed with a sinister thunk! shutting the three of them inside the cellar.

  The sounds were much more muffled inside the cellar. Danny turned and shined the flashlight down the stairs.

  The floor was concrete, not very clean. Cobwebs hung thickly from the ceiling. An old washer and dryer stood in one corner, surrounded by rusty water stains. The other side of the basement was full of old boxes.

  “Guess we should go down,” Danny whispered.

  They went down, wedged so closely together that it was a wonder they didn’t trip each other, fall down the stairs, break their necks and save the ghosts the trouble.

  If it was ghosts.

  “I don’t think it was ghosts,” said Christiana.

  Wendell jumped at her voice, and Danny had to grab for the banister.

  “If it wasn’t ghosts, then why did you run?” he snapped.

  “Because it was freaky!” she shot back. “I happen to believe in serial killers and cannibals, thank you very much!”

  “Don’t forget clowns,” muttered Wendell.

  Christiana gave him a look that would have burned through his pie plate, if he hadn’t dropped it in the headlong flight to the cellar. He prudently decided to stand on the other side of Danny.

  “You think it was cannibals?” asked Danny. “Cool! I always wanted to meet a real cannibal…” He ran the flashlight over the boxes. Most of them had things written on the side like “Summer clothes” and “Kitchen stuff,” but then again, if you were a cannibal, you probably didn’t put labels like “Yummy dead bodies” and “Fresh corpses” on your boxes, did you?

  After all, if you used a moving company, they were bound to get suspicious—

  “No, I don’t think it was cannibals,” said Christiana. “Let’s look at this logically.”

  She paced back and forth at the foot of the stairs. Danny backed up a step.

  “Who knows we’re in this house?” she asked.

  “The trick-or-treaters behind us,” said Danny.

  “Big Eddy,” said Wendell.

  “Bingo.” She pointed at Wendell. “And who would think it was hysterical if we were locked up in this house?”

  “He probably snuck back here to scare us,” she said.

  Danny nodded. “And then he and his buddies—you know, the two losers he hangs around with—started pounding on the doors.”

  Wendell frowned. “Then how do you explain the footsteps upstairs? Or that voice?”

  “One of them could have snuck in,” said Christiana. “Or even waited for us upstairs. He might even be the one who locked us in. And maybe he just hasn’t had dinner yet.”

  “It makes sense,” said Danny. He felt like an idiot. And he was slightly disappointed he wouldn’t get to meet a cannibal.

  “No,” said Wendell, after a minute, “the point is that if someone got in up there, there must be a way out too, right?”

  Christiana frowned. “Not necessarily. Isn’t one of his buddies a chameleon? He could have hidden downstairs…”

  “He could have, but I bet there’s an open window or something upstairs.” Wendell thought about it. “You’d think Big Eddy would have gotten in too, though…”

  “He’s the size of a moose,” said Christiana disdainfully.

  Danny slapped his forehead. “You’re right! He might not have been able to fit in a window—but I bet we could!”

  Christiana nodded. “It’s worth checkin—EEEP!”

  She jumped about six inches sideways and into a box marked “Kitchen.” Danny spun around, prepared to see anything from Big Eddy to a cannibalistic clown from Mars, and saw—

  “You brought a sheep brain to school, but you’re scared of rats?” asked Wendell.

  “I’m not scared of rats,” muttered Christiana, extracting herself from the pile of boxes she’d fallen into. A large copper bowl rolled in a circle, teetering, and stopped with a faint booonnng.

  “Rats are highly intelligent and serve a valuable place in the ecosystem. I was just startled,” she said. “I was looking over there, and it moved, and…look, it’s been a rough night, okay?”

  Danny put his hands on his knees and addressed the rat. “Hey there! Do you know our friend the potato salad?”

  The rat hopped into the cardboard boxes and vanished for a moment. It returned, looked Danny up and down, and shook its whiskers. “Squeak.”

  “Nothing we can fit through,” Danny guessed. “Crud.”

  “You’re talking to a rat,” said Christiana.

  “Hey, you said they were highly intelligent,” said Danny. “We’ve had good luck with rats.”

  Christiana rubbed her forehead, looked like she was about to say something scathing about rats, changed her mind, and said instead, “If we’re staying down here, I’m taking off my head.”

  This was the sort of statement that would normally have required a great deal of analysis and caused concern, but then she reached up and pulled the head off her costume. “Phew. That thing is hot.”

  “Squeak?”

  Danny looked over. The rat had returned, and was perching on the edge of a box, at eye level.

  “Hey again,” he said to the rat.

  “Squeak!” it said. It made a beckoning gesture, then ran down the box to the floor.

  The rat hopped from box to box, and finally darted through a hole in the back wall. Danny played the flashlight over the hole and saw the frame of a low, square door.

  “It’s a hidden passage!” he said. “Cool!” Danny approved of hidden passages. You could hide treasure in them, or smugglers or skeletons. Or maybe even all three.

  “It’s just a crawlspace,” said Christiana. “Probably so people can work on the plumbing.”

  “I am not going in there,” said Wendell.

  The rat poked its head out again and squeaked.

  “Let’s see if we can get it open,” said Danny. He knelt and tugged on the door. It stuck a bit, then yawned open.

  The crawlspace was dark and cobwebby and smelled like rotted wood and his aunt Shirley’s casserole. The rat ran a few feet down and squeaked again.

  “Maybe it’s a way out,” said Danny. He stuck his head through the doorway. The rat squeaked excitedly. Wood creaked under Danny’s hands.

  Wendell fidgeted. On the one hand, Danny was going into the hideous unknown darkness. On the other hand, he was taking the flashlight with him. “Danny…”

  “I’m fine,” Danny called. “Stinks in here, though. Smells all moldy.”

  “Some mold spores can be really toxic,” Christiana said helpfully.

  “Neat!” Danny said over his shoulder. “Can we throw them at the ghost?”

  Wendell wrung his hands.

  “Are you okay!?” Wendell rushed forward. He could just make out Danny lying on a pile of boxes down below.

  “I’m…fine…I think…” Danny sat up, rubbing his head groggily. “Guess the junk broke my fall…”

  The rat, squeaking worriedly, flipped over the broken edges of the boards and dropped into the opening below. A minute later, the rat and Danny were eye to eye.

  Christiana shouldered Wendell aside and peered over the edge of the hole. “Looks like you’re in some kind of sub-basement,” she said. “Must have been another storage room. I don’t think we can pull you up, but maybe we can find the stairs and meet you down there.”

  “Okay.” Danny sat up. The pile of boxes made some interesting sproinging and twanging noises. “Man, they sure had a lot of junk…” He found the flashlight and swept it around the room. “Gotta be a door somewhere…”

  The rat caught his attention again. It was waving him over to one side of the room.

  “Is that the door?”

  Moving through the pile of debris was harder than Danny expected. He couldn’t walk. Instead he made a series of lunges, crushing boxes and old magazines underfoot. It was like swimming in a sea of moldy cardboard.

  When Danny finally reached the rat, it was perched on the li
p of a box next to the wall. It squeaked at him, and pointed.

  “What’s down there?” Danny trained the light down, through a gap in the boxes, and saw…something. It looked faded and fuzzy and rather grungy.

  The rat squeaked again, very seriously, and pointed up at the ceiling, then back down at the object.

  Danny had no idea what that meant, but if the rat thought it was important…He dropped to his knees and reached for whatever it was.

  It was a stuffed animal.

  It was impossible to tell what it had been—a bear, maybe, or a sheep, or something else. It had a generic animal shape, and one dusty button eye.

  The rat squeaked again.

  “This?” Danny turned it over, puzzled. “What’s so important about—”

  And then the world went away.

  Danny was floating in a dark place.

  This did not bother him as much as it could have. He didn’t seem to have a body, but hey, these things happened. Maybe he was dreaming, or he’d hit his head harder than he thought and now he was having an out-of-body experience. He’d seen a TV show about those. There had been weird floaty music on the show, and he was a bit disappointed that there wasn’t any music now.

  Still, you couldn’t have everything.

  A door opened, and light spilled into the room. At first Danny thought Wendell and Christiana had found him, but he seemed to be looking down on the door, and the light coming through the doorway was shining on a bedroom, not a pile of junk.

  “How are you feeling, honey?” asked an unfamiliar voice.

  Danny wasn’t sure if she was talking to him, and furthermore wasn’t sure how to talk in his bodiless state, but fortunately somebody else answered, so it didn’t matter.

  “I’m fine, Mom,” said a little kid’s voice. It sounded crabby and tired and sort of thick. Then it started coughing.

  “Oh, honey…” said the mom, and she walked from the doorway, across Danny’s vision to the bed. “I’m making you breakfast. It’s eggs.”

  There was a kid in the bed, Danny could see. It was only about the size of Danny’s seven-year-old cousin. Danny couldn’t tell if it was a boy or a girl, but he could definitely tell that it was grumpy.

  “Don’t want eggs. I wanna go trick-or-treating,” it said, folding its arms.

  “Honey, you’re too sick to go out,” said the mom. “I know it’s disappointing…”

  “I wanna GO!”

  Come to think of it, it kinda sounded like his seven-year-old cousin too.

  “Honey—”

  “I WANNA!”

  Fortunately a full-blown tantrum was broken off by a coughing fit. It was a bad cough too, the kind that had bubbly snotty stuff in it.

  Danny tried to see if he could move around without a body. He thought he managed to wobble back and forth a bit, but it was hard to tell.

  He wondered what the people below him would see if they looked up—a ghostly dragon hanging around the ceiling? Nothing at all?

  “I like trick-or-treating,” said the little kid. “I hate eggs. You’re mean.”

  “I know it seems mean,” said the mom, “but you’re sick. Next year you can go out. Won’t that be fun?”

  She bustled around the bed, tucking something in alongside the kid. Danny caught the gleam of familiar button eyes.

  “Don’t wanna go next year…” said the little kid, hugging the stuffed animal. “Wanna go now…”

  The scene was fading. Danny had a sense that there was something important here, something he was supposed to remember, and he tried to grab for it, but it was like having a dream and waking up and trying to remember—

  —and then he was back in the basement, staring into the dusty eye of the stuffed animal.

  “Whoa!” he said. He patted himself down—yup, that was his body, all right, and he seemed to be back in it. “That was awesome! Did I just have an out-of-body experience?”

  The rat spread its paws and shrugged.

  “I gotta tell Wendell!”

  Wendell would have liked nothing better than to be having a long talk about out-of-body experiences with Danny. Instead, he was trying to find his way to the basement stairs in the pitch-black.

  The next ten minutes were not among the best of Wendell’s life.

  He and Christiana ran into each other. They ran into the boxes. Christiana yelled at him. He yelled back. They flung junk aside and hit each other with it. Christiana upended an entire box of plastic forks on Wendell’s head. (She claimed it was an accident. The iguana had his suspicions.)

  Finally, they saw a rectangle of light.

  And once they got close to the door, they could hear Danny on the other side.

  Eventually, with Danny pushing from his side and Wendell and Christiana pulling on their side, they got the door open.

  “I missed you! I missed you so much!” Wendell cried.

  “Uh—” said Danny.

  Wendell snatched the flashlight away from him and hugged it. “Never leave me again,” he told the light.

  “…right, then,” said Danny. “Guys, you’re not gonna believe this. I found this stuffed animal, and I had this vision—and I think I know what we’re up against.”

  “You’re right, I don’t believe it,” said Christiana.

  “I’m not saying you didn’t see something,” said the iguana. “It could have been a vision. But you did fall and hit your head, and there were all those mold spores…”

  Danny sighed. He should have known that Christiana wouldn’t believe anything like a vision, but he had to admit that Wendell’s defection stung a little. Danny glared at the stuffed whatever-it-was. “The rat thought it was important,” he said stubbornly.

  “Look,” said Christiana, “this should be easy. We’ll do what scientists do. We’ll get proof.”

  “We can’t prove something like that,” said Christiana, “but it should be easy to prove whether it’s Big Eddy making the noise and not a ghost.” She started up the stairs, and Danny and Wendell followed her into the hallway.

  They didn’t dare use the flashlight, for fear of giving themselves away. Danny stepped carefully over the creaky board, and Christiana and Wendell stopped next to it.

  Danny knelt down by one of the windows and listened carefully.

  After a minute or two, he heard somebody say, “I’m bored.” It sounded like Jason the salamander, one of Big Eddy’s cronies.

  “Shut up,” hissed a deeper voice. Danny jerked back from the window, startled—from the sound of it, Big Eddy was standing directly on the other side of the wall.

  “They’re probably freaking out in there,” said Big Eddy. “When they’re good and scared, we’ll throw open the door and they’ll go running. Then we can grab their candy and get out of here.”

  “Couldn’t you just have taken their candy?” asked Jason.

  Danny rolled his eyes.

  “They haven’t made a noise for ages,” said Jason. “Maybe they left.”

  “Shut up, or I’ll take your candy.”

  Danny sighed. It looked like Christiana was right—but then what was the meaning of his vision in the basement? Why had the rat led him there? It didn’t make sense.

  He looked over his shoulder. Christiana and Wendell were waiting in the hallway. Clearly they’d both heard Big Eddy talking too. He tiptoed back to join them,.

  “So,” said Wendell. “What do we do now? Wait until Big Eddy goes away?”

  “I’ve got an idea,” said Danny. “There’s got to be stuff in all of those cardboard boxes downstairs that we can use…”

  Christiana set her costume head down. “An idea for what?”

  “Big Eddy was trying to scare us, right? So we’re gonna turn around and scare him.”

  He paused dramatically. “It’s time for Operation Mongoose!”

  “I think we’re getting away from the point here,” Danny said.

  “Can we call it Operation Dark Thunder instead?” asked Wendell.

  �
�No,” said Danny, somewhat annoyed, because Operation Dark Thunder was a way cooler name.

  “You know, Operation Dark Thunder is a way cooler name,” said Christiana.

  “We’re calling it Operation Mongoose! Now shut up and grab some stuff to scare bullies with!”

  Wendell was nervous. It had been a bad evening, and they were about to play a joke on Big Eddy that might work, but might just make him really mad.

  When Big Eddy was mad, someone usually got stuffed head-first in a toilet.

  Danny crept back across the room, and listened at the window. Apparently Big Eddy was still out there, because Danny quickly turned back and waved a hand at Wendell. The iguana waved to Christiana.

  Operation Mongoose was under way.

  Christiana stomped a foot down on the squeaky board, which let out a scream like a dying cow.

  “What was that?” Jason yelped. His voice seemed to suddenly come from farther away, as if he’d jumped back. Danny grinned and waved to Wendell.

  Wendell stood in the middle of the room, holding a device cobbled together from an old jump rope and a rusty tin can they’d found in the cellar. He grabbed the rope and began whipping the can around over his head in a circle.

  An eerie keening began as the can picked up speed, rising in pitch as Wendell got into the rhythm.

  Danny could hardly keep from crowing with delight. The iguana said he’d read about it in a magazine—it was called a “bull-roarer” or something like that—and he thought he’d be able to make one, but he hadn’t been sure it would work. You were supposed to use wooden planks, not tin cans and old jump ropes.

  Nevertheless, it was working beautifully.

  “That’s not normal!” Jason yelled. “It’s a ghost!”

  “Shut up!” yelled Big Eddy—whether at Jason or at the noises coming from the house, it was hard to tell.