King’s right arm reached out to the machine beside Adam’s bed, his claw closing on a large red switch. He looked back at David, as if making sure he had his full attention. Before David could react, King flipped the switch. Immediately the wheezing and beeping stopped as the lights on Adam’s life-support machine went dead. The artificial lung settled to the bottom of its glass tube with a final sigh.
“What are you doing?” David started forward. “He’s finished as a dreamwalker — you don’t have to kill him. Send him back to his family!”
“What, so they can sit by his bedside and watch his empty body shrivel up? Why, David, you have a cruel streak too.”
“Turn it back on! He might recover.”
As David watched, aghast, Adam’s body began twitching, his head lolling to one side. It gave one great, final heave, then fell still again. Still as bone.
“As I was saying …” King rolled back to David and squinted up at him with yellow eyes. “… I have a vacancy.”
“No way.” David shook his head, staring at Adam’s corpse. “No. Way.”
“Hold your horses, I’m not done yet,” said King. “Now, listen up. We’ve mentioned Eddie here today, and we’ve even mentioned your sister. But let’s not mention them again, eh? Let’s talk, you and me, about greater things. Let’s see what I can do for you and what you can do in return.”
“No.”
David knew that he had to get out of there, but as he moved, the six haunters around him moved too, closing into the pool of light that poured down from above. They grew spectral, boiling with a ghastly blueness that by now David should have been used to, but that still filled him with an instinctive dread. The haunters grinned. One of them was the girl with the white-blonde hair. She had a tigerish motion that suggested she could be on him in a second.
“You’ve met Harriet, I believe.” King was clearly enjoying himself. “She won’t let you go again, you can be sure of that. She’s one of my best. But have you stopped to think why she works for me, David, and not those wimps at Unsleep House?”
The haunter named Harriet took a curling step, leaving the ground as she did so. She drifted toward David. She was beautiful, David had to admit, despite the fury in her eyes and the pallor of her spectral skin. And she was giving him a very calculated look.
“We got off to a bad start, David,” she said. “Perhaps we could begin again?”
David clamped his mouth shut.
“Oh, think, David!” King burst out. “You’re a ghost! A time-traveling, dreamwalking ghost, able to turn the whole course of human history on its head! What part of that doesn’t excite you, for heaven’s sake? We’ve already seen how capable you are. Imagine what you could do with our help. Imagine the power you could command over the poor schmucks of the past! Imagine — oh, I don’t know — Napoleon! Imagine Napoleon, conqueror of Europe, crouching at your feet in terror, agreeing to bury gold, jewels, priceless works of art … anything, if only you’d just leave him alone. We could do that tonight, David, now if you like. Then tomorrow we’d dig it up and it’d be yours, all yours.”
King began to cough. In his excitement a gobbet of phlegm burst from his mouth. He wiped it away with his sleeve.
“And if that don’t float yer boat, Davy boy, just think of the alternative. Are you really prepared to turn your back on all the fun, on what you really are, just because some chinless professor wants you to follow the ‘Dreamwalker’s Code’? Do you want your wings clipped? Do you want to do history assignments for the sake of a bunch of stuck-up do-gooders? No, you don’t want that. You are a dreamwalker, David, a ghost! Not a historian!”
King’s voice gave out as he spat this final word, and he slouched back in his chair, wheezing. In time his breath settled down, but no one spoke. As the moments passed the silence in the room seemed to solidify into something menacing in its own right. All around, eyes that were filled with hate, fear, or greed — and in King’s case, all three — drilled into David as they waited for some sign from him. After an achingly long pause, David gave it to them.
He slowly shook his head. The silence screamed in his ears as he did so.
When Thomas King spoke again, his face was a mask of utter contempt.
“Did you miss the part where I mentioned money?”
At a sign from King, the haunters began to circle David, rising and weaving, making it hard for him to keep track of them, completely cutting off any upward escape.
“Join us …” King’s voice was flint hard. “… and I’ll consider Eddie’s debt to me settled. Turn your back on me, and I’ll settle it by destroying you and everything you’ve ever dreamed of. Your answer is required immediately.”
“You’re a monster, Tomkin!” David cried out. “Nothing but a murdering, dribbling, shriveled-up old monkey-man! And I will never join you!”
King let out a choked roar of animal rage. “Kill him! Kill him now!”
The six haunters turned on David in a flash, streaking into the space where he stood, their arms coiled back to strike. But David wasn’t there.
Beneath where he had been, in the very floor, King caught a glimpse of a dreamwalker’s door as it slammed shut. David had let himself fall down through it so fast that even the haunters looked dumbfounded as they arced away, crying out in frustration. Harriet shrieked like a banshee, throwing herself at the door, but it was already fading to nothing.
Thomas King’s head bobbed crazily as he craned to see the spot where David had been standing, his mouth open in astonished rage.
David Utherwise was gone.
In the moments that followed, the haunters drifted away from the center of the room, leaving the old man alone in his metal chair. Even ghosts are afraid of the King of the Haunting.
“Pack up,” Thomas King said eventually to the man with the goatee, who was crouching wide-eyed behind his computer.
“We are leaving now. We have much work to do.”
I would like to thank the Chicken House for taking a chance on this book; Imogen Cooper, Rachel Leyshon, and the whole amazing team for taking the chance out and making it work; and Barry Cunningham, who took a chance on me once before.
Thanks to the late Rosemary Canter for sticking by me through thick and thin, and for guiding me through the maze. Thanks to Jodie Marsh for doing the same for me now.
Thanks to all those friends who have shown me their support and patience, especially Marcus, whose experience and advice have been more timely than he knows.
Thanks to my family for everything they have done, across three countries, to encourage and help me. Particular thanks go to my grandmother Nan Case, who not only shared her childhood memories of the war, but who even made a brief appearance in chapter twenty-one to check I was doing things properly.
And finally, my thanks and all my love go to Célia — who believed in me and proved it in countless ways — and to my two amazing, wonderful boys, Max and Benjy, who let me write this book between LEGO sessions. Without them, I don’t think I would have written anything at all.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
THOMAS TAYLOR’s first commission as an artist was for the cover of the original British edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. Haunters is his first work as a novelist. He lives in Hastings, England. Follow him on Twitter @ThomasHTaylor and visit his website at www.thomastaylor-author.com.
Text copyright © 2013 by Thomas Taylor
Cover art © 2013 by John Picacio
Cover design by Christopher Stengel
All rights reserved. Published by Chicken House, an imprint of Scholastic Inc., Publishers since 1920.
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First published in the United Kingdom in 2012
by Chicken House, 2 Palmer Street, Frome, Somerset BA11 1DS.
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ternational and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this publication may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher. For information regarding permission, write to Scholastic Inc., Attention: Permissions Department, 557 Broadway, New York, NY 10012.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Taylor, Thomas, 1973 —
Haunters / Thomas Taylor. — 1st American ed.
p. cm.
Summary: Three boys, separated by generations, are linked in their ability to time-travel using their
dreams to appear, ghostlike, wherever and whenever they choose, but when Eddie, the first
dreamwalker, is targeted by Adam, a dream-terrorist, novice dreamwalker David must stop him.
ISBN 978-0-545-49644-5
[1. Time travel — Fiction. 2. Adventure and adventurers — Fiction. 3. Secret societies — Fiction.
4. Ghosts — Fiction. 5. Dreams — Fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.T21865Hau 2013
[Fic] — dc23
2012024406
First American edition, June 2013
e-ISBN 978-0-545-50254-2
Haunters (9780545502542) Page 26