Rules for Ghosting Read online

  Oliver looked up quickly. “So you’ve never actually seen a ghost?”

  “Two full decades I’ve been focusing on my own brand of in-depth spectral studies, and I’ll have you know that I’ve seen many a lair and paranormal hotspot. I could tell stories that would curl your hair and bake your brownies! What I have yet to do is lay my hands on an actual living—or nonliving, to be technical—genuine ghost. And that is what I intend to do here.”

  “I still don’t get why you think I won’t tell my parents, no matter what you say,” Oliver mumbled. To Dahlia’s alarm, he didn’t sound quite as certain as he had a minute before. Of course he was going to expose Rank Wiley … wasn’t he?

  But an evil grin was spreading across Wiley’s face. “Well, from what I have seen and heard since my arrival, you are especially keen on staying in this house, young Oliver. Am I correct, hmmm? And what do you think will happen if your parents discover that this house is haunted by sinister specters, devouring demons, and ghastly ghouls? Does that sound like a safe location to you? Do you really think they would allow their precious darlings to remain in this infernal mansion?”

  Oliver opened his mouth, but Wiley cut in quickly. “Don’t think I don’t have proof,” he growled. “Don’t think I can’t lay out a full scientific case that will send your parents running for the hills!”

  Dahlia clenched her hands into fists. “Who are you calling sinister, mister?!” she yelled, knowing perfectly well Wiley couldn’t hear her, but too mad to care. Oliver was looking at the ground, and it was clear that the ghosterminator had pegged him right.

  Oliver loved this house, she realized. He really loved it, even though he’d just gotten here. For a second Dahlia tried to see the place through his eyes … it was rather lovely. But she couldn’t help noticing the irony: all Dahlia wanted to do was leave, and all Oliver wanted to do was stay—and this sneaky weasel was getting in the way of both their plans.

  “Dahlia, my dear,” said Mrs. Tibbs quietly behind her.

  But Dahlia was not in a mood to listen. She marched up and shook her ghostly finger in Wiley’s face. “Now you hold it right there,” she spat. Wiley was still talking as Oliver turned toward the door, his sneaker scuffing against the wall.

  “I know you can’t hear me, but you need to leave!” Dahlia growled with another stern finger-shake. Wiley finished his monologue and curled his lip, shoving the goggles over his head and snapping them into place with a resounding snick.

  “You need to leave RIGHT NOW!”

  Something changed when she spoke those last two words; she could tell that right away. In the process of swinging around, Wiley lifted his head and stared straight through the goggle lenses into Dahlia’s eyes. All the blood drained from his face.

  “GHOST!” he bellowed. “A ghost! Right here!”

  And he fell over in a dead faint.

  Time hung by a thread while Oliver looked around wildly. Dahlia was shaking from head to toe. Had the ghosterminator just seen her?

  “Quickly, child,” said Mrs. Tibbs, grabbing her hand. “He’ll come around in a second and we should not be here when he does.”

  Mrs. Tibbs pulled Dahlia through walls and floors and furniture until they hit the cold, clean outside air. The afternoon sun hung lazy in the sky and Dahlia couldn’t stop trembling as she sprawled out in the air above the branch of her favorite tree.

  “What did I do?” she whispered. “He saw me, didn’t he? How is that even possible?”

  Mrs. Tibbs swung around to face her. “You can’t have known this, my dear, but there is another rule you must be aware of—a most important rule, one of which the Ghouncil takes great notice. There must be no Manifesting to the living.”

  Dahlia drew a hand across her face. Her nerves were settling now, and she was able to make Contact with the branch and pull herself up into a sitting position. She shook her head. “Manifesting? Do you mean letting the living see you? If it’s not allowed …”—her eyes went wide—“that means it’s possible! Is that what just happened?”

  “That treacherous toadstool has some very high-tech equipment, which must have enabled the Manifest. It is a most advanced skill and not technically possible until after Crossover.”

  “After Crossover? But he saw me! I know he did.”

  “Through the goggles, yes.” Mrs. Tibbs shook her head. “I don’t like this. I don’t like it at all. The Ghouncil is most persnickety about this particular rule. A ghost’s essence is augmented after Crossover and Training, so it would sometimes be technically possible to Manifest then. It’s still not allowed, of course. But before Crossover? Never!”

  “But—”

  “My dear—it is imperative that we stay very far away from that man. He means trouble in the worst way.”

  Dahlia remembered the dark ironite cube she had seen in Wiley’s room. “You’re right, Mrs. Tibbs, I know you are. But this is an awfully big house. It’s not like we have to hide out or anything, right?”

  Mrs. Tibbs gave a grudging nod. “We can take care to stay out of his way, I suppose. But one thing’s for sure: we need to find your Anchor before too much longer. This process is getting more complicated by the day.”

  “Yes,” Dahlia mused. Part of her couldn’t wait to get started, wished they’d begun the very moment Mrs. Tibbs had arrived. But another part wondered if maybe they shouldn’t rush things quite so much. There were a lot of new things to figure out. And now there was this Wiley business to consider.

  Dahlia swept her Clearsight through the house. Mrs. Day was vigorously battling the kitchen floor with an old-fashioned mop, while a scowling Poppy wiped the kitchen table and the twins juggled juice boxes in a far corner. Oliver sat on the front steps munching on a droopy sandwich. Up in a long third-floor room, Mr. Day wrestled a colorful tent the size of a couch, with piles of puppet bodies strewn on the floor around him.

  And Wiley? There was no other word for it: he was stalking. With his nose bent down toward the floor like a bloodhound, he held out a long black device covered in knobs and buttons. He seemed to be following some invisible trail, and at the slightest noise or movement he would perk up his head, narrow his eyes, and spin in a full circle before putting his head back down and continuing on.

  “What do you think?” Dahlia felt the need to whisper as she watched Wiley, even though they were all the way across the courtyard.

  Mrs. Tibbs sighed. “Perhaps we should give him a few hours. Let him search and find nothing for a bit. He’ll let his guard down, believe he imagined the whole thing—they always do, you know—and we can unobtrusively get back to work.”

  Dahlia nodded, sharpened her focus, and settled more comfortably with her back against—against, it wasn’t really that hard, this Contact business—the trunk of the tree. But as she turned and studied Wiley’s steady progress across the downstairs hallway, she thought to herself that he didn’t seem like someone who was going to believe he had imagined his ghostly encounter. Nor did he seem like someone who would just let it go.

  From her perch high up in the tree, Dahlia watched the chilly October wind whip across the courtyard, lifting leaves and tossing up expired objects in the distance.

  In the house, Wiley’s machine let out an especially sharp crackle, the air popping around him. Dahlia shivered.

  Chapter 10

  Oliver spent most of the next morning trying to figure out what to do about Wiley’s plans. The ghosterminator hummed with a manic energy. There was a new light in his eye, and Oliver knew exactly what it was: Wiley thought he’d seen a ghost. If he’d been slightly whacked before, what was he now?

  Oliver knew he had to take the whole thing to his parents. Wiley had boasted about having mountains of proof, which he had gathered in his many years of ghosterminating. Could that be true? Impossible as the whole deal was, they probably would believe Wiley all too quickly. Gullible and impressionable were not the most flattering adjectives to apply to your parents, but in this case, the shoes fit. The o
ne thing Oliver couldn’t be sure about was whether they would mind living in a supposedly haunted house. But was he willing to take that risk? What if they did just decide to leave?

  The other thing was that neither of his parents was exactly easy to talk to right now. Dad was elbow-deep in his circus show, his lucky hat sitting askew on his head, gearing up for the streaming launch that was set to happen in two weeks—on the very night of their big house party. Last night he’d showed off the brand-new banner ads that he’d plastered across the Internet. Now that Dad had committed to a solid start date, Oliver knew they wouldn’t see much of him.

  And Mom had now been fully replaced by the notorious Party Zombie Mom, who would stop at nothing to chase down her victims and put their brains to work getting ready for the upcoming party. The kitchen was wallpapered in lists, schedules, timelines, and websites; she’d even installed a fancy SMARTBoard that had nine separate screens. Each screen loaded to a particular website, and Party Zombie Mom kept swishing by at random moments: pulling up recipes, ordering supplies, checking ratings, and other crazy stuff Oliver didn’t even care to think about.

  In one of Mom’s better action plans, JJ had been wrapped in some soft cloth and given a bottle of wood floor polish. They were having the time of their lives shuffling up and down the hallways and in and out of bedrooms, leaving some impressively gleaming hardwood floors behind in their wake. Not to mention staying out of trouble. Oliver hadn’t been pranked in quite a while, come to think of it. This new house was good for them too.

  “Oliver,” Poppy whispered as he caught her eye after breakfast. Party Zombie Mom was half-turned away, a zoned-out look on her face. Poppy gestured at him. “Let’s get out of here!”

  Oliver leaped up and the two of them slid sideways to the door.

  “Hmmm?” Mom said vaguely, and Oliver grinned as he shut the kitchen door behind them.

  “That was close,” Poppy said with a shudder.

  “You know she’ll put us to work sooner or later.”

  “The later the better,” said Poppy. “We’ve just gotta lie low. Which you’ve been doing lots of, by the way. What are you up to now?”

  “Um,” Oliver said. What was he up to? The Wiley problem had been churning in his head all morning. The phony fix-it guy was up to no good, but he hadn’t actually done anything wrong, either. Come on—ghosts? He was cracked, of course, but that wasn’t a crime. In a flash, the answer came to Oliver: all Wiley needed was someone to keep an eye on him. Make sure he didn’t do anything too off. And if anything did end up being fishy, well, Oliver would be right there to spot it and sound the alarm.

  Simple! He remembered what Poppy had said about the house seeming kind of spooky. She might have some ideas about what to do. But then he’d be stuck with tagalong-sister time. “Just stuff,” he said at last. “Boring stuff. You wouldn’t like it. I’ll see you later.”

  He turned away quickly and zipped off down the hall, pretending not to see the disappointed look on Poppy’s face.

  It took him a few minutes to find Wiley, whose equipment had now spilled out of the guest bedroom and into the mudroom. The ghosterminator scowled as Oliver entered. “What do you want?”

  Oliver swallowed a couple of rude replies. He had to keep on Wiley’s good side for this plan to work. “I, uh, thought maybe I could help you out today. I’ve got some extra time on my hands and, well, four hands are better than two, right?”

  Wiley narrowed his eyes.

  “Oh, wow!” said Oliver quickly. “Look at all this stuff! What does it do? Where did you get it? Did you invent any of it yourself? Does it help you catch ghosts? Would you tell me all about it, would you?” Oliver felt like a Disney version of an enthusiastic young apprentice, or maybe a member of Sherlock Holmes’s gang of kid followers, the Baker Street Irregulars—but to his surprise and relief, Wiley cracked a huge smile.

  “Well, now that you mention it, it’s something of a fine art, is ghosterminating. One which I’ve perfected, I might add—dare I say, even mastered.”

  Hook, line, and sinker, Oliver thought smugly. But he widened his eyes and said, “Ghosterminating!” He stopped just short of adding an “aw, shucks” which might have worked well in a Sherlock Holmes story, but probably would spoil the effect here. “How exactly does it work?”

  “Very simple, my boy. This apparatus you see here? It is the most sophisticated equipment available anywhere, for any price. Right here you can see my centerpiece: a breakthrough tool called the Aspirator—you can’t find this on the Internet, no sirree!” Wiley picked up something that looked like a vacuum cleaner built into a backpack, with a long neon-orange nozzle and a decidedly ominous air. “I don’t mind telling you that I’ve incorporated a few of my own extra twists into the machinery. And it works like a charm. Simply point the nozzle at the beasts and su-u-uck. All gone—swallows them right up into a sealed compartment inside the pack. Nice and tidy.”

  Oliver didn’t have to work at looking impressed. Whatever this ghost nonsense was, Wiley definitely believed it.

  “From there, you press this button right here.” Wiley pointed out one of the buttons lined up along the shoulder strap of the Aspirator. “The beings are ejected into a specially sealed container—from which, I will add, they are not able to escape. As I said—a fine art! A very fine art indeed.”

  Oliver still felt slightly ridiculous playing along with this game but, for all its idiocy, this “science” of ghosterminating actually was pretty interesting. “Then what?”

  “I take them back to my laboratory.” Wiley rubbed his hands together gleefully. “And then we shall see what we shall see, hmmm? What are ghosts made of, I wonder. How is their essence constructed—or perhaps I had best say, deconstructed? To take them ever so carefully apart, to open them up, if you will—to analyze and identify each of their ghastly and ghostly components … that way lies fame and fortune, my boy, for the happy ghosterminator! Fame and fortune. The very name of the game and, I daresay, the pinnacle of this science to which I have devoted my career.”

  Wiley’s idiocy was clearly trumped only by his greed. Oliver felt slightly sick. “But how do you go about, er, seeing them? If there were any—I mean, when you happen to find any ghosts, wouldn’t they be, like, see-through? You know, invisible? How would you even find them?”

  Wiley pounced on this question with glee. “It’s a tandem attack, my boy! You’ve seen my goggles. They’re not much to look at—pardon the pun!—but what they do is heighten the eye’s natural sensitivity to ghostly phenomena.”

  “That’s what happened yesterday?” Oliver had no idea what Wiley had seen, but for a second back there Oliver could almost have believed the guy had seen something. Definitely something … but a ghost? No way.

  “Correct, exactly, and right on the money!” Wiley paused as a little shudder passed through him. “I have to say that sighting caught me off my guard. But I assure you, that was a one-time failure. I will not be caught out like that again, no sirree! But as to your question of transparency, nothing could be simpler. Once I’ve got the specters in my sights, I use a product of my own invention—I call it phoam. For exposing phantoms, you see.” His face split in a wide grin. “It’s modeled after the fine stuff of fire extinguishers, but vastly more high-tech. And stored right here in my trusty Aspirator. Spray the phoam on those vermin, and poof! Right in the open, for the naked eye to see.”

  Oliver shook his head a little to clear it. Wiley believed his craziness so much that it was starting to sound halfway believable!

  “And now, are you ready to witness the science of ghosterminating in real-life action?” Without waiting for an answer, Wiley set the goggles back down on a low side table. “I won’t use these yet. The first thing you need when launching a ghost hunt is the noble Spectrometer.”

  Oliver shivered as Wiley whipped out the skinny black device he’d been flashing around the property the first day he’d arrived.

  Patting his device lovingly, W
iley flipped the switch and beamed at Oliver. “There, you see these numbers? Right around here—mid-forties—that’s average. Normal, non-haunted atmosphere. But look at that needle—see it rise? Great gadzooks! I haven’t seen such a reading in—well, in quite a while, I assure you.” Wiley’s eyes bulged and Oliver leaned over to watch as the needle climbed up, and up, and up.

  Finally it hovered near the very top of the narrow screen. “These numbers are astronomical. I would say there’s a 95 percent chance”—Wiley lowered his voice to a dramatic whisper—“that there is a ghost in this very room! Boy, pass me those goggles!”

  Oliver didn’t have time to even react before Wiley was up, whipping the Aspirator pack onto his back and darting toward the door, like a dog pulling on his leash. Not wanting to be left behind, Oliver grabbed the goggles and slipped them over his own head. They were bulky and uncomfortable, and the effect was like trying to see underwater.

  He didn’t have time to take them off though, because Wiley was on the move and it was all Oliver could do to keep up. “Hmmm, odd, very odd indeed,” the ghosterminator was saying. “Those readings skyrocketed and then, poof! Just disappeared. Almost as though …” He stood upright and snapped his fingers together. “Of course! The ghoul is on the move.” Wiley spun in a full circle before apparently picking something up on his Spectrometer. He pushed through into the mudroom, the Aspirator knocking against the door in his haste.

  Oliver followed close behind, ignoring Wiley’s ongoing stream of babble, but studying how the goggles warped the air around him. There was nothing ghostly in sight—not that he’d expected there to be—but through these twisted lenses he could almost imagine there was.