DEAD GOOD (16 page)

‘No, it’s not my fault.’ he agrees. ‘It’s not anyone’s fault really. And I don’t know why this happens but it seems to. It did start off happening a lot in the beginning – right after the fire. It’s difficult to say how often because we don’t really have “time” like you do – our time is continuous because we don’t sleep or eat or have anything else to break our days up. In fact we don’t have days or nights either. Here, it’s pretty much how you see us – a kind of hazy mist. It’s a bit disconcerting if I’m honest.’

‘Disconcerting.’ I repeat. ‘Yeah - you’re telling me.’

‘Well, I guess like you said, that blows the lid off my belief that we’re Intelligent Spirits then, eh?’ he tries to smile thinly. I feel sorry for him. ‘Looks like we might be stuck in an energy circle thing – y’know? Where events just keep on repeating themselves. I don’t know what you’re supposed to do with that… if anything. I guess we might be stuck doing it here forever.’

‘Je-sus,’ I try to think in terms of “forever” and it sends a chill down my spine. ‘I hadn’t thought of that.’ I turn around and see that there’s very little activity in the school corridor and realise miserably that somewhere down at the end there is a room that should have me inside it and a teacher that is very probably getting either extremely pissed off or worried that I’m not there. My heart lurches as best it can under the circumstances and all of a sudden I feel sick to my stomach. I don’t think I can face it today.

‘What’re you doing?’ Leo says as I turn back towards the main entrance. ‘You can’t leave. You’ve only just got here. You’ve got lessons. You can’t just go.’ He lifts his arms up in despair.

‘Watch me, ghost-boy,’ I say throwing my bag back over my shoulder.

I end up in the park. I text Amber to tell her what I’ve done. She’ll pick it up before break and I know she’ll understand. I also phone mum and tell her I’m on my way back home, I’m feeling a bit ill, I’m having a quiet sit in the park and can she please telephone school to tell them. She understands immediately.

‘But don’t spend too long at the park, yeah? Although I completely understand your reasons, if someone sees you from school they might not be quite so lenient with you. And you don’t want to have to start trying to explain what’s been happening at the house – who knows what kind of madness it might start up. Maddie?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Let’s all have lunch together, eh? Davey’s back at twelve thirty. Let’s try and see how we all feel after… well, now we’ve had some time to think about it, eh?’

‘Okay,’ I say.

‘So.’ Leo is sitting beside me by the duck pond. He’s hugging his long legs to his chest and staring out over the water. ‘What do you want to do?’

I suppress the urge to smile. If he were actually visible, then to anyone else we’d look like a regular couple trying to work out a relationship problem or two. We’re together but we’re not all over each other. We have things we need to sort out. Its not you, it’s me.

‘Which it is, of course,’ he turns and smiles at me. ‘Completely, one hundred percent Not You. All Me. Because if my heart was still pumping and my blood was still running I wouldn’t be sitting here next to you with my arms round my legs that’s for sure.’

Somehow the way he says that makes my heart start racing and I wonder stupidly if he can hear my own blood rushing around inside my body – is his spectral hearing that good? Then I remember he’s just heard me think that and I may blush with stupidity for having had that thought.

‘I don’t know about you,’ he says, and I silently thank him for not making some wise remark about what he almost certainly heard me think just now - so he does have some manners after all. ‘But I think we need to get some help from someone with slightly more paranormal sense about them than your friend Amber.’ He stops and waits for my reaction. ‘I mean she’s a lot of fun and all, but really, she’s not going to be much use come Judgement Day, now is she?’

I smile back. Properly this time. He’s right. Amber’s not going to be much help. She’s a perfect best friend, granted. But she’s a total wally when it comes to helping the dead pass over.

I give a small laugh.

‘That’s better,’ Leo smiles back. ‘Now let’s think.’

twenty

As if a sucky situation couldn’t get any suckier, Mum virtually pinning me to the doorframe the minute I turn my key in the lock announces a level of suckiness that has yet to be discovered and given a name.

‘Where the hell have you been?’ she snarls like she wants to list my soul on eBay. I have a hard time a) not laughing in hysterical shock and b) breathing – because she’s clamped her hands over my wrists and has me in some kind of Ninja grip which stops me moving. I crane my neck over her shoulder and can see Dad sitting at the kitchen table in the distance, a bottle of something in front of him – great - and a faraway look in his eyes. Probably dreaming of Marlboro Lights.

‘I told you!’ I hiss, twisting my hands under her vice-like grip. ‘I said I needed to get some air and you said that was okay and you said not to…’

‘I know what I said, Madeline, and I know where you said you were and I know what we said but it’s nearly two thirty and I thought I told you I was picking Davey up at half twelve and that we’d have lunch. You could have at least phoned. I tried to call you but it went straight to voicemail – what was I supposed to think?’ She stops and glares, still with the Bride of Frankenstein face. What is up with her?

‘Sorry,’ I mumble, thinking WTF? But maybe a bit of unassuming sweetness might go some way to pacifying this rabid creature she seems to have become from our last phone call. ‘I didn’t realise what the time was. My phone must’ve died. I didn’t get any calls. What’s up?’

‘What’s up?’ She doesn’t need to shriek. In fact it’s more horrific when her voice is quiet. It’s kinda ominous and scary times ten to the power of a gazillion. I gulp. Funnily enough so does Dad in the distance. And he looks like he’s talking to himself as well. Great. Maybe it’s Davey. Ah, no, he seems to be offering his three year old a cigarette. Quickly, just in case I’ve come to the wrong house or I’ve been inadvertently abducted by aliens on the way home and to check I haven’t entered a kind of paranoid parallel universe, I do a quick scan around me with frantic eyes. Okay, so last night was a bit weird and this morning was a bit shattering but what the freakin’ hell is going on right now? Has something else happened that I don’t know about since I’ve… we’ve been gone?

‘What the hell do you suppose might be up?’ she snarls very very slowly at me. I shrink back as much as I can. She’s seriously weirding me out now. ‘You mean apart from the being up most of the night whilst the house came alive in front of our eyes and people who weren’t there screamed in our ears and the place smelled like it was burning without actually showing signs of fire… that kind of up perhaps I mean – hmm Madeline? D’you think?’

I scowl at her as if she’s the mad one.

‘Your Dad’s in the kitchen,’ Leo whispers in my ear, his face frowning nearly as much as mine as he marvels at my mother’s manic stranglehold. She releases my wrists and I actually have to rub them a bit ‘cause she’s cut the circulation off and I have fingling tingers. Tingling fingers. Oh, you know what I mean.

‘DAD!’ I call shrilly cutting short Leo’s latest effort to state the obvious. If I needed a spokesperson for my family I would damned well hire one. And a live one, thank you very much. I throw my mother’s body from my path – not literally you understand, but she’s starting to do my head in with all her histrionics and I’m having a hard enough time dealing with this situation myself without her making everything a million times worse – and make my way into the kitchen.

It is at the doorway that I realise the information which Leo was about to pass on would have had been a lot more pleasing than being told my father was encouraging my kid brother to inhale his first flow of nicotine. For in front of me, sitting opposite Dad at the kitchen table is Mad Old Mrs… I mean Mrs… Hale. In all her beady, flarey-jeaned, seventies throwback hippy generationed glory. And I nearly fling my whole body at and kiss her platformed feet with relief and happiness.

‘You see? This is what I was trying to tell you,’ Leo says, arms crossed and standing behind my dad. ‘Isn’t this great? This is precisely what we were planning to do this afternoon in the park, isn’t it? Talk to someone who knows about this kind of stuff, who can give us some kind of direction? To help me.. you.. us, find a way of sorting this situation out. Hmm? Isn’t this great?’ He looks hopeful and not a little excited. I, however am dubious but willing to be swayed. I sit down next to her and smile pathetically. It’s been a very tiring twenty four hours. I wish I could snap my fingers and have my mum bring me a cup of hot sweet tea. Like Mary Poppins would.

‘Madeline,’ Mrs Hale greets me, all the time staring up at Leo who is still standing behind Dad. ‘How are you? Your parents have been telling me all about what happened here last night. About the sounds, the smells, the funny goings-on…um… etcetera.’

Funny Goings On! Ha! That’s what they say in those silly old fashioned movies. Silly Goings On, indeed! Indeed!

I nod. Nicely. I don’t want to get mum’s back up – or front up – any more than I already have. She’s leaning in the doorway just watching. In a very ‘Freddie Krueger’ way I might add. She can be scary can Mum. I briefly wonder where Davey is and how long mum’s fingernails are behind her folded arms.

‘Asleep. Mia’s with him,’ Leo tells me. Which doesn’t make me feel any better to be honest. Considering the last time she was with him, asleep, the whole house was alive with ghostly flames and the smell of bodies burning and the noise of lives literally going up in smoke.

‘And not for the first time,’ Leo adds with a nod.

Quite.

‘Yeah?’ I say back to Mrs Hale. I’m still feeling a bit worried about how much I can really say to her… tell her. I don’t want to inflame an already overheated situation. And I’ve seen enough of those “Crossing Over” shows on Living TV to know that these fake Psychics do it all by thought manipulation and latching onto one or two key words and tell-tale gestures and stuff like that. I’ll wait and see how believable she comes across. Otherwise we might both end up in the madhouse.

I hear Leo stifle a snort in front of me. What?

‘You’re already mad,’ he says with a flash and proceeds to bend over towards me, resting his ghosty hands on the top of the table – somehow. ‘Now just listen,’ He has a stern look on his face. ‘This is not about you, or about trying to trick you into saying anything which will incriminate you or your family and have you all carted off to a mental institution. It’s actually about trying to make sense of things that are happening in this house and trying to find a way of either coping with it or else… well, ending it, I guess. Now just bloody well listen to her, will you and stop being such a primadonna!’

I shoot him a glare that says if looks could kill then… well, I guess I’d be wasting my time with him, wouldn’t I? I try to ignore his laugh at this.

‘Mrs Hale… Penny…’ Mum comes over to the table now, and her Mr Hyde side seems to have calmed down a bit. Her Dr. Jekyll side is now In and he’s taking my hand in a very motherly and not at all vice-like grip manner. ‘Well, she’s come to see if she can help us out. Haven’t you Penny?’

Mrs Hale nods serenely as if she holds within her all the answers we could possibly need. My Dad is looking even more serene than Mrs Hale and judging by the emptiness of the bottle in front of him I can fully understand how this could be.

My family, I decide, are all nutcases. No wonder this is happening to us. Amber was right – we have been chosen and not for our clear and obvious good sense at being able to handle this kind of ‘situation’ but quite simply because we’re the maddest, mentalist family around and are destined to attract supernatural crap such as this for all eternity.