Milrose Munce and the Den of Professional Help

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

About the Author

Copyright

M
ILROSE
M
UNCE WAS ON FINE TERMS WITH THE DEAD
. S
OME OF HIS BEST FRIENDS WERE, IN FACT, LONG DECEASED
. T
HEY WERE MAGNIFICENTLY REPULSIVE, AND DID THEIR BEST TO KEEP HIM ENTERTAINED.

Milrose did sometimes wonder whether his school produced more dead students than the average. Perhaps it did. On the other hand, adolescence was hilariously perilous on the whole, and it was a wonder those idyllic years failed to claim even more lives. Milrose himself was lucky to have survived numerous death-defying acts of everyday youth. So perhaps other schools were equally stuffed with vile wandering ghosts. It would also make sense if this were not a well-known fact—Milrose could imagine the staff doing their best not to emphasize fatality
rates in meetings with parents. Certainly, precise figures regarding the prematurely departed never seemed to make it into the brochures.

Not that Milrose Munce was the least distressed by the impressive population of hideous wraiths in his own school. Life would be so much less interesting without death.

Milrose was on especially fine terms with the disgusting apparitions on the third floor. Other floors were less friendly, true: the ghouls in the school basement, for instance, were a touch wary of him. Milrose sympathized. He knew that his mere presence served to make them feel inadequate and uncomfortable. Milrose Munce was, you see—through no fault of his own—intelligent. Basement ghouls, who liked to lurk in lockers, were generally athletes who had done something exceptionally stupid on the playing field and had died a gruesome death as a result. They were not always pleased to be confronted with a boy who was, unfairly, still alive at fifteen and who was—even worse—a dire athlete and not at all dense.

Milrose was not particularly well loved on the second floor, either. The ghosts on that floor were not precisely hostile, but they were just as full of themselves as dead athletes, and possibly even less talented. Milrose, who did not take many things very seriously (himself, especially), found these pompous phantoms unbearable.

Poisoned Percy was typical of the second-floor ghosts. Percy had died while attempting to fake suicide. He had hoped that this performance would make him famous as a poet: that once he were revived in hospital, the literary world would take his suffering seriously and recite his verses at funerals. In fact, the only funeral at which his poems were ever recited was his own, where the audience ground their teeth throughout the ceremony in an attempt not to grimace. The sound of grinding teeth occasionally drowned out the reader.

Percy, typically of the second floor, had no sense of humour regarding his life’s unpleasant conclusion. He had been careful to leave a bottle marked “Poison Hemlock
(Conium maculatum)”
beside him, after swallowing pills secretly removed from an entirely different, less poisonous bottle marked “Vitamin C.” No, he had never been the sort of boy to laugh at his own shortcomings, and when the pellets he dramatically swallowed turned out not to be Vitamin C but instead expensive first-class rat poison, he was deeply annoyed. His mother always felt kind of awful about her decision to store rodenticide in a vitamin bottle, but these things are not easy to remedy after the fact.

When Milrose encountered Percy, the pale poet would only sometimes condescend to take notice of the living boy. “Oh, Munce … there you are. How’s life?”

Milrose would shrug. “Fine. How’s death?”

“Droll, Munce.”

Milrose insisted upon calling the ghost Percy, which was short for his given name, Percival. Percy insisted that his real name was Parsifal, but nobody believed him.

Yesterday, Milrose had run into Percy on the way to Math, and—against his better judgment—decided to chat. Being late for Math was something Milrose occasionally enjoyed, and yesterday had felt like the right kind of day to be irresponsible.

“So, you working on stuff that’s fresh, Poisson?”

“Always. A poet is always working. Even when I sleep, I am at work. It is my whole being. I am now writing an epic poem, if you must know. It will be … epic.”

“I forget. Does epic mean ‘long,’ or ‘dull’? Or both?”

“It means deeply moving. And my theme in particular will move even the coarsest soul to tears.”

“Even mine, huh.” Milrose sighed. “Um, all right. What’s the theme?”

“Digestion.”

“What?”

“Digestion. And its enemy: indigestion. I’ll read you what I have so far.”

“Kind of busy today, Perce.”

“It’s only seventy-two pages. And the name’s Parsifal.”

“Decent of you to think of me. But I’m no critic. And I’m
really
busy, in fact.”

Percy had removed a thick, ominous manuscript from his prissy school bag. While he was arranging the pages, however, and clearing his throat, the bell had rung.

“Sorry, Perce. Never been late for Math. Famous for it: never being late. Gotta run.”

Percy barely had time to utter the words “The Flavour of Indigestion, An Epic Poem in Twelve Parts,” before his victim had achieved safe haven in the stairwell.

The dear decayed on the third floor were nothing like the dull dead on the floors below. These were most often the victims of science experiments gone wrong, and they had a sense of humour regarding their untimely mistakes.

Cryogenic Kelvin, for example, had assumed that a cup of liquid nitrogen would make for a refreshing cool drink. His professor had been too busy dissecting a giant carnivorous slug to notice that Kelvin was turning an interesting shade of blue and was growing wet with condensation. When Kelvin began to emit a crackling noise, Professor Pointell finally noticed him. “Kelvin, you’re not looking well. Why don’t you take a seat.”

Kelvin bent to sit down, and immediately shattered into ice cubes, which melted mournfully all over the floor.

Cryogenic Kelvin, dead and cheerful, had a good attitude towards his final mistake. “Yeah, well … it’s because Caroline Corduroy broke my heart. I mean, she also broke my liver, my kidneys, my eyeballs, and my spleen. But whatever. I thought she was pretty hot.” Kelvin would pause, like a professional comic. “Guess she found me kind of cold.”

This joke was a riot the first time Milrose heard it. The next time it was a touch less riotous, and by the fourth time it was getting a bit stale. Still, Kelvin was a fine ex-fellow, even if his jokes were a bit repetitive and his eyes were frozen in their sockets and his skin was cadaverously pallid.

During biology class, these days, Kelvin would park himself beside the skeleton at the front of the room, his dead blue arm around its bony shoulders. Milrose was the only one who could see this; in fact, Milrose was fairly sure that no one else was even
aware
that the school was bulging with the posthumous.

“Why are you snorting, Milrose?” the teacher would ask him, suspiciously.

“Nervous habit, sir. Family thing. Can’t be helped. My great-grandfather used to snort, even at funerals … tragic, really.”

On a tedious Monday a few months back Kelvin had been particularly inspired. Yes, as always, he had stood for a minute with his arm around the skeleton. Yes, Milrose had snorted. Then, however—probably to see whether he could elicit something more poignant than a snort—Kelvin decided to take the skeleton dancing.

The class, who were uniformly bored, perked up to see the skeleton unhook itself from its glorified coat rack. Some of them more than perked up: ten giggled, fourteen squealed, six of them screamed, and the entire front row passed out.

Mr. Shorten knew full well that he was not the sort of teacher to make students squeal, scream, and faint. Giggle, yes. But Mr. Shorten was a dull teacher—he had always been dull—so he wondered what was the cause of all this excitement. He did not have to wonder long. For the skeleton wheeled gracefully into his vision, as if waltzing with an invisible partner. Which, of course, it
was.

Milrose was impressed to note that Kelvin was a competent ballroom dancer. This was a side of his friend that he had not yet witnessed. He wondered whether Kelvin might also be able to tap dance, and whether he might be willing to give Milrose lessons. Milrose Munce had never had the slightest desire to become, say, a good soccer player, but he had always wanted to learn tap.

Mr. Shorten was not having anything like these casual thoughts. He in fact sympathized, greatly, with the front row of the class, and considered passing out cold himself.

“Stop that!” said Mr. Shorten, feebly, probably aware that he did not have much authority over a waltzing skeleton. And this proved correct, for the skeleton did not stop that at all.

The gigglers became squealers as the skeleton whirled daintily in their direction. The squealers screamed, and the screamers fainted. Milrose was thrilled at the escalating excitement. Now
this
was a performance.

When Kelvin and the skeleton had completed their magnificent tour, they returned to the steel mount. Before hanging the bones up and calling it a day, however, Kelvin arranged to have the skeleton perform a gracious curtsy: a truly revolting gesture.

Milrose Munce had provoked suspicion when he stood at the end of this spectacle to applaud loudly. It was noted. Nobody
else
had enjoyed the dance.

Mr. Shorten in particular looked very, very suspicious. This was not the first time he had experienced Milrose behaving in peculiar and inappropriate ways. For instance, just a couple of days before, Kelvin had been telling his Caroline Corduroy joke for the seventeenth time, and Milrose—though not enjoying it quite as much as the first, or even the twelfth time—
had made sure to laugh and slap his dead friend heartily on the back. (He was careful to remove his hand quickly, however, as warm skin would often stick to Kelvin, and frostbite was an issue.) Mr. Shorten had witnessed this: Milrose Munce giving a hearty slap on the back to someone who—as far as Shorten could determine—wasn’t there.

The science teacher was not the only staff member who was beginning to take note of these peculiar incidents: how Milrose seemed to have a cheerful relationship with, well, empty space. Milrose, however, being carefree and irresponsible, had not taken note that note was being taken.

The other ghouls on the third floor were an equally fine group, and many could match Kelvin in terms of dramatic flair. Ghosts had a life of their own, which consisted mostly of not being alive: lazing about, telling stories. When Milrose joined them, however, they were often moved to dramatize these stories in sensational ways.

Stuck Stu, for instance, would masterfully re-enact his own sad demise: how he had accidentally jammed his thumb into an Erlenmeyer flask full of a complex substance that was on the verge of exploding.

After failing to rescue his thumb, Stu had politely addressed his fellow classmates: “Um, you guys, I think you better leave the room.” And, acknowledging his situation, they had regretfully done just that.
After which the flask—and Stu with it—had exploded in a truly dazzling fashion, with pieces of both flask and Stu embedded so deeply in the walls and desks and blackboard that students even today were occasionally finding shards of glass or bone emerging sharply from odd places.

The moment of the re-enacted explosion itself was most fun to watch, as Stuck Stu would in fact explode (an easy enough thing for an unwhole ghost), so that multiple bloody bits of him would hang jiggling from objects all about the room.